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DOI: 10.1177/0725513604046955
2004 79: 43 Thesis Eleven
Beryl Langer
The Return of the Repressed: Alexander's Cultural Pragmatics

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THE RETURN OF THE
REPRESSED: ALEXANDERS
CULTURAL PRAGMATICS
Beryl Langer
ABSTRACT Alexanders call for a cultural sociology that goes beyond
hermeneutic reading to an understanding of how cultural texts are instantiated
in action is considered in relation to earlier attempts to establish a tradition of
symbolic analysis in American sociology. The sociological provenance of the
dramaturgical model that Alexander appropriates from performance studies
serves to underline the precariousness of cultural sociology as a project within
the American academy. Alexanders thesis on the critical importance of
refusion to the life of societies is endorsed, as is his argument that the speci-
city of post-traditional societies cannot be elided by drawing directly on con-
ceptual tools developed in analysis of ritual in traditional societies. His
argument for sociological agnosticism in relation to the moral qualities of
symbolic action, on the other hand, is called into question.
KEYWORDS Alexander cultural sociology disciplinary boundaries
dramaturgy refusion
I
In his essay Cultural Pragmatics: A New Model of Social Performance,
1
Jeffrey Alexander revisits the relation between theory and practice addressed
in Marxs Theses on Feuerbach a relation central to the concerns of this
journal. According to Alexander, this relation is one of sociological theorys
lacunae, its dynamics glossed by both praxis theorists who emphasize action
over theory and underplay the deeply imbedded textuality of social action,
and hermeneuts who sharply underestimate the material problem of instan-
tiating ideals in the real world. He argues that Marx was right in insisting
that theory and practice are necessarily intertwined, and proposes that
Thesis Eleven, Number 79, November 2004: 4352
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sociology look to the new interdisciplinary eld of performance theory for
insight into how this intertwining of theory and practice can be understood.
He sees engagement with meaning via the work of Ricouer as fullling only
part of the project of cultural sociology culture as theory but not as
practice. Alexanders argument is that cultural sociology must complement
the study of meaning with study of the relation between cultural texts and
everyday actors. In his view, meta-theoretical debate about structure and
agency is no substitute for the models and empirical generalizations upon
which explanation depends, and social theorists concerned with meaning
must therefore develop a theoretical model of cultural pragmatics.
What interests Alexander is how social-symbolic texts are activated in
performance a question not answered by hermeneutic analysis of codes,
narratives and rhetorical congurations. Mapping the culture, in other
words, is only the rst step for cultural sociology, which must address the
question of how culture is instantiated in the real world. As he points out
in his systematic account of the conditions of successful performance, collec-
tive representations do not speak themselves, but rather provide the back-
ground for social performances. An analogy with theatre as literature that
walks and talks before our eyes serves to underline the limitations of a
hermeneutics of cultural texts that is not accompanied by a pragmatics of
cultural performance.
Alexanders account of what a pragmatics of cultural performance
would involve is both systematic and comprehensive. The elements of
cultural performance that he identies as requiring detailed analysis include
the system of collective representations which provides the background to
the performance; the actors their particular subjectivities, social identities,
contingent motivations, cognitive and expressive skills and ability to display
moral evaluations; the observers of the performance, or audience, who may
or may not cathect to the cultural text, may or may not represent social
statuses that complement the actors, and whose decoding practices, as
Stuart Hall (1980) has demonstrated in relation to media texts, are variable;
the means of symbolic production objects, clothing, performance space,
means of transmission; mis-en-scene the ensemble of physical and verbal
gestures which must be coded, narratively and rhetorically congured, tem-
porally sequenced and spatially choreographed. Finally, there is social
power, not so much an element of performance as its context. Not all texts
are equally legitimate, not all performances are allowed to proceed, and
decisions as to who can act in a performance, with what means and to what
kind of audience, all involve the exercise of power, as does the question of
what kinds of responses will be permitted.
The parallels with Goffmans (1959) dramaturgical model are clear, as
is Alexanders greater attention to meaning and power. His model can be
seen as incorporating Goffmans dramaturgy, Ricoeurs hermeneutics and
Bourdieus analysis of the dynamics of power in cultural elds, providing the
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basis for a sociology which deals adequately rather than partially with
culture, and takes seriously the question of how cultural texts are instan-
tiated in practice. Whether this complex model of cultural performance is
likely to be widely adopted, however, is another question. Life is short and
so are research funds. It could be argued that the limitations that Alexander
identies in much cultural sociology are as much institutional as intellec-
tual. The real conditions of academic work and legitimation procedures
create a demand for swift outcomes, and, unlike vague gestures toward
agency, systematic accounts of how particular cultural texts are made to
walk and talk take time. This could explain why they are so thin on the
ground. Alexanders essay on cultural pragmatics is certainly a virtuoso
performance in cultural theory, but it requires an Alexandrian equivalent
of the Birmingham School multiple research teams and projects to put
it into practice. Alexanders establishment of The Centre for Cultural Soci-
ology at Yale thus assumes importance as part of a strategy of institution
building essential if cultural sociology is to move from margin to main-
stream.
Theoretically, Alexander uses his model to replot the trajectory of mod-
ernity in cultural terms, replacing the familiar tropes of structural differenti-
ation and division of labour with relations of cultural performance. Dening
cultural performance as the social process by which actors, individually or
in concert, display for others the meaning of their social situation, he outlines
broad historical shifts in the conditions for plausible performance, gener-
ating ideal types based on the relations between actors, audience and cultural
texts.
2
Elaborating these ideal types through the history of performance from
sacred ritual to social drama via post-ritual cultural performance and
theatre, Alexander avoids reducing history to binary oppositions which elide
the complexity and unevenness of historical change and equate modernity
with loss of meaning. He characterizes simpler societies in terms of the
fusion of relations of cultural performance; actors and audience share the
culture-structure or semiotic text implied by performance, which audiences
understand and experience as real or authentic. In the process of social
development, the elements that compose social performance become
increasingly defused differentiation at the level of culture as well as
structure which makes successful performance at the societal level less
likely, but not impossible. Alexander nominates the project of refusion as
the central challenge for contemporary social action. Understanding the con-
ditions under which refusion of the elements of social performance can
occur is therefore a central task of cultural sociology.
It is on this point that Alexander distances himself from old-fashioned
Durkheimians and their critics. He rejects the assumption that secularization
means loss of cultural meaning, and argues that while cultural life has
radically shifted, both internally and in its relation to action and social
structure, culture can still be powerfully meaningful. The task of cultural
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sociology is thus to understand how culture can be meaningful, but may not
be:
Life is different, but not completely so. Rather than sweeping allegorical theory,
we need allegorical deconstruction and analytical precision. We need to break
the whole of symbolic action down into its component parts. Once we do so,
we will see that cultural performance covers the same ground that it always
has, but in a radically different way. (Alexander, 2002: 9)
Alexander urges us to abandon nostalgia for an earlier, more simple,
and more cohesive age a nostalgia not conned to political conservatives,
but evident in the arguments of left cultural critics that capitalism or indus-
trial society or mass society or post-modernity has destroyed the very possi-
bility for meaning. He also rejects the notion that reality and authenticity
are necessarily tied to performance in the present, and that all reproduction
is therefore articial. He argues:
Narrated as disenchantment, history becomes moralized as the fall from Eden,
as declension from a once golden age of wholeness and holiness. Once represen-
tation is encased inside of such a framework, it must inevitably come to be seen
as articial. Whether modernity is viewed as substantively or only formally
rational, it becomes mechanical and un-meaningful. (Alexander, 2002: 6)
One point on which I would take issue with Alexander relates to his
representation of Walter Benjamins essay The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction as the classical theoretical statement of this
allegory of disenchantment. Certainly the passage on auratic art supports
such a reading if extracted from the essay as a whole, but not when read as
a dialectical argument in which the destruction of auratic art is also the
emergence of democratic art forms. That Benjamins writing is not only
dialectical but also fragmentary allows for multiple interpretations, and he
can be classied as either a theorist of disenchantment or enchantment
according to which passages one selects. The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction, however, is not ambiguous in this regard. I read
the essay not as a nostalgic lament for the past its hard to see a statement
like for the rst time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates
the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual (Benjamin, 1973:
226) as nostalgic but as a dialectical account of shifts in the conditions of
artistic production and reception. More to the point, Benjamin is concerned
with the contemporary conditions of refusion a project not dissimilar from
Alexanders own, albeit framed by a different agenda. Benjamin (1973: 236)
writes, for example:
Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art.
The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progres-
sive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is character-
ized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the
orientation of the expert. Such fusion is of great social signicance.
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Unlike painting, Benjamin argues, lm like architecture and epic
poetry presents an object for simultaneous collective experience a collec-
tive experience which has the potential for a deepening of apperception.
The camera, he writes, introduces us to unconscious optics as does psycho-
analysis to unconscious impulses (1973: 239).
By close-ups of things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar
objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of
the camera, the lm, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the
necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of
an immense and unexpected eld of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan
streets, our ofces and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories
appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came lm and burst this
prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now,
in the midst of its far-ung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go
travelling. (1973: 238)
This is hardly the language of disenchantment. Benjamin would likely
agree with Alexander (2002: 39) when he says that without refusion, social
life would not be possible, and argues that not only repressive but liberat-
ing social values are communicated through cultural performances that are
successfully fused. This, indeed, was Benjamins concern in relation to the
fascist aestheticization of politics, and his essay can be read as an argument
for seizing the refusionary power of lm for liberatory rather than fascist
political ends. Given that he is on record as saying that he who cannot take
sides should remain silent, Benjamin would be unlikely to endorse
Alexanders view that the sociological approach to performance remains
agnostic vis--vis the moral qualities of symbolic action, but he would likely
concur on the importance of recognizing the specicity of post-traditional
societies in theorizing the possibility for what Alexander calls the refusion
that sustains myth.
II
The question of whether sociology deals adequately (or at all) with
culture is usually posed from outside the discipline. It comes into play, for
example, in the legitimation of Cultural Studies as the proper domain of
literary scholars, with memory of shared lineage in the Birmingham School
erased as the new discipline moves into English departments. Anthropolo-
gists engaged in urban ethnography are similarly inclined to construct soci-
ology as cultures other a discipline so preoccupied with theoretical
abstraction, multivariate analysis and social welfare policy that the space of
culture is a neglected eld in need of disciplinary attention. With the
categories of modernity and industrialization no longer viable boundary
markers, the distinction between the disciplines comes to be reinscribed in
terms of culture and social structure. In this context, Jeffrey Alexanders
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argument for what he calls the strong program in cultural sociology might
be read as a strategic move in the struggle for disciplinary legitimacy on what
has become rather crowded academic terrain. In the context of American
sociology, however, Alexanders advocacy of the strong program is better
read as a critical intervention within the discipline, which he, too, regards
as a culture-free zone in need of major renovation.
Alexanders view of both the discipline and his own work cannot be
divorced from his location in the American mainstream sociology dened
by the American Sociological Association. Some might consider the ASA view
ethnocentric. Read from less boundary-obsessed territory, it is hard to see
his position as in any way controversial; yes, human action is meaningful
action and culture is more than epiphenomenal. Much of what he has to say
about the relation between culture, meaning and action seems uncontentious
to anyone familiar with the cultural turn. With words like discourse, imagin-
ary, language, mapping, narrative, representation and signication among
the most over-used in the social-theoretical lexicon, why does Alexander
sound so embattled?
An incident recounted in the Introduction to The Meanings of Social
Life locates the origins of this sense of paradigmatic struggle in the middle
of the 1980s a tenure decision in which the question Who is a sociolo-
gist? had extra-textual consequences. He writes:
An assistant professor was struggling for tenure, and the faculty were lining up
pro and con. Those sceptical of the appointment objected that the candidates
work could not even be called sociology. Why not, I asked? He was not socio-
logical, they answered: He paid more attention to the subjective framing and
interpreting of social structures than to the nature of those social structures
themselves. Because he had abandoned social-structural causality, he had given
up on explanation, and thus on sociology itself. (Alexander, 2003: 4)
Alexanders suggestion that work focused on the subjective framing
and interpreting of social structures might be seen as cultural sociology
rather than not sociology was greeted with laughter by colleagues to whom
the idea was oxymoronic not only deeply offensive to their disciplinary
sense but intellectually absurd (Alexander, 2003: 4). One explanation for
Alexanders missionary tone might be the continuing resonance of such
disputes the presence of disparaging colleagues in his imagined audience
even after their arguments have been rendered irrelevant by the legitimacy
accorded his work.
Heated debate about whether or not someone is really a sociologist
is one of sociologys dening rituals. The sociological tradition can be rep-
resented as broad or narrow, and how disciplinary boundaries are consti-
tuted is never a neutral question in relation to career paths and resources.
The intense legitimation struggles for which the academy is notorious
become even more intense where disciplinary boundaries and paradigms are
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contested rather than secure, for as Bourdieu (1988: 269) observed in Homo
Academicus, the fact that hierarchies are not strongly codied or objectied
in norms or in forms makes for insecurity, which tends to confer a particu-
lar violence on the symbolic struggle of each against all. Disproportionate
combativeness is the predictable legacy. Adorno (2000: 7) thought it an
inevitable consequence of sociologys disparate philosophical and empirical
origins:
. . . sociology itself, as it exists today, is an agglomerate of disciplines which
rst came into existence in a quite unconnected and mutually independent
way. And I believe that many of the seemingly almost irreconcilable conicts
between schools of sociology arise in the rst place although I am aware
that deeper issues are also involved from the simple fact that all kinds of
things which initially had nothing to do with each other have been brought
together under the common heading of sociology.
Sociology is also given to recurring bouts of recovery masquerading as
invention. Because the object of study is less amenable to the discovery of
new knowledge than in the natural sciences, paradigm shift is often as much
renovation and recycling as new directions. The sociological tradition is
much broader than suggested in representations that take particular theoreti-
cal and methodological hegemonies as denitive and general rather than
historically specic and partial. Take, for example, the standard post-modern
critique which proceeds from the assumption that sociology equates society
with the nation state not in fact an assumption shared by anyone who
came into the discipline via symbolic interactionism, Simmel or even Weber,
for whom the nation state is a particular social form rather than the deni-
tive object of sociological study. There is an important distinction to be made
between sociology as a broad disciplinary tradition and sociology as dened
by the work of currently inuential gatekeepers, and in that sense, the model
of cultural performance elaborated in Alexanders cultural pragmatics essay
is as much the reclamation of a submerged tradition of dramaturgical analysis
within sociology as appropriation of a new interdisciplinary eld. The fact
that the ideas have had more recent currency in performance theory than in
sociology does not negate their sociological provenance.
This is not to detract from the importance of Alexanders work. Without
such interventions, sociology runs the risk of becoming as boring as its
external critics and internal boundary police would have it. Nor is it to
question his argument that sociology needs to move beyond meta-theoreti-
cal abstraction about structure and agency to the development of system-
atic mediating concepts in a theoretical model of cultural practice. It is rather
to suggest that such a model might have been constructed from within soci-
ology, and to raise the question of why so much of the symbolic interactionist
work potentially relevant to the task has either disappeared from view or
been sequestered in substantive areas like social psychology or deviance
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of little interest to the scholars whose activities constitute the eld of socio-
logical theory.
We do not need to go to performance studies to access Kenneth Burke,
whose theory of dramatism was central not just to the work of Erving
Goffman, but also to that of the less well-known Hugh Dalziel Duncan. Iron-
ically, Duncans Symbols in Society, published in 1968, appears to have been
motivated by an impatience with sociologys neglect of the symbolic that
mirrors Alexanders, and his critique of American sociology is similar in sub-
stance, if not in style. Like Alexander some 35 years later, he introduces his
argument with a lament for sociologys failure to take account of the ways
in which culture shapes the social:
We hear everywhere in the social sciences that the relatedness of men in society
is determined by economics, politics, sex, technology, urbanization, or religion.
Little is said about how symbolic forms shape our social life. (Duncan, 1968:
3)
So too Duncan presumes a sociological audience that needs to be per-
suaded of the distinction between the symbolic and the subjective, and that
symbols are an appropriate object of sociological inquiry. A symbol such as
a proverb, he observes, is hardly private and subjective (Duncan, 1968: 4).
He also points to the gap in explanation glossed by theoretical language that
gestures towards process, but does nothing to advance our understanding of
how it works. In American social thought, he argues, acts are integrated,
their patterns maintained, or their structure organized, but when we
examine closely how this organization occurs we soon discover that inte-
gration is being assumed, not demonstrated (1968: 4). Like Alexander, he
sees the distinction between action and meaning (pragmatics and semantics)
as analytic rather than concrete, arguing that we cannot intend to enact a
role which does not already exist in the kinds of symbolic personication
common to all forms of communication (1968: 6).
My point in situating Alexanders work in relation to overlooked socio-
logical forebears is not to suggest that there is nothing new in his cultural
pragmatics project, but rather to highlight the extent to which cultural
analysis has indeed been marginalized in American sociology. The fate of
Duncans work suggests that Alexander is right to feel embattled; had the
project enunciated in Symbols in Society been given currency in the socio-
logical mainstream, Alexander would have been building on a substantial
body of work in cultural sociology, rather than working to establish its legit-
imacy as a eld. Certainly that was Duncans (1968: 3) ambition when he
wrote the Preface of Symbols in Society:
There is no need for the modern sociologist to start from scratch in the study
of symbolic interaction, or to confuse ignorance of the eld with its non-
existence, but it is true that the observations on symbolic interpretations which
exist in classic sociological theory have not been the subject of much study in
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America. . . . I hope that my analyses of what has been said in social science
about the social interpretation of symbols will do something to create a
benchmark in sociological communication theory. This is badly needed. Too
many of us are repeating each other (and ourselves), just as too many symbol-
ists are discussing communication in society as if there were no tradition at all.
Duncans prediction that the series of propositions offered here [would]
be subject to much renement as they are used by others lends poignancy
to the fact that dramaturgical theory has made its way into Alexanders socio-
logical project via performance studies. If, as Alexander (2002: 1) puts it, the
specically cultural dimension of Goffman made hardly any dent upon the
sociological discipline as it has developed since, at least his work is well
known; Duncans appears to have sunk without trace.
That Duncans mission was remarkably similar to Alexanders is
revealed in a letter he wrote to Kenneth Burke in May 1958, urging him to
come to Chicago for a seminar. Duncan indicated that Burke was popular
with the postgraduate students, and asked for his help to defend against the
rugged empiricist tradition of the University of California. It needed the
hand of the master, he said, to make a systematic statement of the social
and how it can be thought of, in symbolic analysis (Duncan, 1958). Burke
later received and accepted a formal invitation from the Chair of the Depart-
ment, but subsequently bailed out, with profuse apologies to his friend. It is
of course impossible to know whether his direct intervention might have
been instrumental in mobilizing support for Duncans symbolic project, but
the episode offers the tantalizing possibility that things might have been
otherwise. How different the conditions for Alexanders project of cultural
sociology and for the emergence of cultural studies if the tradition of
symbolic analysis and dramaturgy that Duncan had hoped to establish in
American sociology had been legitimized at the centre of American sociology
rather than being consigned to the margins.
Beryl Langer is in Sociology and Anthropology at La Trobe University. Current
research is on the culture of consumer capitalism. Her most recent publication is
Ambivalence and Disjuncture in the Global Childrens Market: The Risky Business of
Branded Enchantment, The Journal of Consumer Culture 4(2) (July 2004). [email:
b.langer@latrobe.edu.au]
Notes
1. This discussion is based on an unpublished version of Cultural Pragmatics: A
New Model of Social Performance, dated 16 April 2002. All page references
relate to a (single-spaced) copy downloaded from a le sent by Jeffrey
Alexander to the Thesis Eleven Centre prior to his visit to La Trobe University
in July 2002. A version of the paper dated July 2003 can be accessed as a
Working Paper from The Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University.
[http://research.yale.edu/ccs/papers.html]
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2. There are parallels between Alexanders use of the historical transition from
ritual to theatre to demonstrate the defusion of shared meaning between actors
and audience and Duncans use of the relation between artist, critic and public,
particularly in relation to their conceptualization of early human societies.
Alexander argues that cultural performance assumed ritual form in simple and
fused social structures and symbolic universes, in which the collective
representations to which such rituals refer are not texts composed by specialists
in an obscure or privileged corner of some complex, contentious and often
inattentive public. Duncan (1957: 491) also focused on shared meaning in his
typology of forms of interaction of artist, critic and public:
Wherever art is produced in small, intimate groups, the purposes for which
art is being used are understood by everyone present. Speaker and hearer
in the drama know each others reactions almost immediately through
reciprocal responses that are clearly understood by everyone because they
are using symbols learned in common and upon which they place a
common value.
References
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Benjamin, Walter (1973/1936) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc-
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Bourdieu, Pierre (1988) Homo Academicus, trans. Peter Collier. Cambridge: Polity
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Duncan, Hugh Dalziel (1957) Sociology of Art, Literature and Music: Social Contexts
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