Performance and Power

Jeffrey C. Alexander

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745655666
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Performativity has emerged as a critical new idea across the humanities and social sciences, from literary and cultural studies to the study of gender and the philosophy of action. In this volume, Jeffrey Alexander demonstrates how performance can reorient our study of politics and society. Alexander develops a cultural pragmatics that shifts cultural sociology from texts to gestural meanings. Positioning social performance between ritual and strategy, he lays out the elements of social performance - from scripts to mise-en-scène, from critical mediation to audience reception - and systematically describes their tense interrelation. This is followed by a series of empirically oriented studies that demonstrate how cultural pragmatics transforms our approach to power. Alexander brings his new theory of social performance to bear on case studies that range from political to cultural power: Barack Obama's electoral campaign, American failure in the Iraqi war, the triumph of the Civil Rights Movement, terrorist violence on September 11th, public intellectuals, material icons, and social science itself. This path-breaking work by one of the world's leading social theorists will command a wide interdisciplinary readership.

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THE CULTURAL PRAGMATICS OF SYMBOLIC ACTION

with Jason Mast

The question of theory and practice permeates not only politics but culture, where the analogue for theory is the social-symbolic text, the bundle of everyday codes, narratives, and rhetorical configurings that are the objects of hermeneutic reconstruction. Emphasizing action over its theory, praxis theorists have blinded themselves to the deeply imbedded textuality of every social action (Bourdieu 1984; Swidler 1986; Turner 1969). But a no less distorting myopia has affected the vision from the other side. The pure hermeneut (e.g., Dilthey 1976; Ricoeur 1976) tends to ignore the material problem of instantiating ideals in the real world. The truth, as Marx (1972: 145) wrote in his Xth thesis on Feuerbach, is that, while theory and practice are different, they are always necessarily intertwined.

Theory and practice are interwoven in everyday life, not only in social theory and social science. In the following chapters, we will see that powerful social actors understand the conceptual issues of performance in an intuitive, ethnographic, and practical way. Individuals, organizations, and parties moved “instinctively” to hook their actions into the background culture in a lively and compelling manner, working to create an impression of sincerity and authenticity rather than one of calculation and artificiality, to achieve verisimilitude. Social movements’ public demonstrations display a similar performative logic. Movement organizers, intensely aware of media organizations’ control over the means of symbolic distribution, direct their participants to perform in ways that will communicate that they are worthy, committed, and determined to achieve acceptance and inclusion from the larger political community. Social actors, embedded in collective representations and working through symbolic and material means, implicitly orient towards others as if they were actors on a stage seeking identification with their experiences and understandings from their audiences.

Towards a cultural pragmatics

Kenneth Burke (1957 [1941]) introduced the notion of symbolic action; Clifford Geertz (1973a) made it famous. These thinkers wanted to draw attention to the specifically cultural character of activities, the manner in which they are expressive rather than instrumental, irrational rather than rational, more like theatrical performance than economic exchange. Drawing also from Burke, Erving Goffman (1956) introduced his own dramaturgical theory at about the same time. Because of the one-sidedly pragmatic emphases of symbolic interactionism, however, the specifically cultural dimension of this Goffmanian approach (Alexander 1987a) to drama made hardly any dent on the sociological tradition, though it later entered into the emerging discipline of performance studies.

In the decades that have ensued since the enunciation of these seminal ideas, those who have taken the cultural turn have followed a different path. It has been meaning, not action, that has occupied central attention, and deservedly so. To show the importance of meaning, as compared to such traditional sociological ciphers as power, money, and status, it has been necessary to show that meaning is a structure, just as powerful as these others (Rambo and Chan 1999; Somers 1995). To take meaning seriously, not to dismiss it as an epiphenomenon, has been the challenge. Strong programs in contemporary cultural sociology (Alexander and Sherwood 2002; Alexander and Smith 1998, 2010; Edles 1998; Emirbayer and Goodwin 1996; Jacobs 1996; Kane 1997; Sewell 1985; Smith 1998; Somers 1995) have followed Ricoeur’s philosophical demonstration that meaningful actions can be considered as texts, exploring codes and narratives, metaphors, metathemes, values, and rituals in such diverse institutional domains as religion, nation, class, race, family, gender, and sexuality. It has been vital to establish what makes meaning important, what makes some social facts meaningful at all.

In terms of Charles Morris’s (1938) classic distinction, strong programs have focused on the syntactics and semantics of meaning, on the relations of signs to one another and to their referents. Ideas about symbolic action and dramaturgy gesture, by contrast, to the pragmatics of the cultural process, to the relations between cultural texts and the actors in everyday life. While the latter considerations have by no means been entirely ignored by those who have sought to sustain a meaning-centered program in cultural sociology (e.g., Wagner-Pacifici 1986), they have largely been addressed either through relatively ad hoc empirical studies or in terms of the metatheoretical debate over structure and agency (Alexander 1988a, 2003a; Hays 1994; Kane 1991; Sahlins 1976; Sewell 1992). Metatheory is indispensable as an orienting device. It thinks out problems in a general manner and, in doing so, provides more specific, explanatory thinking with a direction to go. The challenge is to move downward on the scientific continuum, from the presuppositions of metatheory to the models and empirical generalizations upon which explanation depends. Metatheoretical thinking about structure and agency has provided hunches about how this should be done, and creative empirical studies show that it can be, but there remains a gaping hole between general concepts and empirical facts. Without providing systematic mediating concepts – a middle range theoretical model – even the most fruitful efforts to bridge semantics and pragmatics (e.g., Kane 1997; Sahlins 1981; Wagner-Pacifici 1986) have an ad hoc, “one off” character, and the more purely metatheoretical often produce awkward, even oxymoronic circumlocutions.¹ Cultural practices are not simply speech acts. Around the same time Goffman was developing a pragmatic dramaturgy in sociology, John Austin (1957) introduced ordinary language philosophy to the idea that language could have a performative function and not only a constative one. Speaking aims to get things done, Austin denoted, not merely to make assertions and provide descriptions. In contrast to simply describing, the performative speech act has the capacity to realize its semantic contents; it is capable of constituting a social reality through its utterance. On the other hand, it can fail. Because a performative may or may not work – it may or may not succeed in realizing its stated intention – Austin keenly observes, its appropriate evaluative standard is not truth and accuracy, but “felicitous” and “infelicitous.”

When Austin turned to investigating felicity’s conditions, however, like Goffman he stressed only the speech act’s interactional context, and failed to account for the cultural context out of which particular signs are drawn forth by a speaker. This philosophical innovation could have marked a turn to the aesthetic and to considerations of what makes actions exemplary (Arendt 1958; Ferrara 2001); instead, it led to an increasing focus on the interactional, the situational, and the practical (e.g., Goffman 1956; Habermas 1984; Schegloff 1987; Searle 1961). Austin’s innovation, like Goffman’s dramaturgy, had the effect of cutting off the practice of language from its texts.

Saussure would have agreed with Austin that parole (speech) must be studied independently of langue (language). However, he would have insisted on the “arbitrary nature of the sign” – that, to consider its effectiveness, spoken language must be considered in its totality, as both langue and parole. A sign’s meaning is arbitrary, Saussure demonstrated, in that “it actually has no natural connection with the signified” (1985: 38), that is, the object it is understood to represent.² Its meaning is arbitrary in relation to its referent in the real world, but it is also arbitrary in the sense that it is not determined by the intention or will of any individual speaker or listener. Rather, a sign’s meaning derives from its relations – metaphorical, metonymic, synecdochic – to other signs in a system of sign relations, or language. The relations between signs in a cultural system are fixed by social convention; they are structures that social actors experience as natural, and unreflexively depend on to constitute their daily lives. Consequently, an accounting of felicity’s conditions must attend to the cultural structures that render a performative intelligible, meaningful, and capable of being interpreted as felicitous or infelicitous, in addition to the mode and context in which the performative is enacted.

In this respect, Saussure’s sometimes errant disciple, Jacques Derrida, was a faithful son, and it is in Derrida’s (1982a [1972]) response to Austin’s speech act theory that post-structuralism begins to demonstrate a deep affinity with contemporary cultural pragmatics. Derrida criticizes Austin for submerging the contribution of the cultural text to performative outcome. Austin “appears to consider solely the conventionality constituting the circumstance of the utterance (énoncé), its contextual surroundings,” Derrida admonishes, “and not a certain conventionality intrinsic to what constitutes the speech act (locution) itself, all that might be summarized rapidly under the problematic rubric of ‘the arbitrary nature of the sign’” (1988: 15). In this way, Derrida sharply admonishes Austin for ignoring the “citational” quality of even the most pragmatic writing and speech. What he means is that all words cite the seemingly absent background cultural texts from which they derive their meanings. “Could a performative utterance succeed,” Derrida asks, “if its formulation did not repeat a ‘coded’ or iterable utterance, or in other words, if the formula I pronounce in order to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable as conforming with an iterable model, if it were not then identifiable in some way as a ‘citation’?” (1988: 18).

Because there can be no determinate, trans-contextual relation of signifier and referent, difference always involves différance (Derrida 1982b). Interpreting symbolic practice – culture in its “presence” – always entails a reference to culture in its “absence,” that is, to an implied semiotic text. In other words, to be practical and effective in action – to have a successful performance – actors must be able to make the meanings of culture structures stick. Since meaning is the product of relations between signs in a discursive code or text, a dramaturgy that intends to take meaning seriously must account for the cultural codes and texts that structure the cognitive environments in which speech is given form.

Dramaturgy emerges from the confluence of hermeneutic, post-structural, and pragmatic theories of meaning’s relation to social action. Cultural pragmatics grows out of this confluence, maintaining that cultural practice must be theorized independently of cultural symbolics, even as it remains fundamentally interrelated with it. Cultural action puts texts into practice, but it cannot do so directly, without passing “go.” A theory of practice must respect the relative autonomy of structures of meaning. Pragmatics and semantics are analytical, not concrete distinctions.

The real and the artificial

One of the challenges in theorizing contemporary cultural practice is the manner in which it seems to slide between artifice and authenticity. There is the deep pathos of Princess Diana’s death and funeral, mediated, even in a certain sense generated by, highly constructed, commercially targeted televised productions, yet so genuine and compelling that the business of a great national collectivity came almost fully to rest. There are the Pentagon’s faked anti-ballistic missile tests and its doctored action photographs of smart missiles during the Iraq war, both of which were taken as genuine in their respective times. There is the continuous and often nauseating flow of staged-for-camera pseudo-events, which Daniel Boorstin (1961) had already flushed out in the l960s. Right along beside them, there is the undeniable moral power generated by the equally “artificial” media events studied by Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz (1992) – Sadat’s arrival in Jerusalem, the Pope’s first visit to Poland, and John F. Kennedy’s funeral.

Plays, movies, and television shows are staged “as if” they occur in real life, and in real time. To seem as if they are “live,” to seem real, they are increasingly shot “on location.” National armies intimidate one another by staging war games, completely artificial events whose intention – not to produce a “real” effect – is announced well before they occur, but which often alter real balances of power. Revolutionary guerrilla groups, such as the Zapatista rebels from Chiapas, Mexico, represent powerful grassroots movements that aim to displace vast material interests and often have the effect of getting real people killed. Yet the masses in such movements present their collective force via highly staged photo-marches, and their leaders, like subcommander Marcos, enter figuratively into the public sphere, as iconic representations of established cultural forms.

The effort at artificially creating the impression of liveness is not new. The Impressionist painters wanted to trump the artificiality of the French Academy by moving outside, to be closer to the nature they were representing, to paint “en plein air.” The Lincoln– Douglas debates were highly staged, and their “real influence” would have been extremely narrow were it not for the hyperbolic expansiveness of the print media (Schudson 1998). The aristocracies and emerging middle classes of the Renaissance, the period marking the very birth of modernity, were highly style conscious, employing facial make-up and hair shaping on both sides of the gender divide, and engaging, more generally, in strenuous efforts at “self-fashioning” (Greenblatt 1980). It was the greatest writer of the Renaissance, after all, who introduced into Western literature the very notion that “the whole world’s a stage, and we merely actors upon it.”

Despite a history of reflexive awareness of artificiality and constructedness, such postmodern commentators as Baudrillard (1983) announce, and denounce, the contemporary interplaying of reality with fiction as demarcating a new age, one in which pragmatics has displaced semantics, social referents have disappeared, and only signifiers powered by the interests and powers of the day remain. Such arguments represent a temptation, fueled by a kind of nostalgia, to treat the distinction between the real and artificial in an essentialist way. Cultural pragmatics holds that this vision of simulated hyper-textuality is not true, that the signified, no matter what its position in the manipulated field of cultural production, can never be separated from some set of signifiers (see also Sherwood 1994).

The relation between authenticity and modes of presentation are, after all, historically and culturally specific.³ During the Renaissance, for instance, the theater, traditionally understood to be a house of spectacle, seduction, and idolatry, began to assume degrees of authenticity traditionally reserved for the dramatic text, which was honored for its purity and incorruptibility. The relation between authenticity and the senses shifted during this time as well. Its close association with the aural eroding, authenticity became an attribute of the visual. The visual displaced the aural as the sense most closely associated with apprehending and discerning the authentic, the real, and the true. The aural, on the other hand, was increasingly presumed to “displace ‘sense’” and language to “dissolve into pure sound and leave reason behind” (Peters 2000: 163).

It is difficult to imagine a starker example of authenticity’s cultural specificity than Donald Frischmann’s (1994) description of the Tzotzil people’s reaction to a live theatrical performance staged in their village of San Juan Chamula, in Chiapas, Mexico in 1991. Frischmann describes how, during the reenactment of an occurrence of domestic violence, the audience was taken by “a physical wave of emotion [that] swept through the entire crowd,” nearly knocking audience members “down onto the floor.” During a scene in which a confession is flogged out of two accused murderers the line separating theatrical production and audience completely disintegrated: “By this point in the play, the stage itself was full of curious and excited onlookers – children and men, surrounding the actors in an attempt to get a closer look at the stage events, which so curiously resembled episodes of real life out in the central plaza” (Frischmann 1994: 223, italics in original).

For cultural pragmatics, authenticity is an interpretive category rather than an ontological state. The status of authenticity is arrived at, is contingent, and results from processes of social construction; its accomplishment is separated from any transcendental, ontological referent. If there is a normative repulsion to the fake or inauthentic, cultural pragmatics suggests this must be treated in an analytical way, as a structuring code in the symbolic fabric actors depend on to interpret their lived realities.

Yes, we are “condemned” to live out our lives in an age of artifice, a world of mirrored, manipulated, and mediated representation. But the constructed character of symbols does not make them less real. A talented anthropologist and a clinical psychologist published a lengthy empirical account (Marvin and Ingle 1999) describing the flag of the United States, the “stars and stripes,” as a totem for the American nation, a tribe whose members periodically engage in blood sacrifice so that the totem may continue to thrive. Such a direct equation of contemporary sacrality with pre-literate tribal life has its dangers, as we are about to suggest, yet there is much in this account that rings powerfully true.

Nostalgia and counter-nostalgia: Sacrality then and now

For those who continue to insist on the centrality of meaning in contemporary societies, and who see these meanings as in some necessary manner refractions of culture structures, the challenge is to incorporate the distinctiveness of “modernity,” an historical designation that now includes postmodernity as well. Why does it remain so difficult to conceptualize the cultural implications of the vast historical difference between earlier times and our own? One reason is that so much of contemporary theorizing about culture has seemed determined to elide it. The power– knowledge fusion that Foucault postulates at the center of the modern episteme is, in fact, much less characteristic of contemporary societies than it was of earlier, more traditional ones, where social structure and culture were relatively fused. The same is true for Bourdieu’s habitus, a self that is mere nexus, the emotional residue of group position and social structure that much more clearly reflects the emotional situation of early societies than the autonomizing, reflexive, deeply ambivalent psychological processes of today.

Culture still remains powerful in an a priori manner, even in the most contemporary societies. Powers are still infused with sacralizing discourses, and modern and postmodern actors can strategize only by typifying in terms of institutionally segmented binary codes. Secularization does not mean the loss of cultural meaning, the emergence of completely free-floating institutions, or the creation of purely self-referential individual actors (see also Emirbayer and Mische 1998). There remains, in Ken Thompson’s (1990) inimitable phrase, the “dialectic between sacralization and secularization.” But action does not relate to culture in an unfolding sort of way. Secularization does mean differentiation rather than fusion, not only between culture, self, and social structure, but also within culture itself.

Mannheim (1971 [1927]) pointed out that it has been the unwillingness to accept the implications of such differentiation that characterizes conservative political theory, which from Burke (1987 [1790]) to Oakeshott (1981 [1962]) to contemporary communitarians has given short shrift to cultural diversity and individual autonomy. Such an unwillingness has also undermined the genuine and important insights of interpretively oriented cultural social science.

For the relatively small group of modern social thinkers who have maintained that, despite modernization, meaning still matters, the tools developed for analyzing meaning in traditional and simple societies have often seemed sufficient. For instance, late in his career Durkheim used descriptions of Australian abor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The cultural pragmatics of symbolic action
• 2 Social performance between ritual and strategy
• 3 Performance and the challenge of power
• 4 Social, political, cultural, and performative
• 5 Democratic power and political performance: Obama v. McCain
• 6 A presidential performance, panned, or Obama as the last Enlightenment man
• 7 Performing counter-power: The civil rights movement
• 8 Performing terror on September 11
• 9 War and performance: Afghanistan and Iraq
• 10 Intellectuals and public performance
• 11 Iconic power and performativity: The role of the critic
• Notes
• References
• Index