RECONSTRUCTING THE
SOCIAL SPACE OF CULTURE
Bernhard Giesen
ABSTRACT This paper retraces the conceptual development of Jeffrey
Alexander's cultural sociology. It centres on three major conceptual achieve-
ments: first, the distinction between inside and outside and its more peculiar
variants (like system and environment or friend and foe); second, the elabo-
ration of the temporal axis as a distinct dimension of cultural analysis; and
finally, the close focus on performativity that took centre-stage in cultural
analysis during the last years.
KEYWORDS classical social theory · cultural sociology · Durkheim ·
performance
There is no shortage of cultural studies and cultural sociology can
hardly claim to be a pristine field thrusting for new concepts and perspec-
tives. But if an astute and sophisticated theorist with a classical pedigree
enters this field and reconstructs its basic dimensions, we can, indeed, expect
remarkable contributions. During the last decades Jeffrey Alexander was
regarded as the undisputed chief guardian of the classical heritage in social
theory. Recently, he has proclaimed `the strong program of cultural soci-
ology'. In the following remarks I will not refer in detail to Alexander's
cultural studies on the specific topics ­ ranging from the early research on
the Watergate scandal to the recent studies on the cultural construction of
the Holocaust in the American media. Instead, I will try to outline what I
consider to be the three major conceptual achievements in Alexander's new
cultural sociology.
Thesis Eleven, Number 79, November 2004: 31­36
SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Copyright  2004 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd
DOI: 10.1177/0725513604046954
THE FUNDAMENTAL INSIDE/OUTSIDE DISTINCTION
Scholarly discourse reaches beyond the confines of local practices. It
does not proceed by consent or dissent among those present in a local site,
but it aims at the approval of an invisible and anonymous readership includ-
ing all those who are endowed with reason. This universalism comes at a
price ­ it requires disembedded principles of argumentation and basic dis-
tinctions that can be presupposed by and with respect to any participant in
the discourse. Therefore, fields of scholarly discourse are frequently operat-
ing with reference to one constitutive distinction that defines the perspec-
tive of the discipline. The historical perspective, for example, is structured
by the chronological distinction `before or after', the perspective of law is
defined by the normative distinction consistent or inconsistent with the legal
principles, the perspective of economics results from the basic alternative
between more or less profitable actions, etc. Of course, this focus on one
basic distinction does not exclude reference to other modes of constructing
reality ­ neither does economics disregard temporal sequences, nor does
history dispense entirely with profit expectations and legal norms, but we
can at least imagine historical studies that, for example, do not account for
legal norms. The temporal reference to the past is, in contrast, constitutive
for any historical research as the distinction between relative costs, benefits
and profits is constitutive for economics.
While other social sciences like economics or history can be easily
defined by one constitutive distinction, the focus of sociology on its domain
is less obvious. From its classical foundations till its most recent debates,
sociological theory abounds with paradigms of social action and social order,
but there are few, if any, attempts to deal with the question of what the con-
stitutive distinction of the sociological perspective is in contrast to other
social sciences. One of the most stimulating answers to this question has
been provided by Jeffrey Alexander's new cultural sociology. It suggests that
sociology's basic distinction runs between the inside and the outside and that
this distinction is at the core of cultural communication. Far from disregard-
ing the distinction between the inside and the outside, classical social and
political theory conceived it in normative or even spatial terms. Despite all
its conceptual refinements, mainstream sociology remained within the
confines of a Hobbesian model of society. Society was seen to be a large
group of actors living on a territory and being controlled by a normative
system. Certainly, the normative system had to be reinforced by power dif-
ferentials, backed by solidarity and shielded by cultural world views, but its
core reality consisted of normative expectations, roles, rules, laws, etc. ­ in
short, the model of society was provided by the rule of law in the territorial
state. It was the Durkheimian tradition of sociology that prepared the ground
for a radical departure from the Hobbesian model of society and a reversal
of the relationship between community and law as implied in this model.
32 Thesis Eleven (Number 79 2004)
The Hobbesian model explained society by the range of peaceful interaction
engendered by the monarch's authority that, in turn, resulted from a contract
among selfish individuals. In contrast, the Durkheimian tradition considers
the social community to be the starting point and the normative institutions
to be derivative; the relation between social community and normative insti-
tutions is, however, not a matter of rational choice and strategic interests,
but of ritual performance and symbolic representation.
Replacing the individual by the social community as ontological a priori
shifted the attention to the boundary between the people and their outside.
Durkheim disregarded this encompassing boundary and focused on the grid
of social structure within society. Here, too, boundaries are constructed, but
these boundaries do not limit meaningful interaction with other groups.
Alexander's new cultural sociology, however, conceives of the distinction
between the inside and the outside in more fundamental terms. It marks not
just membership, but delineates the range of trust and meaningful action.
The outside refers to absurdity, evil, chaos, to a realm where understanding
the other is difficult if not impossible, where Quine's principle of charity does
not apply, where Schütz's natural attitude can no longer be assumed, where
nothing can be taken for granted any more. Trust, meaning and rationality
are different phrasings of the same bond that ties and merges community
and culture in contrast to the outlands of absurdity, evil and bestiality. It
allows for a transition from specific questions, investigations, and com-
munications to general, diffuse, calm and continuous certainties. It produces
the latency of social order beyond the threat of violence. Thus, the relation-
ship between community and society as presupposed by classical sociology
is reversed. It is not the society that has to be complemented by ties of
solidarity but the social community that creates and constructs its normative
institutions.
This reversal reflects the democratic turn from the primacy of the law
to the sovereignty of the people. It is the people who construct the consti-
tution and not the other way round. Alexander's fundamental distinction
achieves for sociology what Hobbes' distinction between the state of nature
and the social contract did for political theory ­ it demarcates the domain
and provides a paradigm for its constitution. By linking trust and meaning
in the inside-outside distinction, Alexander reveals a level of constitutive pro-
cesses that can hardly be surpassed in its fundamental ambition. This funda-
mental ambition is, however, occasionally concealed behind a verbal
camouflage that risks being misunderstood. Pedantic critics may read
Alexander's phrasing of civil society and its boundaries as the attempt to
blow up the American conception of civil society to a universal paradigm of
social community. But Alexander uses the historical particularities of the
American civil society and its ideas of virtues and decency only as an
especially well known and familiar illustration for a fundamental distinction
that underlies every construction of social communities. As a culturalist,
Giesen: Reconstructing Social Space of Culture 33
Alexander does not exempt his own cultural presuppositions from critical
accounting and reflexive `bracketing'. But in order to penetrate the surface
and to reveal its basic structure, cultural analysis has to start by presenting
the phenomenology of the case. And this is exactly what is at the core of
Alexander's reconstruction of civil society.
ADDING TIME TO THE INSIDE/OUTSIDE DISTINCTION
By exploring the basic architecture of culture, Alexander's new cultural
sociology does not only focus on the boundary between the inside and the
outside but it addresses also the issue of discontinuity in cultural memory.
Thus, the cultural construction of the social space is completed by a cultural
construction of the temporal dimension.
Traditional sociology conceived of discontinuity only as institutional or
structural transformation or as transition between tradition and modernity ­
thereby reflecting the historical experience of revolutions and progress. It
could disregard the question of beginnings because the past before the revol-
ution was never without any social institutions or social structures. In
contrast, social actors and social communities have to imagine their origin,
they have to mark the beginning of the story, they have to account for the
fundamental discontinuity between the prehistory and the history of a com-
munity ­ even if reliable and precise information about the remote past are
rarely available. Cultural history and the rapidly growing field of collective
memory have called these inventions or imaginations of a beginning
`founding myths' that tell a story of individual and collective heroism
breaking the path for the community. Most of these mythological stories
about founding heroes and revolutions convert violence into victory and blur
the traces of victims and perpetrators. They are commonly regarded as
cultural constructions that tell us more about the contemporary community
of believers than about the events of the past. In contrast the trauma of
victims is mostly taken as an unshakable and naturally given reference for
collective identity and solidarity.
Jeffrey Alexander's new cultural sociology not only complements
studies on triumphant founding myths with a focus on its counterpart, i.e.
the traumatic origins of a collectivity, but also discovers these traumatic
origins as a cultural construction. In a similar way as Weber presented the
charisma of heroes just as an imagination of his or her followers, Alexander
discovers also the collective trauma to be a cultural construction of those
who are not the direct victims but identify themselves with the victims. The
suffering of the individual victim is enclosed in his or her body and has to
be strictly separated from its cultural reconstruction in collective memory.
Alexander's uncompromising cultural constructivism provides a bold break-
through for a sociological analysis of issues that for most sociologists are still
exempted from a constructivist approach and taken for naturally given. Here,
34 Thesis Eleven (Number 79 2004)
Alexander continues the critical stance towards positivism and naturalism that
we know from his early metatheoretical writings and translates it into a sub-
stantial research programme. His theory of cultural trauma as the attempt to
tell the dark beginning of the story can be considered to be the sociological
counterpart to the deconstructivist perspective on myths as provided by René
Girard.
THE PERFORMATIVE TURN
Relying on the fundamental distinctions outlined above, Alexander's
new cultural sociology has recreated the space of culture by refining and
advancing the conceptual tools of cultural analysis, metahistory and literary
criticism, i.e. narrative, tropes, metonymy, textuality, representation, etc. Far
from neglecting issues of agency, he mostly deals with texts and symbolic
structures on the one hand and the boundaries of communities ­ in particu-
lar in terms of civil society ­ on the other. Following the veins of poststruc-
turalism, the analysis of texts and structures hardly left a slot for the account
of social reality as an event that occurs in a locality and at a particular time.
Classical social theory accounted for the dimension of events and occurrence
in terms of intentional action that was framed by shared knowledge and
common norms. This intentionalism is pushed to a most radical twist by
rational choice theory. Its heuristic required every social institution or struc-
ture to be explained as the intended or non-intended outcome of rational
action performed by individual actors and these individual actions were con-
sidered to be the only real events in social processes. Rational choice theory
led to a raging debate in which Alexander defended the cause of sociology
against the reductivist imperialism of rational choice theories. Indeed, the
heritage of classical action theory must not be confined into the narrow cage
of economic individualism.
Most action events do not occur as the result of rational calculations of
costs and benefits, but instead as the repetition of action patterns and it is
this very repetitive character that allows for understanding the meaning of
actions as rule-guided activities. This understanding is an irreducibly social
endeavour ­ it is never created by one single individual alone and it never
refers to one single and isolated act. Instead, it results from the framing or
rule constructing activities of several actors who assume and indicate a
common life world. This conception of action dates back to Wittgenstein,
Schütz, Goffmann and Garfinkel.
Jeffrey Alexander ­ with his unfailing sense for new theoretical move-
ments ­ has recently noticed a coalescence of various strands of this tradition
and envisioned a new paradigmatic thrust that he calls `the performative turn
in the social sciences'. This performative turn does not conceive of action
events in terms of individual economic choice but in terms of a social drama
that involves actors as well as audiences and is dependent on special
Giesen: Reconstructing Social Space of Culture 35
symbolic media and means. The structure of this theatrical performance is
rooted in ritual and mimesis instead of rational calculation ­ hence it is much
less restrictive and more encompassing in its assumptions than the idea of
rational choice between utilities. Drawing on such diverse writers as Kenneth
Burke and Victor Turner, Durkheim and Stanislawski, Alexander merges
cultural sociology with conceptions of symbolic media and ideas from
dramatology to end with a bold theoretical vision that indeed could break
the path for a new cultural sociology beyond the tyranny of the text. Its core
agenda is not the construction of meaning, but the staging of authenticity
and the `fusing' between performance and audience, i.e. the taking of the
performed drama for reality. Because it provides a conceptually refined
perspective on the microstructure of this fusing between performance and
audience, Alexander's latest version of his Strong Program not only offers
reinterpretations of central concepts like charisma or disenchantment, but it
changes our knowledge about the basic structure of social action.
Bernhard Giesen is Professor for Sociology at the University of Konstanz and
recurrent visiting professor at Yale University. Among his visiting positions during
recent years have been those at UCLA, Stanford University, University of Chicago,
European University Institute Florence, and New York University. His latest books
are Intellectuals and the German Nation (1998), European Citizenship (with Klaus
Eder) (2001), Cultural Trauma (with Alexander et al.) (2003), Triumph and Trauma
(2004), and The Performative Turn in the Social Sciences (2004). [email:
Bernhard.Giesen@uni-konstanz.de]
36 Thesis Eleven (Number 79 2004)