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Dialogues and Dramas of Conviviality and Confrontation

Radical Interactionism and Critiques of Contemporary Culture

ISBN: 978-1-83982-029-8, eISBN: 978-1-83982-028-1

Publication date: 30 April 2021

Abstract

Human agents are constantly using “symbols,” according to G. H. Mead, or “signs,” as C. S. Peirce called them, to engage in what Mikhail Bakhtin has called “dialogues” with each other or with the environment. Such vehicles of communication are not freestanding ones but are drawn from specific and demarcated discursive formations. So drawn, these vehicles are then put to use, as Kenneth Burke has shown in his dramatistic perspective on human social life, as agencies used by human agents to construct acts, in defined situations or scenes – that is social situations and physical locations – to display given attitudes, in order to fulfill one purpose or another. Every human move that an individual makes has these Burkean features. Such moves are used to engage in either convivial dramas or confrontational ones.

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Acknowledgements

Acknowledgments

The examples of dialogues I use in this essay have appeared in some of my earlier publications, though I am extracting different significations from them here. This no doubt indicates that even the smallest bit of a conversation will present a variety of features for study and analysis.

I have taken the accounts of the shootings from the entries in Wikipedia. This Internet site has very faithfully collected all the accounts of these incidents from a number of sources and made them accessible to all.

I must thank Prof. Doyle McCarthy of Fordham University for reading an earlier version of this article and making helpful suggestions.

Citation

Perinbanayagam, R. (2021), "Dialogues and Dramas of Conviviality and Confrontation", Denzin, N.K., Salvo, J. and Chen, S.-L.S. (Ed.) Radical Interactionism and Critiques of Contemporary Culture (Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 52), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 205-220. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0163-239620210000052012

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited