Abstract
The “strong program” that Jeffrey Alexander promoted has long become mainstream. The idea that culture—as the study of meaning—is causally important is now part of our disciplinary common sense. But then, how do we analyze and conceive of meaning-making? Here, a thousand flowers bloom, most of them blithely ignoring each other. And while Alexander and his students made important contributions with their work on binary semiotic codes, this was only a first step in Alexander’s stream of research.
The Drama of Social Life represents a second move in Alexander’s work, a performative-dramaturgical turn. Thus, from the early 2000s, Alexander has increasingly emphasized that the binary codes he earlier wrote of need to be enacted and put in narrative motion; and, moreover, that the narrative and dramaturgical structure of such enactments is where the sociological action is. In that way, Alexander is fashioning a dramaturgical approach that seems to be quite distinct from Victor Turner’s or Erving Goffman’s—one where the exercise and performance of shared meaning is paramount, where Durkheimian moments of solidarity and emotion become potent not through interaction rituals, but through the meaningful fusion of text, actors, and audiences.
The book exemplifies this approach. It is itself a performance. Bookended by two theoretical chapters, it provides case studies of this dramaturgical-cultural analysis, from political mobilization to the power of intellectuals. To set the stage, Alexander begins by tying his dramaturgical approach to a more general performative conceptualization of culture through what he terms the problem of defusion and refusion of cultural performance. Whereas performances in less differentiated societies were “fused”—as ritual was enacted as an ongoing part of social life and spoke to the experiences of the group in a more or less unproblematic fashion—the increase of social differentiation became also a moment of performative defusion between audiences, texts, and actors. From this perspective, what we think of as heightened moments of dramatic performances are always-temporary “refusions” of texts, actors, and audiences, forming a powerful nexus of mobilization and emotion.
The Drama mostly follows successful moments of modern performative refusion. From the Black Lives Matter movement through the Arab Spring, Mao’s ability to mobilize the Chinese peasantry, Obama’s presidential debate with Romney, or Frantz Fanon’s writing, Alexander’s chapters constantly reiterate the importance of actual dramatic performance for political mobilization and solidarity.
But while the project is thus important, and the writing is superb throughout, making for an enjoyable read, the book also made this reader, at least, wonder about the theoretical distance the author still needs to cover in order to make good on his theoretical project. Time and again, I tried and failed to recreate his argument and to understand how a reader could use this work as a model that would allow her to recreate this kind of cultural sociology. Performance is important, but to which parts of the performance should I pay attention? What aspects of the structure of performance explain its power? Along which dimensions do they vary?
As a way to understand this difficulty, it is useful to compare the approach to that of sociology’s other dramaturgist, Goffman. Like Alexander, Goffman was undoubtedly a brilliant observer of human life. But Goffman, often rather pedantically, parceled out the different ways in which performances can be understood. His work is strewn with technical language: “line,” “face-work,” “role distance,” the “interaction membrane,” “civil inattention,” “keying,” “footing,” and so on. While Goffman’s analyses of specific instances are compelling, an important part of what makes his dramaturgy tick is the transposability of both its sociological sensibility and its technical language. Indeed, the transposability of Goffman’s sociological sensibility is possible precisely through its technical language.
Alexander spends less time doing so. While at the background of this book is an excellent programmatic article on “Cultural Pragmatics” (Alexander 2004), where he laid out his vision for such an approach and began spelling out the relationship between the elements, such a background is largely implicit. There are moments in which something like such an analytic apparatus is hinted at: There is a discussion of narrative drama, of the sharpening of semiotic codes, of Weberian “carrier groups,” of the “truthfulness” and “authenticity” of actors, and especially an emphasis on “scripts.” But none of these terms receive focused elaboration, and Alexander does not provide a sustained analytic framework in which these different elements cohere. And without such an analytic framework, we are left with a work of sociological art that is very hard to transpose.
This also shades into the empirical, where The Drama is uneven. The treatments of Obama and Biden in Chapter Three, of Martin Luther King in Chapter One, and of Ayn Rand and Fanon in Chapter Four are all extremely compelling; the treatment of the Arab Spring in the book’s lengthiest chapter is less convincing. Perhaps not surprisingly for a cultural analyst, the closer Alexander is to his intellectual “home” the more captivating and original the account. Alexander’s analysis of the shifting of temporality in the 2012 presidential debate opens up aspects of the political that I never thought of before, both in terms of the performance of authenticity and in terms of its temporality. In the analysis of Mao’s revolution or the Arab Spring, however, the text seemed to largely follow secondary texts and newspaper accounts, telling us that performances matter but not quite showing how we would understand these moments differently now that we know that they do.
This is, partly, a matter of intellectual taste. In a work of sociology, I want to see the machinery of analysis, rather than sitting back and enjoying the show. But I believe there is an additional reason why we need such theoretical elaboration. Without it, the specter of circularity floats above the analysis. Obama won the presidency since he was dramatically powerful, yet we know that he was dramatically powerful precisely because he won. The Egyptian revolution seemed to temporarily succeed since it created a dramatically compelling narrative, but we know it was compelling since it brought people into Tahrir square.
Now, in such a cultural analysis, some modicum of circularity is unavoidable, even healthy. Since an important aspect of any performance is its reception by audiences, the success of a performance and its cultural power are always intertwined; since a performance is always interactional, the reaction is part of what defines it. As Alexander (2004:530) put it, “it is at this conjuncture that cultural pragmatics is born.” Yet this is not an answer to the problem, as much as it points to the analytical challenge at hand. The challenge facing Alexander is thus in fleshing out the constitutive parts of his sociological project. Without further elaborating the apparatus he has begun to develop in earlier work, we are left with brilliant expositions of a theory we do not quite grasp.