ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the political, economic, and physical bases of an alienated dramaturgy. Alvin Gouldner has provided some of that sociology. He regards the micropolitics of dramaturgy as a moral calamity. In the Third World, dramaturgy is partnered with death squads to control unrest. Advertising is used to generate more and more demand from poorer and poorer debtors. In the United States as in most of the world, finance capital has elbowed out of center stage its earlier partners—mercantile and industrial capital. Neither Erving Goffman nor Gouldner give an analysis of the political economy of the world in which such uses of dramaturgy arise and are deployed. The intrusion of alienated dramaturgy into the marketplace is best understood in terms of the peculiar dysjunction between a prolific system of production and a strangulated system of distribution. The great dysjuncture that grounds such a use of information technology, of dramaturgy and language, is the separation of production and distribution.
