Political Dramaturgy: A Dramaturg\'s (Re)View

Political Dramaturgy: A Dramaturg's (Re)View Author(s): Art Borreca Source: TDR (1988-), Vol. 37, No. 2 (Summer, 1993), pp. 56-79 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1146249 Accessed: 14-03-2016 16:43 UTC

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Political Dramaturgy

A Dramaturg's (Re)View

Art Borreca

Theatre takes place all the time wherever one is, and art simply facili-

tates persuading one this is the case.

-John Cage (in Gilman 1969:23 1)

Philosophical Context

In his Lives, Plutarch tells us that the Greek poet and politician Solon

went to see Thespis following one of his performances. Solon "asked

[Thespis] if he was not ashamed to tell so many lies before such a number

of people":

and Thespis replying that it was no harm to say or do so in a play,

Solon vehemently struck his staff against the ground: "Ah," said he,

"If we honor and commend such play as this, we shall find it some

day in our business." (n.d.: II5)

Whatever the historical truth of this anecdote, it dramatizes a truism about

the relationship between theatre and politics throughout Western history.

Ever since theatre emerged as an aesthetic mode, both theatre practitioners

and politicians, from Thespis and Solon to Harold Pinter and Ronald

Reagan, have had to deal with the affinities between politics and theatre.

As Erving Goffmnan wrote, "All the world is not, of course, a stage, but

the crucial ways in which it isn't are not easy to specify" (Goffman

1959:72). Substituting "politics" for the "world," the same might be said

about political life.

In what sense is politics dramatic and theatrical? Or, to follow Goffman

more closely, in what crucial ways is politics not theatrical? Since the 1960s

a cross-disciplinary field of research and discourse in the social sciences,

known as "dramaturgy" or "dramaturgism," has burgeoned under the ap-

plication of such questions to social interaction.' The field has historical

The Drama Review 37, no. 2 (TI38), Summer I993

56

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Dramaturgy 57

roots in dramatic theory (e.g., Nikolai Evreinov's The Theatre in Life,

1927), literary theory (Kenneth Burke's "dramatism"), and sociology

(Erving Goffinan on role theory and frame analysis). It has grown as an

area mainly within sociology, but also within other disciplines, including

anthropology, social psychology, political science, philosophy, and perfor-

mance studies. It has received contributions from major figures in several

of these fields: for example, Hugh Duncan, Gustaf Ichheiser, Theodore

Sarbin, and Rom Harre (among others) in social psychology; Victor Turner

and Clifford Geertz in anthropology; Murray Edelman in political science;

Richard Schechner in performance studies.

The field is eye-blurringly wide: it is not uncommon to find

"dramaturgists" (as they are called) in one discipline (say, social psychol-

ogy) who seem to be unaware of dramaturgical work in another (say, per-

formance studies).2 In an age of immense specialization, the dramaturgical

literature refreshes a dogged reader with the old (but not dead) idea that

the humanities and social sciences share a common goal of understanding

human being. Although what "dramaturgists" see in social reality is circum-

scribed by the theatrical paradigm, the best work acknowledges the

paradigm's limits. Like any form of knowledge, dramaturgy is subject to

the limits of concept formation; its genius derives from how flexibly and

exhaustively it can employ the theatrical paradigm to get at how human

beings act, as Goffman would have said, "when they come into each

other's presence."

Now is the time to take stock of dramaturgical principles

from the perspective of the theatre, to see what understand-

ing of the theatre has been employed all along, and to evalu-

ate what might yet be done with the theatrical paradigm.

Not all the major thinkers who have contributed to dramaturgy would

acknowledge themselves as dramaturgists. A history of dramaturgy might

include the media theorists Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, as well

as Daniel Boorstin (a historian) and Raymond Williams (like Burke, a liter-

ary critic whose work led him to sociology), all of whom have constructed

paradigms for the dramatizing or theatricalizing effects of the media in a

technological society. The most perceptive political dramaturgy borders at

many points on such dramaturgically oriented media theory, although it

has tended to overlook dramaturgy outside its own discipline.

That politics should become one of the main concerns of dramaturgy is

not surprising, given the political history of the past three decades. First,

there has been the growth of the media's role in political processes, and

the symptoms and effects of that growth: the decline of old forms of "face-

to-face" political rhetoric; the increasing scrutiny of politicians in terms of

their public and private "characters"; and the proliferation of public affairs

programs that "re-play" political events for us. Second, there have been

heavily mediated events: Vietnam, the first "television war"; such national

"dramas" as Watergate and Iran-Contra; the two-term presidency of a

former actor; and the Gulf War, in which a television network, CNN, was

as much a "player" as were the nations involved.

Within political science, dramaturgy burgeoned in sync with these

events. The field grew exponentially from the mid-1970s to the mid-I98os,

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58 Borreca

in response (apparently) to Nixon and Watergate and then Reagan's first

term. In the mid-I98os there was a decline in dramaturgical studies. As in

all academic industries, the field reached a point where it had been

"plowed"; it seemed as if there might not be that much more to say about

the application of theatre to politics. Reagan had fulfilled the prophecy; re-

ality had overtaken theory. Yet articles in the field still appear, and a glance

at the evening news reveals that the theatrical paradigm hasn't lost its rel-

evance; it has gained relevance. Now is the time to take stock of dramatur-

gical principles from the perspective of the theatre, to see what

understanding (or lack of understanding) of the theatre has been employed

all along, and to evaluate what might yet be done with the theatrical para-

digm. As long as televised (i.e., staged) political event like the Democratic

Convention of 1992 can powerfully affect public response to a candidate

whose "character" was much in question, as long as issues of "character

perception" and media "performance" are central to the attainment of

power in our society, we need to be as clear-headed as possible about

dramaturgical principles.

Those principles haven't changed much since the pioneering sociology

of Kenneth Burke and Erving Goffman in the 1940s and '5os. Dramaturgy

proceeds from the premise that human beings are "symbol-using animals."

Dramaturgists argue that human beings are the only animals who "can con-

trol and structure their actions upon the basis of symbolic meanings that

are not reducible to 'natural' motives" (Combs and Mansfield 1976:xviii,

explicating Burke). All human actions-writing of any kind, war, revolu-

tion, the creation of art, crime, running for political office, making love-

share the property of symbolicity. As Robert Perinbanayagam puts it, they

are all "methods of knowing and making known, through various means,

whatever must be made known to prosecute and sustain transactions, rela-

tionships, institutions, organizations, and social structures [. ..]" (1985:78,

explicating Burke). Those transactions, institutions, etc.-indeed, society it-

self-are always in a process of being constructed in the course of human in-

teractions, along with the symbolic environment in which they take place.

(In this regard, dramaturgy anticipated a central claim of poststructuralist

criticism long before it became fashionable.)

Human interactions (the interplay of human actions) are the focus of

dramaturgical analysis. They show us human actions enacted in space and

time, realized in the three-dimensional management of language, clothing,

gestures, and objects. As Goffinan put it, the interactional context of hu-

man behavior is "where the action is" (1974:134). Moreover:

a status, a position, a social place is not a material thing, to be possessed

and then displayed; it is [...] something that must be enacted and por-

trayed, something that must be realized. (1959:75; emphasis mine)

In Goffman's system, the realization or fulfillment of human actions in

space and time is best understood in theatrical terms: "performer," "role,"

"front" (the performer's stage), "back" (backstage), and various concepts

evoking types of roles and degrees of awareness in one's enactment or per-

formance (Goffman 1959). And just as theatrical terminology, a language

drawn from discourse about performance, grasps the essence of enactment

in space and time, so a dramatic (or to use Burke's word, a "dramatistic")

terminology, a language drawn from the analysis of plays, captures human

motives within the context of interaction. For example, according to

Burke, a "rounded statement about motives" contains five key dramatistic

terms: act, scene, agent, agency, purpose (1969:xv, et passim). According to

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Dramaturgy 59

Duncan (1968), the maintenance of social hierarchies is best understood in

terms of tragic and comic forms.

Dramaturgists have always debated the precise meaning of the theatrical

paradigm for symbolic interaction, raising repeatedly the philosophical ques-

tion: Is dramaturgical terminology merely metaphorical or does it describe

reality? Burke and Goffinan came to different conclusions. Burke argued

that "drama is employed, not as a metaphor but as a fixed form that helps

us discover what the implications of the terms 'act' and 'person' really are"

(1968:11); Goffinan ended The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by step-

ping back from the theatrical paradigm he had been using and explaining

that it was "a rhetoric and a maneuver":

This report is not concerned with aspects of theater that creep into

everyday life. It is concerned with the structure of social encounters.

[. . .] A character staged in a theater is not in some ways real, nor

does it have the same kind of real consequences as does the thor-

oughly contrived character performed by a confidence man; but the

successful staging of either of these types of false figures involves the use

of real techniques-the same techniques by which everyday persons

sustain real social situations. (1959:254-55)

For political dramaturgy, phenomena like media politics and the Reagan

presidency have forced again the question of whether reality inherently

possesses theatrical qualities, or whether it is in some sense nontheatrical

but being encroached upon by forms of theatre, becoming "theatricalized."

The question, In what sense is politics theatrical?, is a variation on the

philosophical question that besieges all dramaturgy. One approach to ad-

dressing the question is to examine the ways in which dramaturgists have

used theatrical terms. Inevitably such an examination is a meta-critique, an

interpretation of how dramaturgists use not only such terms as "role" and

"performer" but also "drama" and "theatre" themselves. This is as it should

be: the foundations of dramaturgical theory (Burke, Goffiman, et al.) are re-

ally critiques of terminology, of how to talk about the relations between

theatre and social life. Both Burke and Goffmnan show us that the theatrical

qualities of social life are intimately related to a consciousness of what we

mean precisely when we say that it is dramatic or theatrical.3 If political

dramaturgism proceeds from the premise that political reality is eminently

describable in theatrical terms, then those terms must be used as precisely

as possible.

Moreover, a meta-critique of political dramaturgy acknowledges that the

relation between theatre and politics is first and last a philosophical matter.

Because it deals with our perception of politics as theatre, with the fact that

politics appears to possess theatrical qualities, it raises phenomenological

questions. Because it deals with the nature of political reality, it raises onto-

logical ones. To employ dramaturgical terminology at all is to have to deal

with its ontological status. This point is raised repeatedly in reviews of

dramaturgical literature. Dennis Brissett and Charles Edgley argue that "dra-

maturgy, and perhaps the rest of social science, might be better off drop-

ping all claims to ontology"; after all, they argue, "being cognizant of the

dramaturgical principle is only one way of being aware of one's awareness

[. . .]" (1990:34, 33; emphasis mine). But the fact that dramaturgy is a

mode of meta-awareness at all suggests that its ontological properties ought

to be scrutinized. James Combs and Michael Mansfield, whose work fig-

ures prominently in the field of political dramaturgy, see this clearly when

they say:

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6o Borreca

If the Burkean perspective [...] is to have universal applicability, the

'onto-logic' of that image must be subjected to philosophical analysis

I[.. ..1

The basic problem is whether the dramaturgical perspective is on

organization of social conduct, and therefore imposed on reality, or

whether it is a description of actual conduct, and therefore inheres in

reality. (1976:xiv, xxvii)

Philosophers who have subjected the dramaturgical view to philosophi-

cal analysis-for example, Perinbanayagam and Bruce Wilshire-caution us

against formulating the ontological issue in terms of a dualism that

overdetermines the concepts of "reality" and "theatre." For these philoso-

phers, to ask, Is dramaturgy metaphorical?, is at most to assume that the

theatre is something apart from reality and that, if the answer to the ques-

tion is "no," then reality has somehow been invaded by theatre; it is at

least to proceed from the bias that theatre is in some sense unreal, and that

to discover that reality is theatrical would be merely to find ourselves once

again in Plato's cave.

The point is not to ask, Is dramaturgy metaphorical?, but to investigate

the very compulsion of symbolic interaction among human beings. For

Perinbanayagam (as for Burke), there is no duality between theatre and life;

the theatrical impulse among human beings emerged with their very capac-

ity for meaning, and dramaturgy is "the efficient, efficacious, and parsimo-

nious method of articulating and experiencing it" (1985:63). Wilshire

reformulates the theatre-life duality, from the perspective that "certain con-

ditions of identity are theatre-like," such as play, mimetic response, role,

display, and recognition of self through the other, and that the theatre is

lifelike (1982:xiv). For Wilshire, the theatre-life duality is one between mi-

metic qualities of life and of art, where these qualities are "'writ large'; the

theatre is historically posterior but ontologically or logically prior"

(1982:4).4

The questions of ontology must be asked of political dramaturgy. Are

we using a convenient metaphor that guides our perceptions or describing

something that exists in reality? Is there any other way into a perception of

reality than to construct a model for our perception that correlates in sig-

nificant ways to what seems to be the reality itself? At its most perceptive,

political dramaturgy has always broached the philosophical complexity of

thinkers like Perinbanayagam and Wilshire, as well as the efforts of Turner

and Schechner to grasp the breadth and depth of the theatrical impulses

manifest in social reality. Because dramaturgy is deeply engaged not only

with "objects" of study (the manifest realities of political behavior, pro-

cesses, systems, etc.) but also with the perspective from which those "ob-

jects" might be best analyzed, its focus is the breadth and depth of the

dramatic and theatrical ways in which politics appears to impinge on our

perception.

The areas in which Solon's fear seems to have been realized are the raw

material of political dramaturgy. When Solon said that "we shall find [the-

atre] someday in our [political] business, he assumed a difference between

the two-a difference between the real and the pretended, the intermingling

of which would result in the corruption of the former (presumably, on the

levels of both its seriousness and substantiveness: its very reality). Today

when we speak of "dramatic" events in a political campaign, the "staging"

of a rally or of a "media event," we are no longer so sure that we're talk-

ing about two exclusive realities, one real and the other laden with illusion.

This apparent compounding of realities-or this perception of similarities

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Dramaturgy 61

between supposedly different realities-is the province of political drama-

turgy. Political dramaturgy wonders, Why does politics appear to us in the

garb of acting and performance, spectatorship and response, and all the ele-

ments of drama learned in high school: protagonists and antagonists, con-

frontation, conflict, suspense, crisis, climax, and catharsis? Why do politics

and theatre seem to share certain essential attributes as human activities?

Traditions of Analysis

Political dramaturgists have failed to build coherent systems of thought

that address these sorts of questions. Many settle instead for a Solon-esque

view, assuming either that to observe the theatrical aspects of politics is to

see the ways in which politics has become corrupted by the evil forces of

performance, pretense, "dramatic" appeals to emotion, etc.; or that politics

and theatre are distinctly separate, with the theatre being set apart from re-

ality. This division of the world into the "real" world of (business, politi-

cal) affairs and the "unreal" world of the theatre underlay much early

political dramaturgy, spawning a tradition of analysis that began and ended

with the identification and categorization of the dramatic elements of politi-

cal life. No one in this tradition complained about the encroachment of

the theatre upon politics; in fact, they were acknowledging that the time

had come to take the dramatic qualities of politics seriously. They're there,

they said, they have to be analyzed. But they didn't go much further than

this.

For example, Orrin Klapp (1964) identified seven "outcomes" of "dra-

matic confrontation among public men" [sic] (e.g., hero-making, villain-

making, and fool-making) without pursuing the nature of the confrontation

itself and why it can be called "dramatic" at all. His approach suggested

that politics is "dramatic" because it manifests elements of drama. But this

is to suggest that a house is a temple because they both have windows and

doors, without examining the structure of either the house or the temple.

If Kennedy was made into a "hero" by the Cuban Missile Crisis, and

Nixon into a "villain" by Watergate, by what process did that occur? Simi-

larly, Iran-Contra wasn't "dramatic" because it made Oliver North a "hero"

nor because the hearings naturally contained suspense and climax. Sym-

bolic interaction suggests that perceptions of North's character arose from a

dynamic among players, media audience, and his own performance before

the cameras, in which he cast himself as a loyal servant of America. "Sus-

pense" and "climax," along with "character," are attributes of a particular

arrangement among those elements.

It's intriguing that early dramaturgists didn't seek out those arrangements,

but rather the elements themselves. Following Klapp, Richard Merelman

(1969) identified dramatic devices (personification, identification, suspense,

climax, catharsis, and others) and the kinds of political issues, settings,

group situations, and encounters that seemed to encourage their use, but

never stopped to ask, If dramatic devices are "salient" (Merelman's word)

at particular points in political processes, does this have to do with the na-

tures of the processes themselves? More recently, James Rosenau (1980)

identified the dramatic characteristics of political systems, "performance cri-

teria" for analyzing them and, more important, "system dramas" and "pro-

cess dramas" that recur around the world (he provides a long list of

"socialization dramas," "decision-policy dramas," "bureaucratic dramas,"

and "mobilization dramas"). But although Rosenau's thinking is highly sys-

tematic-characteristics, criteria, and dramas depend on one another for

their existence; and these interlocking concepts derive from the insight that

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62 Borreca

politics resembles drama in "the concerting of action on a large scale to

achieve goals" (3-4)-his system is rooted in the assumption that drama can

be only an analogy, although he never explores that assumption.

Even in Ferdinand Mount's The Theatre of Politics (1973), a rare instance

in which categorization gives way to speculation, the categories outrun the

insights. Mount shows how various political "theatres" (e.g., Theatre of

Embarrassment, Theatre of Sentiment, etc.) need to be defined according

to the perception that political events, like theatre, "are meant to be seen"

(51). In turn, he uses his categories as a basis for addressing the qualities of

political theatricality-in particular, the dual condition of political actor as

observer and protagonist. Goffman originally noted this condition for the

presentation of self in social interaction. It has ready political applications-

for example, to the press conferences of Ronald Reagan, who could be

seen to monitor himself cautiously, or to the speeches of George Bush,

who in his rhetorical performances has been Reagan's opposite, a man who

flies free of his planned texts (written or mental), responding to an ever-re-

ceding hope of hitting the mark with his audience. Mount missed an op-

portunity to galvanize his categories with his sense of theatricality and vice

versa, of viewing different "political theatres" in terms of different formula-

tions of the observer-protagonist relationship.

Then there is the opposite to Solon, an unexamined Burkeanism: a line

of thinking based upon the assumption that politics simply is theatrical.

The foremost exemplum of this kind of thinking is Sanford M. Lyman and

Marvin B. Scott's The Drama of Social Reality (1975), which isolates six "ba-

sic and essential dramas" that legitimate political power, and examines sev-

eral historical "dramas of resistance" to political power (such as slavery and

bandit life in the U.S.). The categorization of data here assumes that the

dramas are "basic," ever-present, a natural part of existence. This may have

been a seemingly undeniable claim in the wake of Watergate, but to as-

sume that politics simply is theatre is as philosophically naive as to assume

that they are utterly different from each other.

Still, within the kind of thinking represented by Lyman and Scott, there

developed a paradoxical kind of fiercely anticapitalist (sometimes Marxist)

dramaturgy, which maintains the unexamined assumption that politics is

theatrical. In the work of Peter M. Hall (1972, 1979), T.R. Young and

Garth Massey (1978), Young and John Welsh (1984), and Welsh working

alone (1985), the assumption that politics is a kind of theatre gives life to

perceptions of the enforced political stagings and image-management of capi-

talist society-what these thinkers usually call "the dramaturgical society."

In this society, powerful elites sustain both their power and its institutions

by projecting political and cultural images upon the masses, and by generat-

ing the illusion that society is in reality of the people, by the people, and

for the people:

[The dramaturgical society] is one in which the interaction between

an atomized mass of people and the major institutions and largest

organizations is deliberately managed, masked by the profuse genera-

tions of images of service, quality, or agency, and the projection of

these upon the population for whose benefit these organizations and

institutions are ostensibly acting. (Young and Massey 1978:79)

As Welsh puts it, "the dramaturgical technology of the American state is

geared toward [sic] conveying the impression and appearance of democ-

racy, equity, accountability and participation [...]" (1985:21). Theatrelike

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Anticapitalist dramaturgs

viewed the Clarence Tho-

mas hearings as a perfect media stagings mystify the masses into believing that they are in fact partici-

example of how far capitalpating in a democratic society, when they actually are not.

ist society is willing to go Through this paradigm, anticapitalist dramaturgists begin to probe the

to dramatize its false theatrical manifestations of politics. Although they see media stagings (and

democratic ideology. In this accompanying image-projections) as instrumentalities of a "false politics"

analysis, politics is a (Welsh 1985:5)-untruthful or inauthentic if not necessarily unreal in the

process that generates Solon-esque sense-they also see them as essential to the capitalist state.

appearances (in this image They are not evidence finally of unreal theatre invading the political realm

Anita Hill is testifying but of an utterly real (and psychically brutal) process by which one kind of

before the Senate) that can dominant and self-perpetuating political system sustains itself. References to

become reality in the course "false politics" and "mystification" (e.g., Welsh 1985:4, et passim) betray an

of being generated. (Videoassumption that political reality is necessarily a form of impression manage-

tape courtesy ofJerri ment enacted on a societal scale. Theatrelike stagings and images, as instru-

Hurlbutt) mentalities of capitalist power-maintenance, create an illusion that is the

capitalist reality itself. These can be broken down into a series of "mystify-

ing" elements, such as television debates that maintain "the spectator na-

ture of American political life," personality cults, and "the symbolic

generation of patriotism," and, above all, democratic ideology itself (Welsh

1985:4, et passim). Such stagings and images do not result from conscious

manipulation but from, so to speak, the presentation of the capitalist

macro-societal self in everyday life.

To the anticapitalists, the Clarence Thomas hearings are a perfect ex-

ample of how far capitalist society is willing to go to dramatize its false

democratic ideology. The hearings risked embarrassment in the eyes of the

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64 Borreca

world but sought to give the impression-worldwide-of democratic careful-

ness, of judicious deliberation of a citizen's accusations. Media criticisms of

the process were part and parcel of this false reality of judicious delibera-

tion, suggesting that criticism is "open" and central to a larger deliberative

process. False democratic ideology was dramatized-and the status quo sus-

tained-through the spectacle of media-created personalities clashing with

one another.

The achievement of anticapitalist dramaturgism begins with the percep-

tion of politics as a process that generates appearances (stagings, images)

that can become reality in the course of being generated. (The public person-

alities of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill were constructed by a false pro-

cess, but who is to say that who they appeared to be isn't who they really

are?) And more important, the anticapitalists assert virtually existential con-

ditions that persist in a self-perpetuating, mediated political world: e.g., the

cultivation of political paralysis, inequality, and fundamental unfreedom

through mass dependence upon media (see Young and Massey 1977:80,

Hall 1979:298-99). Low voter turnout, especially among minorities, is the

clearest statistical evidence of these conditions.

But the work of these dramaturgists is seriously limited by their empha-

sis on enforcement. They build upon Burke, Goffman, and broad concepts

of symbolic and "dramaturgical" interaction without establishing the theo-

retical status of the theatre in their analyses. They speak of "dramatiza-

tions," "stagings," and "images," without addressing their theatrical origins,

and without elaborating a dramaturgical vocabulary that correlates theatrical

aesthetics with political reality. Although their assumption that capitalist

politics is dramaturgical leads them to examine the compounding of theatre

and reality, they don't establish those larger terms, "theatre" and "politics,"

themselves.

Above all, they overenforce the dramaturgical paradigm by taking image-

culture itself as evidence of capitalist tyranny. They argue that a process of

"demystification" will help to create an "authentic political reality" (Welsh

1985:22), but they don't address the problem of authenticity and

inauthenticity. In a world in which the projection of images enforces a

dramaturgical existence, how will such demystification take place? Through

new uses of the media? (How can the media be separated from image-pro-

jection and staging? What would an "authentic" use of the media be like?)

Through a divorce between the media and political life? (How will this be

accomplished?) Anticapitalist dramaturgism fails to probe the nature of the-

atre to get at how the media theatricalizes reality in the first place, to gain a

perspective on the relationship among the dramaturgical society, the media,

and the theatre.5

Although no dramaturgical paradigm can address all cases (political sys-

tems, processes, events) or answer unassailably the question of simile vs.

homology (Is dramaturgy metaphorical?), to make a convincing claim

about that question it needs to establish the following: (I) a theoretical base

that clarifies politics as a form of symbolic interaction with unavoidable

dramatic or theatrical qualities; (2) an interpretation of modern image-cul-

ture and its relations to politics as symbolic interaction; (3) an interpreta-

tion of both drama (the Burke emphasis) and theatre (the Goffman

emphasis) as models for the kind of image-generation fundamental to that

interaction; (4) some inquiry into the nature of theatre as an art, and about

how aspects that distinguish it generically manifest themselves in mediated

political processes.

The most theoretically refined political dramaturgism has addressed these

concerns by bridging political philosophy and media or rhetoric studies,

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Dramaturgy 65

and by settling on two extreme points of focus. First, the broadly theoreti-

cal, in which a coherent dramaturgical system works from a refined sense

of the theatre itself. Second, the case study, in which single (and singular)

events, systems, or processes are shown to pose essential dramaturgical

questions.6

The case study encourages quantitative research that can help buttress, in

a positivistic way, a speculative dramaturgism. For instance, in 1976 John

F. Cragan and Donald C. Shields examined how "mediated messages"

about three "foreign policy dramas"-the cold war, power politics, and neo-

isolationism-quite literally played in Peoria (1977:275). They found that a

sample of the population of that town more readily accepted political mes-

sages about the first two dramas, and argued from this evidence that people

(at least in Peoria and at most in whatever Peoria represents socially and

politically) tend to process media messages about foreign policy in

"dramatistic" terms. Their study also found that "pretested dramatistic [po-

litical] speeches" (289) can be written with great success on the basis of

"public opinion data gathered in a rhetorical form via a small sample re-

search technique" (275).

The great danger of the case study has always been that any

case can be easily stretched beyond the theoretical limits that

it can endure. But there is one extended study that over-

comes the danger, providing a possible bridge between the

case study and "universalizing" theory.

What Cragan and Fields leave out of their study is an idea of what they

mean by "dramatistic." They imply that messages about the cold war and

power politics are more "dramatistic" presumably because those dramas in-

volve greater conflict, and that Peorians process media messages in terms of

Burke's five key terms of dramatism. Yet they seem to be suggesting some-

thing more fundamental about audience hunger and its relation to the mak-

ing of "political dramas." They seem to suggest that dramatistic reception is

a need cultivated and sustained by dramatic mediation: that we receive

election campaigns, for instance, in dramatic terms because they are pro-

grammed and portrayed that way, and that they are programmed that way

to close a vicious circle that either begins or ends with our dramatistic

need. But in contrast to the anticapitalists, they also imply that this circle

separates "political dramas" from the usual run of political life.

To this day the quantitative dramaturgical case study remains an exciting

possibility, which might synthesize dramaturgy with scientific research. In

the meantime a fuller articulation of political dramaturgy can be found in

qualitative case studies, such as James M. Mayo's (1978) examination of

"environmental dramaturgy in the political rally"; Joanna B. Gillespie's

(1980) study of first ladies as symbolic characters in the "morality play" of

presidential leadership; Michael T. Hayes' (1987) investigation of policy-

making with regard to the nuclear freeze; William F. S. Miles (1989) study

of the 1983 election campaign in Nigerian Hausaland; and Joseph W.

Esherick and Jeffrey N. Wassterstrom's (199o) study of the Chinese "politi-

cal theatre," as played out in the 1989 democracy movement focused in

Tiananmen Square.

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66 Borreca

Hayes, Mayo, and Gillespie all seek to reach "universal" dramaturgical

conclusions from their cases, and ultimately none of them flies free of the

Solon-esque tradition. In contrast, Miles and Esherick and Wasserstrom use

their cases to illuminate the cultural specificity of "political theatre," deny-

ing the universality of Western social science/dramaturgy. For them, the

purpose of the case study is to capture a representative moment in the on-

going political drama of a given culture. One can only get at what is "uni-

versal" to that culture: for example, the blending of modem and traditional

symbols in Nigerian political rallies, or the shift from "ritual-infused poli-

tics" to state-defying "political theatre" in 2oth-century China. These recent

writings represent the development of multiculturalism within political dra-

maturgy.7 So far there have been too few studies to generalize about the

nature of this development. However, it's worth noting that, as political

dramaturgy has thinned out, it has spread out and sought to become en-

gaged more globally. It may be going through a stage of redefinition, aban-

doning the search for universal principles, although nonetheless proceeding

(ironically) from the principles set down by Goffman and Burke. (In this

connection, we should recall that Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Ev-

eryday Life grew out of a case study of performance behavior on an island of

the United Kingdom.

The great danger of the case study has always been that any case can be

easily stretched beyond the theoretical limits that it can endure. But there

is one extended study that overcomes the danger, providing a possible

bridge between the case study and "universalizing" theory. In The Moro

Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama (1986), Robin Erica Wagner-Pacifici

examines the dramatic and narrative structuration of the Moro kidnapping.

(In 1978 Italy's Red Brigade kidnapped Aldo Moro, the president of the

Christian Democrats, as he was on his way to Parliament to begin the pro-

cess of ratifying a new government. A two-month media spectacle ensued,

ending with Moro's assassination.) Like the anticapitalist dramaturgists, she

subscribes to the idea of political events as constructed, but she doesn't

equate the construction of theatricalized reality with capitalism. Instead, she

starts from the (postmodern) assumption that all events are generated by

and within a culture. Like the multiculturalists, she demonstrates that any

social drama itself dramatizes something essential about the society in

which it occurs. In the Moro case the competing plots dramatized an es-

sential fragmentation of Italian culture.

To isolate what she calls the "social drama" in the Moro kidnapping, she

examines "the self-referential discourse (both verbal and gestural) of the

protagonists [of the kidnapping] as it engages the mechanisms of the four

phases [of Turner's social drama model of breach, crisis, redress and recon-

ciliation or schism]" (9). She finds that social drama, as exemplified in the

Moro kidnapping, is a matter of multiple plots-"dramaturgic agendas" in

which "aesthetic agendas" interact dialectically with "political and moral

imperatives"-that are simultaneously scripted and enacted by multiple par-

ticipants; and of "mass communications stages" that mediate and interpret

these plots, causing crucial competition among participants and plots for

stage time (I4). The Moro affair illustrates the triumph of what Turner

(1969, 1974, 1990) called competing "liminoid performances" over a "limi-

nal center" or "ritual center"-of "the optionality of audience response"

(Wagner-Pacifici I986:278).8

Wagner-Pacifici implies a theoretical paradigm that might be applied to a

number of social dramas in Euro-American politics. The Moro affair is

only incidentally her focus; her main concern is a set of dramaturgical ob-

servations about the fine line between social drama and formal theatre (the

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Dramaturgy 67

art of theatre). Her applications of Turner imply that social drama manifests

itself whenever persons involved in politics act to gain an audience, first and

foremost through decisive, singular action (e.g., the kidnapping) and later

through the elongation of that initial action into an agenda that is struc-

tured and enacted to hold an audience's attention. Media are the places of

enactment, the stages to which an audience turns its attention; it is through

a precise disposition of plot (enacted agenda) and stage (medium) that an

audience, and thereby social (or political) drama itself, is sustained.

Wagner-Pacifici posits phenomenological equivalencies between observ-

able aspects of social reality-mass media, mass audience, participants, politi-

cal agenda-and elements of theatre-stage, audience, participants, actors,

plot, and action. The latter manifest themselves precisely when the former

become arranged in a dynamic configuration corresponding to the arrange-

ment of the elements in theatre art. Social drama is what happens when

certain factors-social action, social "plotting," mass media, mass audience-

are constructed in this configuration, a form that can only be called

"drama" or "theatre." From the perspective of early dramaturgists, the con-

figuration would represent the "theatricalization" of social reality; but from

Wagner-Pacifici's perspective, "theatricalization" (she doesn't use this term)

takes place when the structures and means of the theatre are drawn upon

to accentuate the configuration itself, to "overplay" it in forcing the

audience's attention. The maintenance of an audience-a sense of its pres-

ence-is the precipitating force behind the articulation of a "social drama."

The "competing plots" of Wagner-Pacifici's analysis persist because, in

Euro-American society, the mass media offer themselves as stages, places

for the enforcement of attention. (The anticapitalists would agree with this

point.)

In Wagner-Pacifici's analysis, Turner's schema of breach, crisis, redress,

and reconciliation or schism serves two purposes. First, it describes a basic

structural pattern of the Moro kidnapping as a social drama (represented in

its competing plots). Second, it evokes a structure embedded in mass-medi-

ated society itself, one that becomes manifest when competing participants

manipulate mass communications stages, forcing social drama into being.

Ultimately, Wagner-Pacifici implies that a triad of participant (actor)-mass

communications stage-spectators manifests social drama spatially; Turner's

schema manifests it temporally.9 By attending to the phenomenological

"place" and "moment" in which social drama appears, Wagner-Pacifici (like

Brown) elaborates the dramaturgy of Burke and Goffman on a macro-so-

ciological level. (Burke's dramatistic principles concern the enactment of

drama in time; Goffman's principles of impression management concern the

embodiment of such dramatic enactment in time and space, within the

performative dimension of symbolic interaction.)

Wagner-Pacifici has much in common with more broadly inclusive theo-

rists. All of them identify the point at which theatre becomes manifested in

the social world, the point at which it appears to be the case, and thereby ex-

plore something first addressed by Norman O. Brown in Love's Body:

Political representation is theatrical representation. A political society

comes into existence when it articulates itself and produces a represen-

tative; that is to say, organizes itself as theatre, addressed to a stage, on

which [the] representatives can perform[...]. (1966:III; emphasis

mine)

Brown's view extends Burke and Goffmian into politics: political society

comes into being when society organizes itself as theatre, by producing rep-

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68 Borreca

resentatives who are intended at most to act for the people and who at least

act before them, are observed by them (are objects of spectatorship).

Wagner-Pacifici slightly rearranges Brown's claim by demonstrating that, in

mass-mediated Euro-American societies, a theatrical polity comes into be-

ing when society organizes itself theatrically, by developing "stages" (mass

communications systems) that compel a theatrical organization of the world

(places where politicians, activists, etc., can be observed by mass audi-

ences); and moreover, that compel a theatrical consciousness of political re-

ality, a sense that some degree of performance skill is essential to the

attainment of political goals. With its impulse of representation as defined

by Brown, politics contains the seeds of theatre within it; but it only "be-

comes" theatre when it manifests itself as such, when representatives are

provided with stages where they become observed by audiences, and when

spectatorship-a demand for stage performance-becomes the norm in politi-

cal interaction.

Such was the case with the Moro kidnapping, and has been the case in-

creasingly in Euro-American political events in the past two decades. The

centrality of media to political culture, and the development of ways to ma-

nipulate it, has heightened the dramatic configuration latent in politics; dis-

crete political and social dramas come more regularly into being in a context

that was already inherently theatrical but which did not always give way to

so many individual "performances." Thus the Vietnam War and the protests

against it were media-saturated, and endemic of an evolving "society of the

spectacle"; but the Gulf War was plotted and performed with an awareness

of the media stage. It was perhaps history's most fully staged Theatre of

War. What Wagner-Pacifici shows us is that the dramatic configuration has

always been present but that explorations of the "media stage" have made its

presence-and our awareness of its presence-more obvious.

The "inclusive" theoreticians who resemble Wagner-Pacifici include

James E. Combs, Michael W. Mansfield, Dan Nimmo, and Murray

Edelman. With the exception of Edelman, all of them get lost in categories

but arrive (like Edelman) at broad perspectives for applying dramaturgy to

politics. For Combs and Mansfield working together, these include areas in

which drama can be perceived most clearly: e.g., leadership, ritual and cer-

emony, mass media, the use of symbols, the notion of history and culture

in toto as drama (1976:xxiii-xxviii). For Combs (1980), they are "dimen-

sions" of political drama: ritual, institutions, leadership, mass media, cam-

paigns, and political movements (I98o:I6-17, et passim). For Nimmo and

Combs, dramaturgical analysis reveals the forms of "pseudo-myths" drama-

tized by political flacks (e.g., pseudo-qualities, pseudo-issues, pseudo-events,

etc. [1980:112-116]), as well as dramatic elements encouraged by the me-

dia: e.g., melodramatic news coverage; campaigns as "seasonal ritual dra-

mas"; the "national soap opera" of political celebrity (1983). Categorization

of this kind springs from a laudable effort to systematize political drama-

turgy and to mark off the realms of experience in which social or political

drama manifests itself. (Admittedly, the current meta-analysis partakes of

this penchant for categorization.) But it can be taken to an extreme point

at which categorization cordons off political dramas from reality, and loses

sight of how those dramas come into being in the first place.

On this crucial matter, Combs, Combs and Mansfield, Nimmo, and

Nimmo and Combs all develop versions of Wagner-Pacifici's perspective,

although with an important difference. Their perspectives allow for greater

flexibility in the making and manifestation of political dramas, and-in the

course of their categorization-they elaborate more fully than Wagner-

Pacifici does the dynamic of the actor-stage-spectator triad. Where Wagner-

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Dramaturgy 69

Pacifici concerns herself primarily with phenomenology, with the bound-

aries of the configuration that can be called "social drama," the others ex-

tend their work to the dynamics of dramatic and theatrical being that take

place once political drama appears or makes itself known.

At the heart of their work is the idea that "social drama" or "political

drama" and its "dimensions" or mythologies are produced and sustained

through the active reinforcement of the actor-stage-audience triad, with the

more or less equal input of all three elements. In this regard, the work of

these political scientists is more purely symbolic interactionist than Wagner-

Pacifici's or the anticapitalists. For Combs, Mansfield, and Nimmo, the

presence and manipulation of mass communication stages as such doesn't

bring political drama into being. Rather, political drama is produced when

essential components of ongoing symbolic interaction become "reified," to

use Combs' (1980) term: when a place in which political action takes

place, for example, or self-images presented by persons involved in that ac-

tion, or the action itself, is treated as an object of either self-conscious

performance or passive spectatorship, thereby transforming them into "set-

tings," "roles" or "dramatic" actions. Once symbolic interaction becomes

reified, "dimensions" of political drama (again to use Combs' term) come

into being: political campaigns enact a repeated reification of particularly

persuasive actions, symbols, and images. This perspective implies that po-

litical drama involves a compulsion to repeat what has worked in the

past. This is why, in the 1992 presidential campaign we heard a great deal

[T]he Willie Horton ad exemplified the reification of televi-

sion as a political stage, but television is not inherently dra-

matic (from the perspective of politics) until it is reified in

this way.

of dramatic rhetoric about "family values." The Republican party compul-

sively repeated that which seemed to work for Ronald Reagan, becoming

rigid and stagnant in its rhetoric.

Like Wagner-Pacifici, Combs, Nimmo, and Mansfield all suggest that

the mass-media become "stages" when they are treated as such (reified into

foci of passive spectatorship); however-and this is a crucial difference-they

see the mass-media as a dynamic element within the performance-stage-

spectator triad, rather than as a precipitating force. Their perspective is alto-

gether more dynamically flexible than Wagner-Pacifici's. They see political

dramaturgy as a specific form of symbolic interactionist analysis, which en-

gages with forever emerging, receding, and re-emerging political dramas.

These articulate (and re-articulate) themselves when political individuals act

with an expectation of being seen and scrutinized. The final implication of

Wagner-Pacifici's analysis is that the mass media in and of themselves dra-

matize politics by offering "stages" where performance and spectatorship

are bound to take place. For Combs, Nimmo, and Mansfield, the mass me-

dia are only that-media-with their own properties (which include their ca-

pacities for mass communication). They don't demand drama, but they are

easily reified into stages through the alternatingly free and bound actions of

human beings who, in the course of symbolic interaction, invest their

selves, the symbols they wield, the actions they take, and the places in

which these occur, with the status of things either to be performed or ob-

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70 Borreca

served. "Free" because human beings choose to invest themselves in this

way; "bound" because, by investing themselves in this way, they generate

plans for and expectations of performance as well as actual performances

(Combs and Mansfield 1976, xxiii). They also generate a circular relation-

ship between the performance of self-images and the nature of those im-

ages (Nimmo 1974:133-136). For example, the Willie Horton ad

exemplified the reification of television as a political stage, but television is

not inherently dramatic (from the perspective of politics) until it is reified

in this way. However, once George Bush projected an image of The En-

forcer through this ad, he became bound to play it through, to sustain the

dramatic (and theatrical) contingencies that the ad (and its self-projection)

demanded.

Freedom is the foremost question for the future political dramaturgy-for

the analysis of both actors and spectators within the dramatic configuration

discussed by Wagner-Pacifici, Nimmo, et al. To broach a phenomenology,

as Wagner-Pacifici does, and an ontology, as Nimmo, Combs, and

Mansfield do, is to begin to approach the question. Thus far, the most

comprehensive political dramaturgy, rooted in a flexible, symbolic

interactionism and dealing with the question of human freedom within that

context, has been elaborated by Murray Edelman, whose Constructing the

Political Spectacle (1988) is the culmination of a career spent interrogating

political symbols, political language, and mediated political reality.'o

Edelman shares Nimmo, Combs, and Mansfield's view that political reality

is at all times controlled by an interaction of audience and "spectacle"-con-

structed and mediated events, symbols, and rhetoric. Whereas Nimmo, et

al. argue in essence for what Edelman calls the construction of the spec-

tacle itself (in Combs' analysis, the reification of political acts, places, and

persons), Edelman probes the ongoing construction of the subjective posi-

tions from which (whom?) those "things" become reified. Unlike his three

colleagues, who posit endlessly reconfiguring performer-stage-spectator tri-

ads, Edelman takes the triad as a "natural" property of a media-suffused

world; he analyzes the fluid construction and reconstruction of events, per-

formers, and spectators, all of whom are "sites" of endlessly reverberating

signification. (The Willie Horton ad does not in itself reify television into a

stage; it only does so through the action of the candidate who approves it,

the handlers who encourage and manage it, and the audiences who receive

it as an image that depicts a "real problem.") In this view, freedom is both

forever possible and forever in danger; to become conscious of the con-

struction is to move into a position to become free.

Edelman does not use a theatrical paradigm as such, although it is im-

plicit in his analysis. With his work, political dramaturgism moves in a new

direction, in which dramaturgical terminology has become so necessary to

describing the political world that the theatrical paradigm itself need not be

made explicit. What matters is the dramaturgist's ongoing implication of

the paradigm, his or her use of dramaturgical terminology to reflect a fun-

damental knowledge of social drama (in Turner's and Wagner-Pacifici's

sense of the term) as an essential form of political being. With Edelman,

the time to treat the generation and regeneration of performance triads as

an aspect of mediated society itself has arrived. Next to the multiculturalist

case study, Edelman represents another decisive direction in which political

dramaturgy seems to be moving."

Present Questions, Future Directions

In the flexible and inclusive symbolic interactionist theory of Nimmo,

Combs, Mansfield, and Edelman, political dramaturgy and communications

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Dramaturgy 71

theory meet, pointing in directions that need to be pursued further. For

example, once symbolic interaction in politics "enters" an observably dra-

matic or theatrical mode, it is unclear what sort of shift, if any, takes place

in the substance and effect of symbolic representation. Nimmo and Combs

argue that dramatized political realities tend to develop their own internal

logic. Patterns of reification produce a limited number of kinds of symbolic

performances, such as melodrama (Nimmo and Combs 1983); these re-

peated forms require settings, roles, and actions to be played and perceived

in particular ways; and they generate repeated myths (Nimmo and Combs

1980; see also Jamieson and Campbell 1982). But do these forms enforce a

peculiar view of reality, as the anticapitalists claim, or does dramatic repre-

sentation by its nature permit the spectator the choice to get up and leave

the play? (If you didn't vote for George Bush in 1988, did you reject the

Willie Horton ad and the performance triad it helped sustain? Or did you

affirm that triad-and the status quo-by participating in the process without

disrupting it?) "Political drama" might be at once the most tyrannical and

freeing forms of symbolic interaction, with the capacity both to immerse us

in a view of the political world and to offer us a choice to create the world

rather differently. Contrary to Burke's thinking, all forms of symbolic inter-

action might possess dramatistic properties, but only those in which a per-

formance triad becomes reified might be termed "social dramas" or

"political dramas."

In the past 30 years several media theorists and historians have addressed

issues like these with such overarching dramaturgical concepts as the

"pseudo-event" (Boorstin 1987), "the medium is the message" (McLuhan

1965), "the medium is a metaphor" (Postman 1986), and "the dramatized

society" (Williams 1989). These concepts display a progression from the

idea of mediated reality as on the one hand manufactured and inauthentic

(Boorstin) and on the other hand primeval, sensorious, and essential

(McLuhan), to dramatized reality as a habit and a need "built into the

rhythms of everyday life" (Williams 1989:4) and as a determinant of our

perception of reality itself (Postman). In this last view, Burke and Solon

shake hands: what might be called a televisualized world proves that life is

(or has become) drama, yet we must be cautioned (in Postman's view) that

such a world is evolving out of only the most debased forms of theatrical

entertainment, upon which television draws.

The following areas of political dramaturgy might still be addressed

through a marriage with media theory:

I. The recurrent patterns of dramatic and theatrical representation in the political

world. Can the dramatization (and theatricalization) of symbolic interac-

tion ever involve the making of new forms of interaction or does drama-

tization by definition involve the repetition of forms (such as

melodrama) for which participants and observers develop a habit and a

need? Nimmo and Combs' (1980) work on myth began to deal with

these questions, coming down on the side of constant, ongoing repeti-

tion.

2. The typical stagings of dramatic patterns. My references to "drama" and

"theatre" have implied that the former involved the planning and perfor-

mance of action (in Burke's sense) and the latter the performance itself

(in Goffman's sense). But this distinction may no longer be really useful.

The insistence on a correlation between political drama and its staging

denies the possibility that drama can be culturally generated through

what Ernest Bormann has called "fantasy chaining" (1972:387, et passim).

When Ronald Reagan constructed a political melodrama with references

to "the Evil Empire," his statements-his "performances"-of the refer-

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72 Borreca

ences might have been relevant only minimally to the "drama" he gener-

ated. It seems possible that the staging of political drama might take

place first in the realm of sheer consciousness, second in some form of

scripting (mental plan or written document), and third in physical and

gestural embodiment; from there it might become a repeated, reified

drama through mediation and "fantasy chaining." To speak of "political

theatre" might be to speak only of the first moment of its occurrence in

the physical world, the moment of its initial manifestation.

The assumption that political dramaturgy ought to attend mainly to

political performance-speeches, media manipulation, etc.-encourages a

limited notion both of political theatre and of theatre art. If it becomes

reified, a performative triad might certainly be the focus of analysis, but

it is more crucial to see drama and performance as thought structures, as

anticipated projections of images and thoughts upon the world, as pecu-

liar paradigms of consciousness.

The least penetrating use of political dramaturgy is the simple (and

simplistic) demystification of media manipulation, of "stagings." Politi-

cians don't have control over every performance triad that comes into

being in the course of a campaign or a term of office. For example, tele-

vision as a political stage has become to a great extent a given reality. To

employ the resources of the reality might not be to falsify it but to be

true to it. The precise point at which this use becomes manipulation is a

different matter from the fact of staging, and one of the most complex

issues facing political dramaturgists.

3. Apropos the question of staging: the modes in which political drama can be

"staged. " The modes need not necessarily be theatrical-they don't have

to involve performance and observation. The broadcast media of course

demand performance or, at least, enactment, but even in print one might

"stage" a drama without actually, physically performing it. For if political

drama involves a performer-stage-spectator configuration, it doesn't have

to be performed to exist, although of course it might in some sense be

fulfilled (or definitely initiated) when it is.

The idea that politicians, like actors in the theatre, act to gain some

type of response from their public emphasizes only one-half of an essen-

tial dialectical transaction. As in certain forms of theatre, the response in

political life has the potential to be an action itself; the performance

might be joined, setting in motion an ever-shifting symbolic interaction,

in which performers and audience members move swiftly between these

"parts," and the drama, as it comes into being, gains potential for per-

petual regeneration through a triad that reformulates itself over and over

again.

Much fine work on political rhetoric and on the rhetoric of Reagan in

particular has shown that performance and its trappings (stage, props,

gesture, vocal tone, etc.) are crucial to the dramatization of political real-

ity (see for example Atkinson 1984; Denton 1988; Erickson 1985; Hart

1984; Stuckey 1989). However, many of these same studies (especially

Denton, Erickson, Hart, and Stuckey) indicate that political drama rests

as much in the structure and substance of what is said and appealed to as

in its "performance." The "dramatization" of politics might involve the

minimal construction of a performer-stage-spectator model within lan-

guage; the "theatricalization" of politics might involve merely the appro-

priate performance of that model, the physical embodiment of what is

dramatistically encoded in speech.

4. New analysis of "stagings" (in the usual sense of the term). If the central ques-

tion of political dramaturgism should no longer be the manipulation of

settings, props, symbols, etc., what is needed is a vocabulary for the dy-

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Dramaturgy 73

namics of actor and action analysis and the forms these can take. We

need to see how the political actor engages in the construction of politi-

cal symbolic action, the nature of her or his involvement in its dramatic

reification. This must involve a revision of Burke and Goffman, of the

very idea of manipulation; it must not treat settings, symbols, etc., as if

they were divorced from the persons "performing" with or through

them. The concept of "political actor" or "player" is inseparable from

how she dresses or speaks, what she holds in her hands, the overall im-

pression she makes in the "reification" of performance triads.

Why Political Dramaturgy?

To have reviewed political dramaturgism in this way is to suggest that it

is essential to the political age in which we live now. Political life is getting

far ahead of where we are in our theory and consciousness of dramaturgical reality. It's striking that political dramaturgy has petered out somewhat;

it makes one wonder about the relationship between the worlds inside and

outside academia. There is an urgent need for an inclusive theory of politi-

cal dramaturgy that has something not only to say but to do in affecting

our consciousness of how our media-saturated world works, and of how

politics operates within it. This is not a Solon-esque warning, but a (dis-

tressingly) detached observation of what's going on.

The idea that politicians, like actors in the theatre, act to gain

some type of response from their public emphasizes only

one-half of an essential dialectical transaction.

Political dramaturgy is a peculiarly challenging form of thinking because

it involves the probing of certain "common" perceptions. It's easy to make

observations about politics such as "Dukakis lost because he didn't perform

well"; "Bush grew into being an actor, like Reagan"; "Iran-Contra is melo-

dramatic," etc. etc. etc. The function of political dramaturgy is to take us

to a state of reflective thinking where the use of dramaturgical terminology

is not a reflex but a choice, which grasps both political phenomena as well

as what dramatic terms are doing to the very structure of how we think

about those phenomena.

Since we assume that dramatic and theatrical elements are present in po-

litical life and see them at every turn, the only final, satisfying answer to

the question, Is dramaturgy metaphorical? might be that it is the great

chicken-egg question of dramaturgism: Which comes first, the dramaturgi-

cal triad or political phenomena with the potential to generate such triads?

To be always conscious of the question is not to have to answer it defi-

nitely; it is to let it inform at all times the dramaturgical analysis of politics.

What is more, if one chooses to argue that politics is theatre, as Burke

probably would have, one is not saying that politics can or will replace the

art of the theatre. The theatre as an art has its own way with the triad of

performer-stage-spectator, not the least of which is a very literal reification

of the stage. What political dramaturgy does-and can do-is to describe the

triadic impulse to which theatre art is connected. If it does this, it will have

reinforced theatre as an essential activity, not only within social life, but as

a formal undertaking-reflecting, refracting, and crystallizing the triads of so-

cial and political drama.

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74 Borreca

Notes

I. In the social science literature the terms "dramaturgy" and "dramaturgism" are used

interchangeably. In this essay I use the term "dramaturgy" because it is stylistically

less turgid, although it might cause confusion with the term "dramaturgy" as used

by theatre critics and dramaturgs.

2. See Bruce E. Gronbeck, "Dramaturgical Theory and Criticism: The State of the

Art (or Science)," (1980:315-330) for an excellent review of the dramaturgical lit-

erature as of 1980. For a more recent general review of the literature, see Dennis

Brissett and Charles Edgley, "The Dramaturgical Perspective" (1990:1-46).

3. For Burke, dramatism entails the philosophical interrogation of reality and being,

our perception of these, and our meta-perception in the form of our discourse

about them. In "Dramatism" Burke wrote: "Dramatism is a method of analysis and

a corresponding critique of terminology designed to show that the most direct

route to the study of human relations and human motives is via a methodical in-

quiry into cycles or clusters of terms and their functions" (1968:445). See also

Dramatism and Development (I972).

4. Perinbanayagam: "The theatre is not something apart from society [.. .]. Rather it

is a crystallization and typification of what goes on in society all the time-or, more

sharply, what a social relationship in fact is" (1985:63).

Wilshire: "As the mimetic art par excellence, [theatre] reveals certain aspects of our

mimetic reality as human beings" (1982:xiv). For Wilshire, to engage in dramatur-

gical analysis is not to get either theatre or life to "supply an exhaustive set of lit-

eral terms adequate for itself which can then be applied metaphorically to the other

'side'"; rather it is a process of "[balancing] perpetually in our conceptual system

between notions of offstage and onstage" (xiv).

5. For probably the mostly overenforced idea of "the dramaturgical society," see Guy

Debord, Society of the Spectacle (I970). Although Debord isn't cited often by the an-

ticapitalist dramaturgists, his Marxist analysis of social spectacle as a form of con-

sumerist fetishization clearly impacted their thinking.

6. Early and pioneering case studies included two works that did not develop drama-

turgical models but that laid the groundwork for them: Joseph R. Gusfield's Sym-

bolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement (1966), which

argued for two main forms of symbolism within political movements ("gestures of

cohesion" and "gestures of differentiation"), and Bill Kinser and Neil Kleinman's

The Dream That Was No More a Dream: The Search for Aesthetic Reality in Germany,

I890--945 (1969), which offered the first image of the evolution of an entire soci-

ety-and a period of social history in toto-as a journey toward aesthetic fulfillment

and transcendence. (That is, a historical view of political power as sustainable

through the exercise of aesthetic power.)

7. Earlier instances of multicultural dramaturgy include Abner Cohen's work on Af-

rica (1981) and Frank Manning's work on the Caribbean (1980, 1986).

8. Wagner-Pacifici draws mainly upon Turner's "Liminality and Communitas" in The

Ritual Process (1969) and "Liminal to Liminoid in Play, Flow and Ritual" (I974). For the breach-crisis-redress-reconciliation/schism model, see Fields and Metaphors

(1974); From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (1982); and "Are

There Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual, and Drama?" (1990).

9. For another approach to societal performance triads, see Bonnie Marranca, "Perfor-

mance World, Performance Culture" (1987).

io. Edelman's earlier work includes The Symbolic Uses of Politics (1967), Politics as Symbolic Action (1971), and Political Language: Words that Succeed and Policies that Fail

(I977).

I I. Yet another direction of the late 1980s (and for the 1990s) is what might be termed

"practical political dramaturgy," as represented in the work of Joel Schechter, the

author of Durov's Pig: Clowns, Politics, and Theatre (1985). Following in a line of

drama critics who have commented on the performance aspects of politics-such as

Robert Brustein, Bonnie Marranca, and Gautam Dasgupta-Schechter has tested the

relations between political theatre (Brecht, et al.) and theatre in politics by running

as Green Party candidate for the New Haven Board of Aldermen and staging "po-

litical dramas" that capitalized on theatrical realities already at play in the campaign.

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Dramaturgy 75

Schechter staged self-conscious political theatre in order to provoke an awareness of

false (and more hidden) theatrical manipulations at work in the New Haven power

structure (see Schechter 1989).

A Selected Bibliography of Political Dramaturgy

(Although this bibliography focuses on dramaturgy in political science, it

also includes works consulted in sociology, media theory, rhetoric studies,

and performance studies.)

Atkinson, Max

'1984 Our Masters' Voices: The Language and Body Language of Politics. London

and New York: Methuen.

Boorstin, Daniel

1987 The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Atheneum.

Bormann, Ernest G.

1972 "Fantasy and Rhetorical Vision: The Rhetorical Criticism of Social Real-

ity." Quarterly oumal of Speech 58 (no. 4):396-407.

Brissett, Dennis, and Charles Edgley

1990 "The Dramaturgical Perspective" and "Political Dramas." In Life as The-

ater: A Dramaturgical Sourcebook, edited by Brissett and Edgley, 1-46, 347-

52. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter (revised edition).

Brown, Norman O.

1966 Love's Body. New York: Random House.

Brustein, Robert

1974 "News Theatre." The New York Times Magazine, 16 June: 7, 36, 38-39,

44-45, 48.

Burke, Kenneth

1966 Language and Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berke-

ley: University of California Press.

1968 "Dramatism." In The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 7, edited by David L. Sills, 445-51. London: Macmillan. (Also in Combs

and Mansfield 1976:7--17.)

1969 A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press.

1969 A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press.

1972 Dramatism and Development. Barre, MA: Clark University Press.

Bums, Elizabeth

1972 Theatricality: A Study of Convention in the Theatre and in Social Life. New

York: Harper and Row.

Cohen, Abner

1981 The Politics of Elite Culture: Explorations in the Dramaturgy of Power in a

Modem African Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Combs, James E.

1980 Dimensions of Political Drama. Santa Monica, CA: Goodyear Publishing

Co.

Combs, James E., and Michael W. Mansfield

1976 Drama in Life: The Uses of Communication in Society. New York: Hastings

House.

Cragan, John F., and Donald C. Shields

1977 "Foreign Policy Comm. Dramas: How Mediated Rhetoric Played in Peo-

ria in Campaign '76." Quarterly] Joumrnal of Speech 63 (no. 3):274-89.

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76 Borreca

Dasgupta, Gautam

1988 "The Theatricks of Politics." Performing Arts Journal II (no. 2): 77-83.

Debord, Guy

1970 Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Red and Black.

Denton, Robert E., Jr.

1988 The Primetime Presidency of Ronald Reagan: The Era of the TV Presidency.

New York: Praeger.

Duncan, Hugh

1968 Symbols in Society. New York: Oxford University Press.

Edelman, Murray

1967 The Symbolic Uses of Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

1971 Politics as Symbolic Action. New York: Academic Press.

1977 Political Language: Words That Succeed and Policies That Fail. New York: Academic Press.

1988 Constructing the Political Spectacle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Erickson, Paul D.

1985 Reagan Speaks: The Making of an American Myth. New York: New York

University Press.

Esherick, Joseph W., and Jeffrey N. Wassertstrom

1990 "Acting Out Democracy: Political Theatre in Modem China." Journal of

Asian Studies 49 (no. 4):835-65.

Evreinov, Nicholas

1927 The Theatre in Life. New York: Benjamin Blom.

Gamson, W.A.

1985 "Goffman's Legacy to Political Sociology." Theory and Society 14

(no. 5):605-22.

Geertz, Clifford

1981 Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali. Princeton: Princeton

University Press.

Gillespie, Joanna B.

1980 "The Phenomenon of the Public Wife: An Exercise in Goffinan's Impres-

sion Management." Symbolic Interaction 3 (no. 2):Io9-25. (Also in Brissett

and Edgley 1990:379-97.)

Gilman, Richard

1969 The Confusion of Realms. New York: Vantage Books.

Goffman, Erving

1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday An-

chor Books.

1974 Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York:

Harper and Row.

Gronbeck, Bruce E.

1978 "The Functions of Presidential Campaigning." Communication Monographs

45 (no. 4):268-80.

1980 "Dramaturgical Theory and Criticism: The State of the Art (or Science)."

Western Journal of Speech Communication 44 (no. 4):3I 5-30.

Gusfield, Joseph R.

1966 Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement.

Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Hall, Peter M.

1972 "A Symbolic Interactionist Analysis of Politics." Sociological Inquiry 42

(nos. 3-4):35-75.

1979 "The Presidency and Impression Management." In Studies in Symbolic In-

teraction 2:283-305.

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Dramaturgy 77

Hare, A.P.

1980 "A Dramaturgical Analysis of Street Demonstrations: Washington D.C.,

1971 and Cape Town, 1976." Group Psychotherapy, Psychodrama, and

Sociometry 33 (no. I):92-12o.

1985 Social Interaction as Drama: Applications from Conflict Resolution. Beverly

Hills, CA: Sage.

Hart, Roderick

1984 Verbal Style and the Presidency: A Computer-Based Analysis. Orlando, FL:

Academic Press.

Hayes, M.T.

1987 "Incrementalism as Dramaturgy: The Case of the Nuclear Freeze." Polity

19 (no. 3):443-63.

Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell

1982 The Interplay of Influence: Mass Media and Their Publics in News, Advertising,

and Politics. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co.

Kinser, Bill, and Neil Kleinman

1969 The Dream That Was No More a Dream: The Search for Aesthetic Reality in

Germany, i89o-I945. New York: Harper and Row.

Klapp, Orrin

1964 Symbolic Leaders: Public Dramas and Public Men. Chicago: Aldine Publish-

ing Co.

Lyman, S.M. and M.B. Scott

1975 The Drama of Social Reality. New York: Oxford University Press.

MacCannell, Dean

n.d. Nonviolent Action as Theatre: A Dramaturgical Analysis of 146 Demonstrations.

Haverford: Haverford College Nonviolent Action Research Project,

Monograph No. Io.

McLuhan, Marshall

1965 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill.

Manning, Frank

I98o "Go Down Moses: Revivalist Politics in a Caribbean Mini-State." In Ide-

ology and Interest: The Dialectics of Politics (Political Anthropology Yearbook I),

edited by Myron Aronoff, 31-56. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction

Books.

1986 "Challenging Authority: Calypso and Politics in the Caribbean." In The

Frailty of Authority (Political Anthropology, Vol. 5), edited by Myron

Aronoff. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.

Marranca, Bonnie

1984 "Nuclear Theatre." In Theatrewritings, 147-52. New York: PAJ

Publications.

1987 "Performance World, Performance Culture." Performing Arts Journal Io

(no. 3):21-29.

Mayo, James M., Jr.

1978 "Propaganda with Design: Environmental Dramaturgy in the Political

Rally." Journal of Architectural Education 32 (no. 2):24-27. (Also in

Brissett and Edgley I99o:353-63.)

Merelman, R.M.

1969 "The Dramaturgy of Politics." Sociological Quarterly Io (no. 2):216--4I.

Miles, William F.S.

1989 "The Rally as Ritual: Dramaturgical Politics in Nigerian Hausaland."

Comparative Politics 21I (no. 3):323-38.

Morley, Terry

1990 "Politics as Theatre: Paradox and Complexity in British Columbia."

Journal of Canadian Studies 25 (no. 3):19-37-

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78 Borreca

Mount, Ferdinand

1973 The Theater of Politics. New York: Schocken Books.

Natanson, Maurice

1966 "Man as an Actor." In Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 26

(no. 3):327-41. (Also in Combs and Mansfield 1976:46-56.)

Nimmo, Dan

1974 "The Drama, Illusion and Reality of Political Images." In Popular Images

of Politics: A Taxonomy. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Nimmo, Dan, and James E. Combs

1980 Subliminal Politics: Myths and Mythmakers in America. New York: Prentice-

Hall.

1983 Mediated Political Realities. New York and London: Longman.

Perinbanayagam, Robert

1985 Signifying Acts. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Plutarch

n.d. The Lives of the Noble Graecians and Romans. Translated by John Dryden.

Revised by Arthur Hugh Clough. New York: Modem Library.

Postman, Neil

1986 Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.

New York: Penguin Books.

Rosenau, James

1980 The Dramas of Political Lfe. North Scituate, MA: Duxbury Press.

Schechner, Richard

1988 Performance Theory. New York and London: Routledge.

Schechner, Richard, and M. Schuman, editors

1976 Ritual, Play and Performance: Readings in the Social Science/Theatre. New

York: Seabury.

Schechter, Joel

1985 Durov's Pig: Clowns, Politics, and Theatre. New York: Theatre Communi-

cations Group.

1989 "Politics as Theatre; or, How I Too Lost the Election in 1988." TDR 33

(no. 3):I54-65.

1989 "Reagan in Bohemia." American Theatre 6 (no. 7):34-36, 118-19.

Stuckey, Mary E.

1989 Getting Into the Game: The Pre-Presidential Rhetoric of Ronald Reagan. New

York: Praeger.

1990 Playing the Game: The Presidential Rhetoric of Ronald Reagan. New York:

Praeger.

Turner, Victor

1969 The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing

Co.

1974 Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press.

1974 "Liminal to Limonoid in Play, Flow and Ritual." Rice University Studies 60

(no. 3): 53-92.

1982 From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ

Publications.

1990 "Are There Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual, and Drama?" In

By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual, edited by

Richard Schechner and Willa Appel, 8-18. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1990.

Wagner-Pacifici, Robin Erica

1986 The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama. Chicago and London:

University of Chicago Press.

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Dramaturgy 79

Welsh, John F.

1985 "Dramaturgy and Political Mystification: Political Life in the United

States." Mid-American Review of Sociology Io (no. 2):3-28.

Williams, Raymond

1989 "Drama in a Dramatised Society." In Raymond Williams on Television, ed-

ited by Alan O'Connor, 3-13. London and New York: Routledge.

Wilshire, Bruce

1982 Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor. Bloomington,

IN: Indiana University Press.

Young, T.R., and Garth Massey

1977 "The Dramaturgical Society: A Macro-Analytic Approach to Dramaturgi-

cal Analysis." Qualitative Sociology I (no. 2):78-98.

Young, T.R., and John Welsh

1984 Critical Dimensions in Dramaturgical Analysis. Lubbock, TX: Red Feather.

Art Borreca is Assistant Professor of theatre history, dramatic literature, and dra-

maturgy at the University of Iowa. He is also the dramaturg for the Iowa Play-

wrights Workshop. He has recently published "The Making of the British History

Play, 1956-1968" in Theater 3, and is working on a book on British historical

drama, The Past's Presence.

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