Audience Agency in Social Performance

The Audience in Cultural Pragmatics

The cultural pragmatics tradition is a strand of the performative turn in sociology (Alexander and Smith, 2018; Butler, 1990; Collins, 2004; Durkheim, 1995; Goffman, 1959; Wagner-Pacifici, 1986; Weber, 2009) and incorporates influences from cultural anthropology (Asad, 1993; Geertz, 1973; Turner, 1982; Turner and Turner, 1978), linguistics ( Austin, 1975; Burke, 1954; Saussure, 1990), and theater studies (Schechner, 2003). This model argues that solidarity can be analyzed with a six-part framework of necessary-but-not-sufficient elements that integrate meaning and pragmatic action, and together provide a causal model. These six elements are: systems of collective representations, actors, audiences, means of symbolic production, mise-en-scène, and social power. Since Alexander (2004: 529) first offered this ‘systematic, macro-sociological model of social action as cultural performance,’ scholars have offered refinements, including work on music (McCormick, 2006, 2015), populism (Gauna, 2016; Karakaya, 2018), social movements (Eyerman, 2006; Morgan, 2018; Morgan and Baert, 2017), the 2016 election (Mast, 2017), political apology (Saito, 2016), power (Reed, 2020), and the COVID-19 pandemic (Villegas, 2020).

The goal of social performance – fusion – is to choreograph a production, and wield social power and symbolic means, to eliminate all distance between actor and the collective representations they perform. And who arbitrates whether or not this is achieved? The audience. When he introduced this theory, Alexander (2004: 531) explained that audiences’ relationship to actors ‘depends on cathexis’ and the actor’s ‘ability to project these emotions and textual patterns as moral evaluations’. Audiences then ‘decode what actors have encoded (Hall, 1980), but they do so in variable ways’ (Alexander, 2004: 531). Audiences filter the performance through the lens of their own unique boundaries of identity; they choose to engage and clap, reject and jeer, or be distracted (Alexander, 2011; Morley, 1980). Fusion can take many forms; even when audiences choose to connect, they can do so without attributing any moral qualities to the cultural text (e.g. we follow bureaucratic rules at the Department of Motor Vehicles, or National Health Service, but we’re usually disgruntled about it). And even when performances are sophisticated, with all the trappings of celebrity or power, audiences still may not be persuaded. De-fusion is the typical result in our highly differentiated society.

In expansions of this initial rendering of the audience (Alexander, 2006a, 2006b, 2010, 2011, 2017), Alexander (2006a: 58) explains that ‘actors and audiences actively engage in drawing the hermeneutic circle’, noting that ‘audience interpretation is a process, not an automatic result,’ and that audiences interpret comparatively (Alexander, 2006a: 76) and attribute felicity or authenticity when a performance is successful (Alexander, 2017: 13). He also clarifies that it is because of the audience fusing that a cultural script seems to ‘ring true’ (Alexander, 2011: 58). Even with this expansion, though, the audience does not receive as much attention as the actor. Though he provides a description of the audience’s agency, Alexander does not dive deep into a theoretical method for how to account for audience variability. There are a few exceptions to this critique where Alexander and other cultural pragmatics practitioners go beyond simplistic abstractions of the audience, including Alexander’s (2006b: 102-104) discussion of the 11 September attacks in which he reviews differing audience interpretations, his review of the audience in modern theater (Alexander, 2011: 74-77, 2017: 131-134), and McCormick’s (2015: 204-243) lengthy discussion of an audience versus a public (in the Habermasian sense) in classical music competitions. However, most cultural pragmatics analyses tend to describe audiences superficially (Alexander, 2017: 57) and remain focused on the actor(s), like Barack Obama and John McCain (Alexander, 2010), Nathaniel Bacon (Reed, 2013), Bill Clinton (Mast, 2013), or Ohio Governor DeWine (Villegas, 2020).

As cultural pragmatics is meant to account for differentiation and increased agency in ritual-like social action, it stands to reason that the audience’s differing agency and interpretation should be theorized and analyzed as much as the actor. The actor’s ability to transmute the collective representation into an authentic performance depends as much on the audience’s interpretations as the actor’s actions. Importantly, cultural pragmatics already holds the capacity to accomplish this, and work to date has laid a foundation for understanding the audience’s interpretive power. Expanding theorization of the audience is thus not a radical revision but a positive contribution to the model. As Mast (2013: 15) writes, ‘cultural pragmatics conceives of audiences as – to a greater but qualified degree – more interpretive, critical, and agentic than the ritual framework’s theorized audiences.’ This article seeks to catalyze this analytic capacity.

Other scholars have noted the under-theorization of the audience, as well. For instance, in her study of classical music competitions, McCormick (2015: 236) explains that ‘audiences are usually conceived of as aggregates of individuals whose associations consist of the mere coincidence of taking in a performance.’ Similarly, Braunstein also notes the under-theorization of the audience as a gap she had to navigate in her study of Tea Party activists:

Theories of social performance offer a framework for understanding . . . by conceptualizing mass demonstrations as collective self-representations staged for a variety of audiences . . . Yet most existing analyses of political action using the performance framework privilege questions of audience reception with little attention to how audience reactions influence the performers themselves. (Braunstein, 2015: 356, emphasis added)

To get around this, Braunstein synthesized cultural pragmatics with symbolic interactionist theory, specifically Cooley (1902) and Goffman’s (1959) theories of the self, as well as Collins (2004) and work on emotion to parse out how groups translate resonant cultural scripts into performances that keep varying audiences and reception outcomes in mind. Though it is a creative solution, I will demonstrate with the concept of audiences performing fusion that it isn’t necessary to leave the realm of cultural pragmatics theory, and its six-element model, to account for audience agency. All that is needed is an expanded understanding of, and method to analyze, the audience.

Morgan and Baert (2017) similarly argue for operationalizing the audience in their analysis of performative citizenship in the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM). Since apartheid in South Africa restricted citizenship status through legal and institutional means, anti-apartheid activists like Steve Biko (2017: 457). strategically engaged in a symbolic fight through performances of counter-power Morgan and Baert (2017: 463) point out that, by focusing only on dominant power, and when only choosing cases of written or spoken forms of political expression, researchers miss other substantive claims-making activities, like embodied performativity, artistic performance, performative self-sufficiency, and performative polarization. They also cite Blee and McDowell’s (2012) call for further research into audience reception in social movements. ² The theoretical contribution offered in this article meets these appeals, as well as Morgan and Baert’s (2017) call to look beyond speeches and written manifestos for other types of performing.

The audience gap in cultural pragmatics is also resonant in Isaac Reed’s (2013) theory of charismatic performance. Via a historical sociological analysis of Bacon’s Rebellion in colonial America, Reed synthesizes the cultural pragmatics approach with Weber’s theory of charismatic authority, arguing that it isn’t leaders we should be indexing as units of analysis, but specific charismatic performances. Reed defines charismatic performance as a series of interactions between a leader and devoted followers where success is based not on their former authority but on the interpretive resonance between leader and followers within the performance itself. This is a key contribution to cultural pragmatics. Audience in charismatic performance – or the ‘charismatic community’ – is composed of both followers and the larger population that is aware of the performance but has not yet devoted themselves to it. Affect builds excitement amongst followers, whose interpretations center on the actor’s ‘body, action, and speech,’ and when the leader senses the possibility of success, the back-and-forth, dialectical resonance between them heightens energy in a spiraling motion, which Reed (2013: 266). calls a ‘spiral of success’ (See Figure 1). ³ This synthesis methodically explicates the structures of meaning that underpin interaction between leaders and followers, which Collins (2004) calls ‘emotional energy.’

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Figure 1.

Peer Reed’s (2013) theory, ‘Spirals of success’.

However, the spiral of success Reed theorizes is unfinished, as it emphasizes the actor and does not sufficiently theorize the audience. His empirical analysis of Bacon’s Rebellion focuses exclusively on Daniel Bacon, and he speaks of Bacon’s followers in general terms, passively referring to them as ‘the local gentry,’ ‘a band of small farmers,’ ‘other aristocrats who would become his lieutenants,’ or simply ‘his men’ (Reed, 2013: 268-269). This analytical focus is in part, and understandably so, a result of the fact that archives privilege leaders (Trouillot, 1995). Nevertheless, the beliefs of followers, and their actions based on these interpretations, are necessary to understanding Bacon’s charismatic rise.

Fusion’s outcome resides in the audience’s arbitration of the performance. In the spiral of success, the audience faces the actor, and the actor faces the audience, with the meaningful text between them. The actor is emboldened only when they sense that the audience is arbitrating their performance as a success. Thus, any effective analysis of the dialogic bonds that generate spirals of success must be just as focused on audiences as they are on actors. However, up until this point, cultural pragmatics studies have only elucidated the actor’s side of the spiral, and have treated the audience’s arcs as ‘givens’ (see Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Vague understanding of the audience's contribution to ‘Spirals of success’.

Thus, to move this analytic strategy forward, we must shift our methodological and empirical gaze towards the audience. To do so, I propose a theoretical intervention with the concept of audience performances of fusion, and the analytic tool arcs of fusion.

Audience Agency in Sanders’ Performative Rise

Bernie Sanders’ success as an actor can, in part, be explained by the fact that populism as a collective representation is on the rise in the USA. In the 14 years since the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis, populist rhetoric has washed over American politics and has been pragmatically put to use as a script by the political left and right in varying forms (Alexander et al., 2021). Sanders, during the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, and throughout his 40 years in political office, has preached a script of left populism that criticizes the influence of ‘millionaires and billionaires’ in government as a systematic and perpetual injury against ‘working-’ and ‘middle-class’ Americans (Sanders, 2010, 2016, 2017; Sanders and Gutman, 1997, 2015). ⁴

This cultural pragmatics illustration of Sanders’ political rise begins with his 2010 eight-and-a-half-hour filibuster speech on the floor of the United States Senate. Sanders’ speech leveraged the left populist script and scorned proposed legislation to extend Bush era tax cuts. The speech rested on a foundation of collectively held representations that had been discursively and materially built in the years prior: after the 2007 market crash, the lauded symbol of ‘laissez-faire’ was replaced with ‘too big to fail’ language by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson as big banks like Bear Stearns hung in the balance. Paulson and others shifted neoliberal narratives of an empowered free market to that of a victim, and suggested the government be the rescuer.

In the speech, Sanders rejected the proposal and placed the ‘middle-class,’ a sacred American signifier, in opposition to the ‘ultra-rich.’ He painted a picture of civil citizens who are productive, empathetic, and righteously angry. These citizens are also future-focused, especially as it relates to children, another sacred symbol (Zelizer, 1985). In contrast, he characterized the ultra-rich as profane, apathetic, and greedy, and who operate by a short-term vision. With examples like budget surpluses, a robust Social Security program, active labor unions, campaign finance reform, and energy independence, Sanders illustrated his vision for a civil American society with a distinctive script of ‘we-ness.’ This is well characterized in his 2020 presidential campaign slogan, ‘Not Me. Us.’

As a male, college educated, white American senator, the boundaries of social power particular to Sanders were broad and the means of symbolic production available to him were vast; he had the floor of the United States Senate and a live C-SPAN feed. The mise-en-scène of the speech was without fanfare, which is characteristic of Sanders’ political style. He speaks slowly and directly with a heavy Brooklyn accent that many interpret as authentic to a hardworking American, and purposefully separated himself from the symbolic pollution of the populist imagination: the Ivy League-educated, white collar, wealthy members of Congress. He does not affiliate with the Democratic party (except when running for president), he is an Independent. At that time, he traveled coach on commercial airlines (Krieg, 2015).

Sanders’ performance should be considered a failure – his Senate audience did not fuse with his performance of the cultural text, and voted to pass the tax bill 81-19 (Detrow, 2019). But it would be a mistake to stop there. Just a few hours into Sanders’ speech, calls from Sanders’ citizen audience started pouring in. Each of these calls can be considered a powerful performative contribution by audience members that worked to catalyze a spiral of success. Additionally, the speech was published into a book that audiences made a bestseller, which raised Sanders’ name recognition. Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign manager, said that the speech ‘brought Bernie Sanders to the notice of millions of Americans who didn’t know who he was, and . . . laid a lot of the groundwork for the success that he would see in the 2015–2016 election cycle’ (Detrow, 2019). Variability in audience engagement with the speech – both de-fusion and fusion – determined the fuel behind Sanders’ performative rise.

All performative outcomes are forged in the audience’s response – in their applause, boos, laughter, or tears. Their reaction constitutes fusion. Without their willingness to connect or ‘vibrate in tune’ (States, 1985, cited in Alexander, 2017: 133), the joke doesn’t land. Demands are not met. The collection plate comes back empty. Nothing is assured until the audience acts. And when they do finally act, they become active performers themselves. They perform fusion, or de-fusion, in both immediate and extended ways, and are the sole arbiters of performative success. We must analyze their performances as we would actors while also noting variability. ⁵

To represent this variation, I introduce the concept of arcs of fusion (Figure 3). Each arc serves as a conceptual tool to elucidate the audience’s side of the spiral of success. Though I speak in the singular by using ‘audience’ as a term implying a collective, each collective is made up of individuals who come to the performance with their own experiences and intersectional identities (McCall, 2005). This complicates our understandings of fusion. It is not as simple as equating fusion to applause or a majority of votes tallied. Rather, there are as many types of fusion and de-fusion as there are people in the audience.

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Figure 3.

Analyzing arcs of fusion in the spiral of success.

Arcs represent different trajectories of audience-generated power across time and space. For both actor and audience, the origin of each arc on either side of the spiral is the nexus of the collective representation and the interpreted performance of it. Variability in trajectories is dependent on the power of the collective representation, but also the contingency of the audience’s reflexive interaction with the other elements. This accounts for divergent arcs in the spiral of performative success and determines whether or not arcs align with one another. For every instantiation by an audience member, versions of power constituted by the collective representations they fuse with are produced (Asad, 1993; Morley, 1980). The heights of power and the direction of each arc depend on the time engaged in fusion and the space this engagement occurred. When case studies are bound and studied with a bottom-up approach, we can trace how arcs move. ⁶ Arcs of fusion help to analytically untangle different types of audience agency and action, and how they differ from that of the actor, and I illustrate this distinction with two ideal typical arcs in the next two sections.

It is important to note that because meaning is highly differentiated, fusion is extremely difficult to achieve and de-fusion is the typical result of social performance. Conceptually this means that we could also study arcs of de-fusion. ⁷ However, I term the concept ‘arcs of fusion’ because previous focus on lead actors and large-scale events have obfuscated the small but still significant acts of fusion that comprise performative success. This means that fusion, despite the difficulty in achieving it, is more prevalent than previously accounted for, and arcs of fusion provide a means to illuminate their force. In this way, arcs of fusion as a concept is not only a theoretical expansion but also a methodological tool for study. In studying audiences to illuminate fusion (or de-fusion), we leverage the model’s synthesis of culture and pragmatics to parse apart their interactions and meaningful engagement with each other and the actor.

The process of audience performances of fusion or de-fusion begins in the space between the initial encounter (T₁) and their choice to fuse or de-fuse (T₂). At T₁, the audience encounters an interpretive script, which is based on a collective representation, and is performed by an actor. This could be the first time a person witnesses someone like Sanders speak on the news or on a YouTube ad about his vision for America. At T₂, the audience decides, through both emotional and cognitive connection, if the script resonates with the collective representations they subscribe to. They will arbitrate the performance’s success, and perform fusion or de-fusion. Because it is so difficult to achieve fusion in our complex society, the space between T₁ and T₂ is usually negligible because de-fusion is the typical result.

The arbitration of fusion that takes place in the space between T₁ and T₂ can also be the product of several encounters with the performer. Sanders might show up on news clips repeatedly, or in digital ads, only to result in repeated cases of de-fusion with the electorate. But as the performances and audience arbitration add up, de-fusion can shift into fusion. People who once thought he was not a viable candidate might be swayed to change their minds if they hear he is raising more money than the other candidates, for instance, or is polling better. In analyses of audience performances of fusion, the space between T₁ and T₂ varies.

An audience arc of fusion launches upwards, and joins the larger spiral of success, the moment fusion occurs. It is the moment of conversion when the actor fused completely with the collective representation – like democratic vision, or the American dream – in the eyes of the audience member. The audience member will perform their fusion in an immediate way, by cheering at a rally or choosing to donate money to the campaign, and this performance is bound by the same elements as the actor. It is choreographed – consciously or subconsciously, as the person aligns themselves to the normative order of their society – and is bound by their means to symbolic production and the social power constraining them. Stuart Hall (1980: 131) calls this interpretive process ‘encoding/decoding,’ and says that the meaning structures on each side of this performative process – actor and audience – are not always symmetrical; therefore ‘“misunderstandings” arise from . . . the lack of equivalence between the two sides in the communicative exchange’. Thus, fusion can be considered an alignment or a symmetry in meaning, and de-fusion as a result of an incoherence or disagreement.

The shape and trajectory of audience arcs depends on their extended performances of fusion (when T₃ begins). Arcs of fusion do not require direct and/or one-on-one interaction with the leader. ⁸ Extended performances of fusion occur when the audience reflexively integrates the cultural script into their lives. This integration can be as small an effort as posting to Instagram about their experience, or as large as leading a movement of their own, with all sorts of instantiations in-between. Again, with an eye to variability, these extended performances of fusion are not simple reproductions of the original performance but are rather translations (Rancière, 2009: 22, 13, cited in Heim, 2016a: 41).

Performances of fusion both widen the spiral of success and drive it upward. In terms of influence or the strength of power, some arcs may reach great heights and distances as audiences perform to their own audiences, thus creating their own spirals of success and new audience trajectories. As I illustrate later, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one example of a Sanders audience member who now has a new, unique spiral of success with her own audience. And of course, some audience members drop off dramatically as they choose de-fusion, a choice that can be made even after multiple performances of fusion. With a methodological multi-tool including ethnography, archival research, and comparative analysis, we can trace each audience arc, and better understand how performative spirals of success work.

Using arcs of fusion as both a theoretical expansion and an analytic tool, studies of collective representations and the performances inspired by them can go beyond actors and abstractions of the audience. And beyond the post-speech phone calls to the Senate in 2010, there are seemingly infinite arcs of fusion to trace. The limits of this article prevent a full rendering via cultural pragmatic analysis, but to illustrate this theory of audience agency and performative variability, I present two ideal typical, empirical arcs of fusion in the Sanders political community: (1) the political operative and (2) the political volunteer.

Future Directions for Arcs of Fusion

In offering the concept of ‘arcs of fusion’ as an analytic tool, this article highlights new directions in cultural pragmatics studies, including a challenge to traditional temporal understandings of social performance. It also illuminates pathways to contribute to the decolonization of sociology, and, specific to cases of charismatic performance, challenges standing definitions of charisma in social theory.

The concept of extended performances of fusion challenges the temporality of the performative moment from an event that happens in one place and time, with direct interaction between a performer and their audience (Alexander, 2004: 552). It also widens it to incorporate indirect audience engagement with the performance, and arcs that shift after the initial encounter as meaningful examples of shared time (Fabian, 2002). For instance, in studies of popular films, performances of fusion beyond the initial movie screening are just as important to the construction of performative success. Many fans, like those devoted to the Marvel or Harry Potter Cinematic Universes, engage in discussions on platforms like Discord or YouTube to analyze the films, scripts, and casting. A cultural pragmatics analysis of arcs of fusion in these interpretive communities (Fish, 1982) can render a clearer sense for why a film fandom grows and franchises expand, or why it is struck down by cancel culture.

Arcs of fusion also illuminates audience agency not previously hypothesized. There are as many possible arcs of fusion as there are possible intersections within the human experience. This especially applies to those people who are historically misrepresented in the archive (Trouillot, 1995). In this way, audience performances of fusion chart a path for cultural pragmatics practitioners to contribute to the decolonization of sociological study, and challenges researchers to consider arcs of fusion made by those who are considered to be performatively successful by their community but who are opposed by a power that ignores audience attribution as a way to undermine authority (Wenger, 2017: 117).

For instance, the ability to volunteer on a political campaign is a privileged one. The ‘biographically available’ volunteers (Braunstein, 2017; McAdam, 1986) who made knocking on doors and dialing calls a ‘part time job’ (Bond and Exley, 2016: xv) were able to do so because they could afford to. ⁹ For Americans who have two or three jobs in an effort to make ends meet, or who are incarcerated, political organizing in the style Exley and Bond espouse is difficult. For these audience members, performing fusion looks dramatically different. To truly understand Sanders’ performative power, their arcs of fusion must be considered.

For example, another ideal typical arc of fusion could be called ‘the political poet.’ The 10 authors of Let Me Be Clear (Anderson et al., 2012), an edited collection of poems, were incarcerated at McGregor Prison in upstate New York in 2010 and took a poetry class taught by writer Cara Benson. Each poem was inspired by, and in some cases was composed of words from, Sanders’ 2010 filibuster speech. The volume meditates on the role money plays in politics. The symbolic coding of the 26 poems in the book, which have titles like ‘Economic Downpour,’ ‘Dear Bernie,’ and ‘The Ritual of How to Destroy an Economy in 16 yrs,’ emphasizes clarity vs. obfuscation and align well with Sanders’ populist speech. Let Me Be Clear also illustrates what Morgan and Baert (2017) categorize as ‘artistic performance’ in their four-part model of ‘performative citizenship.’ While Sanders has the stage of the US Senate, and thousands of Americans canvass to persuade voters, some write poetry – and all hold performative power.

Finally, the notion of arcs of fusion in the specific case of charismatic performance catalyzes questions like, what does fusion in charismatic performance look like for subaltern audiences? Can charismatic performances result from more than public speaking and boisterous rabblerousing? Arcs of fusion suggest it is possible, and that a revised definition of charisma could be considered. The process of charismatic attribution by audiences depends on how the extraordinary and seemingly-divine is defined in a particular society; as mentioned earlier, the boundaries of what is acceptably considered sacred and extraordinary are drawn by those in power (Asad, 1993; Joosse and Willey, 2020). This doesn’t mean that charisma does not exist in these cases. Rather, it is possible that accounts of charisma have not been uncovered. Arcs of fusion works to reverse this.

Cultural pragmatics theory in social performance is a helpful tool in the sociologist’s kit. It not only synthesizes ritual and strategy, and centers the relative autonomy of culture, but with audience agency in mind it is strengthened as a highly flexible and scalable analytic model. Social performances are intricate webs of signification and action. Arcs of fusion contests previous conceptions of the audience as passive observers of this web and invites culturally minded sociologists to consider the audience as masterful spinners in their own right.