Jeffrey C. Alexander

Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance Between Ritual and Strategy

From its very beginnings, the social study of culture has been polarized between structuralist theories that treat meaning as a text and investigate the patterning that provides relative autonomy and pragmatist theories that treat meaning as emerging from the contingencies of individual and collective action—so-called practices—and that analyze cultural patterns as reflections of power and material interest. In this article, I present a theory of cultural pragmatics that transcends this division, bringing meaning structures, contingency, power, and materiality together in a new way. My argument is that the materiality of practices should be replaced by the more multidimensional concept of performances. Drawing on the new field of performance studies, cultural pragmatics demonstrates how social performances whether individual or collective can be analogized systematically to theatrical ones. After defining the elements of social performance, I suggest that these elements have become “de-fused” as societies have become more complex. Performances are successful only insofar as they can ‘“re-fuse” these increasingly disentangled elements. In a fused performance, audiences identify with actors, and cultural scripts achieve verisimilitude through effective mise-en-scène. Performances fail when this relinking process is incomplete: the elements of performance remain apart, and social action seems inauthentic and artificial, failing to persuade. Refusion, by contrast, allows actors to communicate the meanings of their actions successfully and thus to pursue their interests effectively.

The discourse of American civil society: a new proposal for cultural studies

In this essay we make a new proposal for the sociological approach to culture. We begin with a brief critical history of the social scientific treatment of culture and a criticism of some recent alternatives. In the section following this we develop our own model, and, in the third part of the essay, apply this in a construction of what we call the discourse of American civil society. In the fourth and longest section of our paper, we demonstrate the plausibility of this substantive model by using it to investigate a disparate range of events in American social and political history.

Social Performance : Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual

Description Contents Resources Courses About the Authors Jeffrey C. Alexander brings together new and leading contributors to make a powerful and coherently argued case for a new direction in cultural sociology, one that focuses on the intersection between performance, ritual and social action. Performance has always been used by sociologists to understand the social world but this volume offers the first systematic analytical framework based on the performance metaphor to explain large-scale social and cultural processes. From September 11, to the Clinton/Lewinsky affair, to the role of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Social Performance draws on recent work in performative theory in the humanities and in cultural studies to offer a novel approach to the sociology of culture. Inspired by the theories of Austin, Derrida, Durkheim, Goffman, and Turner, this is a path-breaking volume that makes a major contribution to the field. It will appeal to scholars and students alike.

Action and its environments :toward a new synthesis

PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction Part I: The Problem StatedOne: Social-Structural Analysis: Presuppositions, Ideologies, Empirical Debates Part II: Structure, Action, and DifferentiationTwo: Durkheims Problem and Differentiation Theory TodayThree: Core Solidarity, Ethnic Outgroup, and Social DifferentiationFour: The Mass News Media in Systemic, Historical, and Comparative PerspectiveFive: Three Models of Culture and Social Relations: Toward an Analysis of WatergateSix: The University and Morality Part III: The Micro-Macro LinkSeven: Social Differentiation and Collective Behavior (with Paul Colomy)Eight: The Individualist Dilemma in Phenomenology and InteractionismNine: From Reduction to Linkage: The Long View of the Micro-Macro Debate (with Bernhard Giesen) Part IV: The Problem RestatedTen: Action and Its Environments Index

Neofunctionalism and After

Series Editors Preface. Preface. Acknowledgments. Part I: Origins of a Theoretical Project: 1. From Functionalism to Neofunctionalism: Creating a Position in the Field of Social Theory. 2. Traditions and Competition: Preface to a Postpositivist Approach to Knowledge Cumulation. Part II: Reinventing Parsons/Reconstructing His Tradition: 3. Neofunctionalism Today: Reconstructing a Theoretical Tradition. 4. Parsonss Structure in American Sociology. 5. Formal Sociology Is not Multidimensional: Breaking the Code in Parsonss Fragment on Simmel. 6. On Choosing Ones Intellectual Predecessors: Why Charles Camic is Wrong About Parsonss Early Work. 7. Structure, Value, Action: What Did the Early Parsons Mean and What Should He Have Said, Instead? Part III: After Neofunctionalism: Its Contribution to Theory Creation Today: 8. The New Theoretical Movement. 9. Action, Culture and Civil Society. Name Index. Subject Index.

Real civil societies : dilemmas of institutionalization

Introduction - Jeffrey C Alexander Civil Society I, II, III: Constructing an Empirical Concept from Normative Controversies and Historical Transformations PART ONE: UNCIVIL HIERARCHIES Banfields Amoral Familism Revisited - Elisa P Reis Implications of High Inequality Structures for Civil Society Between Economic Dissolution and the Return of the Social - Michael Pusey The Contest for Civil Society in Australia Civil Society, Patronage, and Democracy - Luis Roniger Civil Society and Uncivil Organizations - G[um]oran Ahrne PART TWO: BIFURCATING DISCOURSES Citizen and Enemy as Symbolic Classification - Jeffrey C Alexander On the Polarizing Discourse of Civil Society Barbarism and Civility in the Discourses of Fascism, Communism and Democracy - Philip Smith Variations on a Set of Themes The Racial Discourse of Civil Society - Ronald N Jacobs The Rodney King Affair and the City of Los Angeles PART THREE: ARBITRARY FOUNDINGS Neither Faith nor Commerce - David Zaret Printing and the Unintended Origins of English Public Opinion Mistrusting Civility - Piotr Sztompka Predicament of Post-Communist Society The Public Sphere and a European Civil Society - V[ac]ictor P[ac]erez-D[ac]iaz

Iconic Experience in Art and Life Surface/Depth Beginning with Giacometti's Standing Woman

This article examines a key question emerging from the strong program in cultural sociology — can art provide a window into social life? An examination of Giacomettis Standing Woman shows that art attempts to express cultural structures via immersion into and through the material surfaces of aesthetic form. Through an analysis of the iconic significance of family photos, furniture and celebrities, the article goes on to suggest that such iconic experience remains at the basis of contemporary social life. It explains how we feel part of our surroundings, how we experience the ties that bind us to the people we know and how we develop a feeling for cultural hierarchy.

From the Depths of Despair: Performance, Counterperformance, and “September 11”

After introducing a perspective on terrorism as postpolitical and after establishing the criteria for success that are immanent in this form of antipolitical action, this essay interprets September 11, 2001, and its aftermath inside a cultural-sociological perspective. After introducing a macro-model of social performance that combines structural and semiotic with pragmatic and power-oriented dimensions, I show how the terrorist attack on New York City and the counterattacks that immediately occurred in response can be viewed as an iteration of the performance/counterperformance dialectic that began decades, indeed centuries, ago in terms of the relation of Western expansion and Arab-Muslim reaction. I pay careful attention to the manner in which the counterperformance of New Yorkers and Americans develops an idealized, liminal alternative that inspired self-defense and outrage, leading to exactly the opposite performance results from those the al-Qaeda terrorists had intended.

Struggling over the mode of incorporation: backlash against multiculturalism in Europe

Abstract Documenting the extraordinary potency and reach of the European backlash against multiculturalism, this essay provides a new theoretical model for explaining it. Rather than focusing primarily on demographic and institutional facts about Islamic immigration – such as education, wealth, participation and mobility – the author proposes a cultural-sociological approach that focuses on meanings and emotions as core issues for civil societies. As the demographic presence of Islamic immigrants has intensified, the anti-civil construction of Islamic qualities has led European masses, leaders and intellectuals, not only from the right but from the centre and left, to demand homogenizing assimilation. Representing public practices of Islam as threatening European democracy, newly restrictive citizenship tests have emerged alongside growing xenophobic political parties and newly threatening neo-fascist violence. Initially brought to Europe for economic and political reasons, the question has now become whether the children and grandchildren of Islamic immigrants can be incorporated into European civil society. The conflict is not over whether immigrants should be incorporated but over the grounds for doing so.Using an interpretative approach, this paper examines the perspectives of Franco-Ontarian postsecondary students employing an exploratory qualitative research. Between January and June 2014, in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted in Ottawa and Toronto with 18 Franco-Ontarian postsecondary students. The findings reveal that participants who study in bilingual postsecondary institutions would like to have access to courses in French, as well as see improvement in the quality of the language of instruc-

The Celebrity-Icon

This article develops a non-reductive approach to celebrity, treating it as an iconic form of collective representation central to the meaningful construction of contemporary society. Like other compelling material symbols, the celebrity-icon is structured by the interplay of surface and depth. The surface is an aesthetic structure whose sensuous qualities command attention and compel attachment; the depth projects the sacred and profane binaries that structure meaning even in postmodern societies. While celebrity worship displays elements of totemism, it also reflects the eschatological hopes for salvation that mark post-Axial Age religion. The attacks on celebrity culture that inform critical public and intellectual thinking resemble iconoclastic criticisms of idol worship more than they do empirical social scientific study.