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European Journal of Social Theory
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DOI: 10.1177/1368431008097010
2008 11: 523European Journal of Social Theory
Rodrigo Cordero, Francisco Carballo and José Ossandón
Performing Cultural Sociology : A Conversation with Jeffrey Alexander
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I N T E R V I E W
Performing Cultural Sociology
A Conversation with Jeffrey Alexander
Interviewed by Rodrigo Cordero, Francisco Carballo, and
José Ossandón
UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK AND GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON, UK
Introduction
Traditionally, sociologists have referred to the study of culture that concerns their
discipline as ‘sociology of culture’. Since the mid-1980s Jeffrey Alexander has
been turning the discipline on its feet, coining a new term: ‘cultural sociology’.
The purpose of this upheaval is to redefine the sociological understanding of
meaning in relation to social action as well as to rework both meaning and social
action as categories for social research in general (see Alexander, 2007). Alexander’s
work seeks to construct above and beyond Parsons’ theoretical edifice. This implies
that, for Alexander, culture is a structure analytically different and autonomous
from society, which is, in turn, understood as the internal environment of action.
Consequently, Alexander regards culture as an ‘independent variable’ for sociological
analysis (Alexander and Smith, 2003). His rethinking of culture stresses
the need for a new sub-discipline within sociology, while reinvigorating other
fields such as politics, economics or law due to its emphasis on the creative and
performative character of meaning. In this sense, Alexander’s ‘strong program’ in
cultural sociology, is also a strong bet for the social sciences.
In the last two decades cultural sociology has become an increasingly institutionalized
field within American sociology. Alexander has played a major role in
advancing his own theoretical paradigm while shaping generations of graduate
students under its workings. It is no wonder that the ‘strong program in cultural
sociology’ is an unvarying reference among different schools of cultural analysis
(Kurasawa, 2004). Alexander’s work has been the object of several critical reviews
generating as much adhesion as rejection (i.e. Collins, 1985; Colomy and Turner
1998; Emirbayer, 2004; Fuhrman, 1986; Inglis et al., 2006; Joas, 2005; Kurasawa,
2004; McLennan, 2004, 2005; Mouzelis, 1999; Poggi, 1983; Wallace, 1984).
In the present interview Jeffrey Alexander discusses the intellectual evolution
of his work, from early attempts in rethinking the theoretical logic of sociology
to his latest pragmatic turn in terms of a theory of social performance. Moreover,
he contextualizes his cultural sociology and explains the points of agreement and
European Journal of Social Theory 11(4): 523–542
Copyright © 2008 Sage Publications: Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore
www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/1368431008097010
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disagreement with competing approaches for cultural analysis, such as neoinstitutionalist
sociology in America, traditional and more recent post-structuralist
influenced cultural studies in Britain, and current developments in French social
theory. Finally, Alexander addresses his position on the pertinence of the notion
of ‘the social’ for contemporary sociology.
The Autonomy of Meaning: Toward the ‘Strong Program’
in Cultural Sociology
Q1 From ‘Theoretical Logic’ (1982–3), the concept of synthesis has played a
central role in your theoretical work as a pathway to overcoming, as you
say, the main polarities that have divided classical and contemporary sociological
thought (i.e. normative/instrumental action, positivism/relativism,
individual/society, etc). In which way is it possible to understand your early
attempts to develop a multidimensional theoretical approach as the base
for the development of your ‘strong program in Cultural Sociology’?
JA Part of the Theoretical Logic project was finding a way to situate meaning.
In order to establish multidimensionality, my main interest there was to find
a way of critiquing materialism, even though the premise of the argument
philosophically and theoretically was that idealism was also an error. I criticized
Durkheim’s later work from that perspective, and I also criticized
Parsons for making an idealist reduction not in any one period of his work
but in a dimension that permeated his entire work. Those critiques I found
easy to make. I think it is easy for any sociologist to make a critique of
idealism.The critique that I found difficult to make, and that was my animus
from my early days as a cultural Marxist, is the critique of materialism.
In Theoretical Logic I was particularly interested in Parsons’ notion that
in any concrete entity empirically there is an ideal and a material element,
and that the common sense idea that empirical entities are material is an
illusion and that it hides the a priori or the analytic, in Parsons’ sense,
which is the invisible cultural element that is what is always at play in
relationship to external elements.
When I wrote this four volume book, which was from the early 1970s
until 1980, I thought Parsons had made the best macrotheoretical argument
for the interpenetration of these two elements, but I gradually changed my
mind in the course of the 1980s. I had already decided in the book on
Parsons (Alexander, 1983) that he did not have a strong enough sense of
the material world and of the contradictions created by tensions between
spheres, a tension I have elaborated, for example, in my book The Civil
Sphere (2006). But to my surprise I realized, in the course of the 1980s,
that there was a lot of work that I had not paid much attention in semiotics
and anthropology. In the 1970s, I had read closely Cliffort Geertz’s
Interpretation of Cultures, Emile Durkheim’s late work, Elementary Forms of
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Religious Life, Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger, and Victor Turner, but I
realized that I had simply not taken them seriously enough. I do not think
that I really understood the repercussions of these ideas were until I started
seriously reading and teaching semiotics in the early to mid-1980s: Roland
Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marshall Sahlins, and others.
By the time I went to the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton
in the fall of 1985, I had become acutely dissatisfied with the work of
Weber, the early Durkheim, and particularly Parsons’ theoretical multidimensionality.
In a sense I had been too satisfied with notions of values,
or what Parsons had called ‘the cultural system’. I realized that I needed to
create my own sense of a sociological understanding of culture, a ‘stronger’
cultural program. I had to put aside the task of a multidimensional general
theory because I had to go back behind Parsons, which meant giving up
for a time the ambition to create an elegant, beautiful, and complex model
of the society as a whole. I had to go back to the foundation, to the building
blocks, and concentrate on what meaning might be and how it was created
and composed in a social context. For me that meant going back to recovering
semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, all in the spirit, if not the
letter, of the late Durkheim.
I had made an interpretation of the late Durkheim in Theoretical Logic
(Alexander, 1982, Vol. 2). I argued, in a rather elaborate way, that, while
few of his later interpreters had understood it, Durkheim had really decided
to start his sociology all over again. This happened in the late 1890s, with
his discovery of religion. Durkheim had turned against modernism, not as
an ethical system but as an epistemological idea. I still think it is a good
interpretation of Durkheim and I have repeated it and rewritten it in various
ways since then. At that early time in my own intellectual development,
however, I had yet not understood the implications of my interpreting
Durkheim in this manner.
I understood the implications of my own Durkheim interpretation only
after I had read through and understood more symbolic and linguistic
theory. I now understood what Mary Douglas, Cliffort Geertz, and Victor
Turner were talking about. I tried to combine the late Durkheim with these
symbolic anthropologists, semiotics and a bit of Foucault, and I started
laying out a strong program in cultural sociology. The uncomfortable thing
about that is that I started doing that in the mid-1980s, even as I continued
to develop neofunctionalism. So I was doing two somewhat contradictory
things at the same time. I felt that neofunctionalism could be the platform
for a satisfactory macrosociology. It allowed one to pay attention to different
social levels, to bring together interests, carrier groups, institutions,
uneven development and differentiation, multidimensionality, the psychic
level and the cultural level. It also allowed me to make a critique of what
we might today call neoliberalism as an ideology. See, for example, the
collectively edited books Differentiation Theory and Social Change (1990)
and The Micro–Macro Link (1987).
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In 1993 I went to Paris for the academic year where I visited Alain
Touraine’s group. That year I decided that I could not continue working
simultaneously on neofunctionalism and the cultural program. That was a
bit of a crisis for me because, by then, I had been developing neofunctionalism
for ten years. I realized the time had come to publicly develop my
misgivings in a coherent manner. I did this in the book Neofunctionalism
and After (1998), where I put together my neofunctionalism essays and
wrote an introduction and a conclusion which explained my reasons for
not working to develop that program anymore. One of these reasons was
the cultural, which I have explained; the other reasons concerned problems
of agency and social contradiction.
One of the things that I became very aware of from 1976 on was that
Parsons did not have a strong theory of action. I began to see this as a result
of my close connection with the ethnometodology and symbolic interactionist
groups at UCLA. So I developed a serious critique of Parsons on
that score as well – a critique that was not at all part of Theoretical Logic.
Because Parsons said he was an action theorist, as had Weber before him,
I had not seen that, for both theorists, action was a black box. It was Harold
Garfinkel, whom I was quite close to, who helped me figure that out. I
elaborated this microcritique of Parsons in Twenty Lectures: Sociological
Theory since World War Two (1987a), and most systematically in the essay
‘Action and its Environments’ (1987b).
From this Paris period, and for about a decade after, I gave up on the
project of publishing general theory. My writing for publication was more
focused on cultural sociology. Throughout this period, however, I was
conceiving and writing The Civil Sphere. I had started this project in the
spring of 1989, after returning from the democracy crisis in China; revised
it in Paris; and continued to elaborate this culture-centered macrosociological
theory until its book length publication in 2006.
Q2 In this transition toward a program in Cultural Sociology, how and when
did the idea of the ‘relative autonomy of culture’ become a central notion?
JA I don’t know precisely when I started to talk about that. But Steve Seidman
and I edited a book called Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates
(1990); I wrote a long introduction to that book where I talked a lot about
the relative autonomy of culture. What I realized from my encounters in
the mid-1980s was that culture structure had to be given an internal design
and that we needed a time-out from socio-structural analysis – and from
issues of causation in a normal sense – so that we could investigate these
internal patterns of meaning. We needed to find a way of saying we should
not be so rushed. As sociologists, of course, we want to change social structure
and make it better and more just. To understand meaning, however,
one has recourse to a different kind of reference. To talk about the relative
autonomy of culture we need to have the time to go inside of meaning,
find it, and then come back to the question of social structure and social
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change. This is what I worked out programmatically into my introduction
to Culture and Society. Of course, the notion of ‘relative autonomy’ is from
Marxism. When I was a Marxist, I was deeply committed to the idea of
the relative autonomy of culture, reading closely what Perry Anderson later
derisively called Western Marxism. I first drew this idea into my thinking
in Theoretical Logic, when I made reference to Engels’ Letters to Bloch where
he said the superstructure has a relative autonomy from the economic base,
though not, he hastened to add, in the last instance.
Q3 Drawing from what you have just said, it seems to us that your Cultural
Sociology, following the best Durkheimian tradition, addresses, in both a
theoretical and empirical manner, the problem represented by ‘structures
of meaning’. What exactly do you understand by these structures?
JA Durkheim’s central interest, of course, was in the non-individual, collective
representations, which far removed him from concern for representational
process on the individual level. In my own movement toward cultural
sociology, I have not made this Durkheimian choice, but have felt free to
draw upon the phenomenological tradition, especially from Schutz on, that
conceptualized individual representation processes, for example, the notion
of typification. My understanding of individual process has also been
informed by psychoanalytic theory, especially ideas about mechanisms of
defense, e.g. splitting, projection, repression, neutralization, and so forth.
These references and homologies are explicitly made in the ‘Action and Its
Environments’ essay, and later as well.
As for the idea of cultural structures themselves, it obviously reaches
back to the tradition of structuralism. It was the structuralists, from Saussure
on, who developed the compelling argument that cultural beliefs, supraindividual
and trans-situational, can be seen as structures. The prototypical
statement was Saussure’s contrast between langue and parole. In the introduction
to Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies (1988), I made the case
that this Saussurian idea actually has Durkheimian roots, for there is strong
evidence that Saussure attended Durkheim’s lectures at the Sorbonne and
drew directly upon some of these core ideas.
I would wish to point out, however, that in contrast with the structuralist
tradition narrowly conceived, I have emphasized, always, that cultural
structures do not determine but rather inform action. There are layers of
other kinds of structuring, and also layers of contingencies. Here I would
point to the entire history of sociological thinking about social structures
and contingent action, and to the very productive dialogue that Roman
Jacobson initiated with Saussure, which led to the Prague school and
eventually to the synthesis of structuralism with pragmatism.
Q4 You compare cultural sociology to psychoanalysis. ‘Where Id was, Ego shall
be’. This implies an understanding of a social unconscious, of a deep
symbolic reality of which we are not precisely aware. And you said that ‘to
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reveal to men and women the myths that think them (the agency of myths)
so that they can make new myths in turn’. How do you think this myth
creation process is going to work once people are aware of previous myths?
It seems that in this idea you are coming closer to democratic theory than
to purely descriptive sociology?
JA I agree that my work has a normative element, not only a descriptive one,
that in it is also written a certain kind of ideology. The contents of my
ideology are revealed, no doubt, in my empirical insistence that civil society
combines individuality and solidarity. In terms of the normative elements
of my work, I would point to my skepticism about the moral validity of
certain myth constructions. For example, in The Civil Sphere, I critique
myths based on primordial ideas about the uniqueness or superiority of
race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, nation, or class. Such myths are based on
attributions of otherness that are polluting and stigmatizing. On the one
hand, I continue to embrace myth as a necessary and often inspiring
cultural dimension of society: I reject the kind of ideology-critique that,
for example, Barthes projects in ‘Mythology Today’. On the other hand, I
reject a whole set of myths on normative grounds even as I elaborate the
reasons for their empirical existence. This dual ambition is at the heart of
my understanding of how binarism works in social meanings. As compared
with, for example, Jacobson’s writings on binarism, mine have a clearly
normative quality, not only an empirical one.
One should note that the phrase you ask me about, which I offered in
the introduction of The Meanings of Social Life (2003), has a rhetorical
quality, partly because it mimics the ‘legislative’ ambitions derived from
Enlightenment (Bauman) that informed the interpretative standpoints of
figures like Freud and Marx. We cannot replace myth with reason; I do not
think that is possible, at least as reason was conceived by the Enlightenment
and articulated not only by classical figures but also by Habermas
and Rawls. In my work, I have repeatedly tried to develop a different, nonrationalistic
understanding of reason. I talk a lot about reason in Fin de
Siécle Social Theory (1995). In Civil Society, I ask, how can we understand
reason in a more cultural manner, without giving up the notion of universality
and criticism? This is a major challenge. Generally in the philosophical
tradition and specifically in the logical positivist tradition, we find a thin
notion of reason as a culturally neutral, purely analytical language. That is
not how reason operates.
Although we cannot replace myth with reason, we can use reason to criticize
particular myths. As intellectuals and social theorists we see that there
is no social fact or rhetorical statement that has an ontological status; in
society, and for the sake of social analysis, nothing is true in itself, regardless
of its validity in a scientific sense. Once we understand how social
processes create appearances of truth, however, we will grasp that we, as
analysts, can have the effect of helping groups and actors separate themselves
from an unthinking fusion with social performances. At the same
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time, we also know that the process of separation usually happens only
when people are already committed to something else. So, you do not just
sit there as an isolated intellectual without any pre-commitments or
presuppositions. You are applying reason but in a non-rational manner. Or,
as the great American rock ’n roller Bruce Springsteen once sang, ‘Show a
little faith, there’s magic in the night’.
Q5 Sociology is prone to look to the outside, to external environments, and in
that sense to map the ways of instrumental rationality is more than natural.
The strong program in Cultural Sociology looks, instead, for internal
environments and in that sense culture becomes a dimension on its own.
Is it possible for your sociological approach to develop an explanation of
social imagination, or of social creativeness?
JA I do not like the notion of ‘the imaginary’ insofar as it seems to suggest that
cultural imagination or creativity is tied to a normatively utopian reference,
to an alternative reality, and that the rest represents something without
imagination, i.e. the dead weight of reality. To the contrary, the imaginary
is everywhere; there is no dead weight of material reality. What we do have
is an institutionalization of meanings that become routinized and get
sanctions attached to them, so that we feel as if we were in a dead world of
materiality. Actually, the supposedly dead routines and institutions of others
are very much involved with their own kinds of imaginaries; we may not
respect those imaginaries and they might not be utopian in a normative
sense. But we should not, for this reason, judge the people who hold them
as bad or stupid, or suggest that they act without any relation to the imaginary.
I do not think they themselves feel that way. To consider a stark
example: We say ‘the people who worked in the concentration camps were
instrumentally rational’. But this is nonsense; they were thinking and
feeling people, many of whom wanted to kill Jews. They had big imaginaries,
anti-Semitic, anticommunist, folkish. I do not think it was just
banality, they had imagination too.
My point is that sociology and more generally social sciences do not pay
enough attention to the internal environment of action. There is a humanistic,
ethical, and moral implication of doing so: cultural sociology reminds
us that we are alive, for a fundamental aspect of being alive is to be interpretative,
to have an imagination. In a footnote in Capital, Marx asks what
is the difference between bumblebees and human beings, and he answers
that when humans build houses we have the idea in our minds. Marx is
one of my favorite antagonists because he had such a well developed idea,
up until 1844–5, of the internal environment of action, after which he
seems to become convinced that capitalism has eliminated everything, that
we live in an objectified world and that only some day after the socialist
revolution will we be able to recover our subjectivity.
Q6 Regarding your recent theoretical work on social action as a performance,
you have mentioned that ‘the challenge for social performance is to make
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its component parts invisible (actor, collective representations, means of
symbolic production, mis-en-scène, social power, audience.) If they are not
invisible, action will seem performed, and thus, unbelievable’. In contemporary
aesthetics, conversely, the call for verisimilitude is constantly challenged.
The process of creation seems to be more important than creation
itself. As if the artist wants to show the seams of her own work. If we dwell
on this kind of aesthetic we can say that the public is probably judging a
performance less for its capacity to communicate meaning than for the way
in which it was crafted. It can be argued that the public is more interested
in the mediation of the process rather than allowing themselves to be
seduced by the artists’ communication of meaning, which apparently
occurs without mediation. Do you think that this aesthetic approach challenges
in a way your vision of meaning and performance?
JA No, I do not think so. In the introduction that Jason Mast and I wrote to
Social Performance (2006) we looked closely at Bernhard Giesen’s contribution
to that book, which concerned the turn toward the performative in
contemporary art. Contemporary art is, indeed, interested in showing the
process of creation, not only the result, in looking at assemblage, at something
that is created once and once only, in looking at the seams and seeing
through seamlessness. As I see it, rather than refuting my cultural pragmatic
theory, this dimension of contemporary art represents an artistic
equivalent to it. There is today, inside aesthetic, political, and intellectual
life, a broad self-consciousness about the performative and its elements.
Both in cultural pragmatics and contemporary art we find a growing awareness
and recognition of the artificiality of performance. My work, too,
aims to allow people to become aware of the seams and of the elements of
performance, in intellectual rather than aesthetic terms. Can I still maintain
that the success of a performance depends on making the elements
invisible? Is that a contradiction? Has contemporary art’s reflexivity about
art falsified my argument? I do not think so. First, I would insist that much
of the power of high art, and most of the power of popular art, depends
on making the elements that compose it invisible. There remain significant
contemporary traditions in painting, sculpture, film, and photography,
which do not deconstruct the performative process. Though deconstruction
is undoubtedly the most distinctive element of contemporary art,
especially in the avant-garde, it is not its only element. Second, the deconstructive
process may not, in fact, even be able to explain the experience of
these avant-garde objects/events themselves. Aesthetic experience, it seems
to me, continues to depend in some significant manner on losing oneself
in the object and on being unaware of the fact that it is produced in a
particular place, at a particular time, and by a particular social actor. In
other words, I think it is too simple to say that we have a distanced attitude
even towards the performative domains of contemporary art.
Q7 Let me translate the question into politics, taking as example Bill Clinton
or Tony Blair. People probably admire more the craft of their speeches
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than the meaning that they create. On the other hand, you have George
W. Bush, who tries to construct meaning all the time but people are really
disappointed with his abilities to transmit it and to connect with the
audience. So, in a way probably audiences are becoming much more aware
of this.
JA Once again, this both is and is not the case. We may be more aware of the
artificiality of political action, but the point of my cultural pragmatics is
that without moments of re-fusion there is neither narrative nor belief, nor
even a sense of reality. I think effective leadership, whether it is on the left
or on the right, depends on the audience taking up as true and faithful the
performances of authority, whether that authority is represented by a group,
a book, a manifesto, or an individual speech. This is apparent in the last
months of commentary on Tony Blair. For example, in late June 2007,
there was an article in the Saturday magazine of The Guardian by Martin
Amis on Tony Blair. Amis had been traveling with him. On the one hand,
what he sees makes Amis completely cynical, or let’s say sophisticated, and
he makes note of the complete constructiveness of the entire Blair thing.
On the other hand, what Amis ends up concluding is that Blair is Blair, that
at the bottom there is simply the human being who is who he is – that
nobody is pulling the strings. This is the kind of acceptance of authenticity
that links the left-democratic faithful in America to Bill Clinton, despite his
mendacity, and the communist faithful in Cuba to Fidel Castro, whatever
his dictatorial power of manipulation might be. One is aware of the
performative quality, yet there is also a sense that on the bottom there is a
set of ethical commitments and good faith. So, I think a critic can be aware
of the complexity of the elements of performance and still believe in the
person or in the cause, believe in the values or ethics motivating an official.
The mind of a modern, or perhaps especially a postmodern person, is
complex; it has a doubleness of vision where you see the constructiveness
and at the same time you want to find ways of attributing to the other
person good faith. In the beginning of a period of leadership, the group
that has just elected a person attributes to her authenticity, whether from
the left or the right, while, at the same moment, the opposition group is
convinced of complete de-fusion, constructiveness, and artificiality. In this
utterly fascinating situation – which flourishes in democracies – there are
two simultaneous movements. On one side, this is a good person, a good
movement, and a good set of values that now we are going to try to institutionalize;
on the other side, an almost equally powerful group of intellectuals
and media are saying this is complete bullshit, that the new display
of leadership is the opposite of authentic, that it’s actually a dangerous
puppet show. This agonistic performative structure unfolds whether the
left or the right comes to power.
Q8 You make a very important distinction between speech and language, a
distinction that enables you to have a much more complex understanding
of power than most of the people that took the language turn seriously and
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saw in power a ubiquitous tool. For Cultural Sociology power is performative
and in many ways constantly checked and balanced by skeptical audiences,
by critical publics, and potentially by counter-performative publics.
If this understanding can enrich both theoretical and empirical discussions
on civil society and life-world it seems to me that it leaves, however, an
important problem of power in language untouched. Who sets the rules of
the linguistic game; how are these rules decided or even imposed? Speech
is ultimately rooted in language and the words and its meanings are limited
and probably a bit constricting. How can Cultural Sociology escape the
foundational political problem of language?
JA I think the implication of combining social complexity and performance
theory – an intertwining that is at the heart of my cultural pragmatics – is
that no single actor or force consistently or exclusively sets the rules. Rather,
there are multiple speech communities and multiple projects. Believing
that they are set by a single force is what seems rather dangerous about a
notion such as Bourdieu’s, which insists on the overwhelming capital
possessed by the possessor of language/power. In the good old Marxist or
power elite tradition, there is a desire to think of power as an invisible and
centralized source in the society, whether state or economic or even
cultural-critical power, and that is just not true. I think, in this regard, we
should all go back and ‘relire’ Raymon Aron’s wondrous critiques of elite
and class power theories. The critics who write within these traditions say
that the problem with modern societies is that we are blocked – social
repair, change, and justice are impeded – because there is one central power
setting the rules. Aron says that the problem actually is quite the opposite:
that the problem of modern societies is fragmentation and the blockages
that come from the fierce animosities among different groups. These fragmented
groups, he believes, often neutralize one another to such a degree
that ‘society’ can’t get anything done. I too wish to bring our attention to
the plurality of powers that marks many contemporary societies, though I
would not do so in precisely the manner of Aaron. With my theory of civil
society I want to explain the discursive and institutional structures that
sustain the democratic sphere among others, as distinctive and potentially
independent of the religious, the familial, the political, the economic, and
scientific worlds. Only by looking at the civil sphere, as one among a
plurality of relatively independent spheres, can we do justice to the role of
social criticism. We do a great disservice to modern society by underestimating
the social role of criticism, and I mean this in a very wide sense
of any interpretative source that is outside of the speaker, such as newspapers,
news media, and the sacred and secular-intellectual worlds, for these
are all sources of interpretation that are not controlled by a speaker, by a
single power over others.
To insist that one force doesn’t ‘set the rules,’ of course, does not at all
suggest that there is pluralism in the liberal sense. As I have emphasized
time and again in Civil Sphere – see the sections in race, religion, and
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gender – there are always asymmetrical relations between spheres, and
between the groups that compose civil society itself.
Cultural Sociology and its Others
Q9 In Fin de Siécle Social Theory (1995) you point out that ‘social theory is a
mental reconstruction of its time, not a reflexion but a self-reflexion’,
embedded in cultural structures of understanding and historical conditions.
Since Cultural Sociology would not be an exception to this rule, what
would you say are the cultural roots and structures in which your Cultural
Sociology is embedded?
JA I could, of course, propose the postmodern explanation of Stuart Hall
and the British Cultural Studies group that we live in a world of hypersymbolic
processes, a postindustrial, information-based, and gigantically
mass-mediated society. So knowledge workers, including sociologists of
culture, move from an economy of things to an economy of signs. I think
that undoubtedly provides a good deal of social explanation for the cultural
turn, as Kenneth Thompson and I document in A Contemporary Introduction
to Sociology: Culture and Society in Transition (2008). Since we do
live in an intensely, symbolically saturated world of media and culture
industry, it would be very strange indeed if our theories remained wedded
to materialism and rational choice. On the other hand, the intellectual and
philosophical origins of the cultural turn long preceded the emergence of
postindustrial society. There was the later Durkheim, Saussure, Wittgenstein,
and semiotics. So there can be no one-to-one correspondence of cultural
sociology and social change, which is, after all, why I speak of selfreflection
rather than reflection. I do not accept the notion that is the
mirror image of postmodern or postindustrial theory, namely that before
1920 or 1950, or even in the nineteenth century, we somehow inhabited
a world of materiality. I think that world too was vastly symbolically
mediated, though, obviously, people talked in those days about religion not
about mass media. There were a lot of social things for a culturally
inclined sociologist to work on. Weber and Durkheim were influenced by
the religiosity of their ancestors and by their immediate cultural milieux,
Tocqueville by his sense for les meurs.
Q10 But how has the American context specifically provided the cultural conditions
for the emergence of your Cultural Sociology?
JA I think good intellectual history does not move just from ‘society’ or
‘macro’; you need to pay attention to the mediation of intellectual groups
and how they shift the Weltenschung over time. If I were doing a history of
American elite intellectual life from the 1950s until now, I would need to
pay a lot of attention to just these ‘micro’ shifts between intellectual groups.
One shift concerns the role of cultural Marxism for the 1960s generation.
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As a result of the influence of New Left Marxism, both its atmospherics and
its social theory, many if not most of my intellectual generation, even when
they ceased being Marxist, maintained a sensitivity to consciousness, subjectivity,
and performance. I wrote about this in ‘The Sixties and Me: From
Cultural Revolution to Cultural Sociology’ (2005a). Among my generation,
for example, there is a strong sense of antagonism to the positivism
of American sociology as expressed in the two main journals, the American
Sociological Review (ASR) and the American Journal of Sociology (AJS). Today,
of course, this often rather banal empiricism represents a minor and diminishing
segment of the sociological discipline, even in the United States.
I should also like to emphasize that this generational sensibility is hardly
confined to the United States. Despite my American roots, throughout my
career I have been very influenced by French and German thinking, so
much so that I resisted for a long time the influence of pragmatism. Only
with my work in performance in the last five years have I found a way of
coming to terms with it. I had felt an antagonism to the pragmatic part
of the American character in terms of the materialism and consumerism of
American society; the individualism of pragmatism bothered me as well.
So I did not feel happy with that.
Q11 Now we would like to ask you about the ‘performative’ character that the
‘strong program’ itself has. The program you have developed resembles the
operation done by the American ‘new economic sociology’ in the 1980s.
Specially, I am thinking in the solution given by Granovetter, when he
pointed out that any ‘market exchange’ is embedded in social forces (in his
case interpersonal networks), so, to fully understand the evolution of
markets a sociologist is needed. But at the same time a sub-discipline with
its own ‘conferences’, ‘journals’, ‘handbooks’ was being created. Do you
think the ‘strong program’ can be seen as an analogous operation, but one
step further, where instead of claiming that ‘any market exchange has a
social side’ any ‘social phenomena has a cultural dimension’? Therefore a
cultural sociologist is needed to understand them? In terms of academics
politics, do you think the future of cultural sociology is similar to the new
economic sociology, in the sense of creating almost a new discipline, with
own methods, journals, handbooks, PhDs, etc.?
JA Any kind of new intellectual argument must be accompanied by some
institutionalization process. In the United States it is a bit harder to create
and control institutions of intellectual production, much more so, I believe,
than, for example, in France and Germany. I do not have my ‘own’ department,
or a PhD program in cultural sociology. My colleagues and I have
been able to organize a Center of Cultural Sociology (CCS), but we do not
control any material resources to speak of. We could not, for example,
possibly afford to start a journal or to financially sponsor visiting fellowships.
Insofar as there is an institutional dimension of the strong program
in sociology, it occurs through CCS, which involves supervising our PhD
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students, holding conferences, publishing volumes and articles, maintaining
a website, and welcoming the steady flow of foreign visiting fellows,
who pay their own way. We also have the Yale Cultural Sociology Series
with Paradigm Publishers, where there are now a dozen volumes published
or forthcoming.
When I started doing cultural sociology in the mid-1980s, I admit to
feeling quite isolated, not only outside of the main currents of American
sociology but of British cultural studies and continental critical interpretative
work. I think that over the last 20 years, somewhat surprisingly to me,
this situation has changed in a dramatic fashion. Today, cultural sociology
is either considered part of the (new) mainstream or, certainly, one of the
major new sociological voices, and not only in the United States. One
recent affirmation of this transformation is the appearance of the BSA
sponsored journal, Cultural Sociology, which has a very strong interest in
the strong program in the United States. I must admit the emergence of
this journal was a complete surprise to me, but a pleasant one.
Over the last two decades in the United States, I have thought of my
own perspective as enmeshed in a struggle against more purely pragmatic
understandings of culture, more instrumental, more symbolic interactionist
– what I call ‘sociology of culture’. For example, if one studies how
cultural meanings are imbedded in networks, institutions, and weak or
strong ties, this is not, for me, a cultural-sociological argument, though it
might well reveal something important about this or that cultural item. This
sociology of culture approach, in fact, is quite consistent with the American
tradition of institutional economics going back to John R. Commons, who
started something called Institutional Economics, a school of critical
thought of which Thorstein Veblen is probably the best known member
today. Replaced by marginal utility theory in economics, the institutionalist
tradition migrated into the social sciences, paving the way for such
perspectives as Granovetter’s. Certainly, this has been an immensely
successful research program, which articulated with neo-institutionalism in
organizational sociology.
Q12 Is cultural sociology then a kind of specialty within sociology?
JA Yes it is, but it is also a broad perspective and framework applied to every
speciality. My own ambition for cultural sociology is that, rather than a
speciality, it will change the manner in which sociology is carried out. What
is emerging today, I think, is a culturally oriented political sociology,
economic sociology, gender and sexual sociology, and so forth. (See, e.g.
how Viviana Zelizer’s cultural version of economic sociology has challenged,
and to some significant extent displaced, the ‘new’ economic sociology of
Granovetter.) One indication of this new range is that Oxford University
Press invited me to prepare their Handbook of Cultural Sociology. With Philip
Smith and Ron Jacobs, we have brought together 25 contributors who will
write about a very wide range of different fields and specialities. Our goal
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is to demonstrate than a meaning-centered sociology is not only possible
but has actually emerged over a wide front.
Q13 As you know, Cultural Sociology is not the only current approach to understand
meaning and culture. For instance, our impression is that current
British Social Science is quite ‘culturalist’, but in a way that is neither ‘sociology
of culture’ nor ‘cultural sociology’; not about the way cultural reflects
society nor about taking ‘culture’ as something different that has to be
understood in a separate way. We would say it is rather about the way
multiple elements interact. For example, we are thinking of current ‘cultural
economy’; or people like Nigel Thrift, John Urry, or Scott Lash. Celia
Lury’s (2004) book on brands is a very good example. Her point is to
understand what a brand is: and she shows how a brand is ‘symbol’ but is
also ‘sign’, affect, information, and money; and another example can be
found in Lash and Lury’s new book on Global Culture Industry (2007) and
their insistence in how meaning is created in a vast array of relations that
are embodied in the ubiquitous cultural objects of our age. Do you think
of this kind of approach as challenging to cultural sociology? You don’t
think that the trend here is not to create new ‘sub-disciplines’ but to
increasing multidisciplinarity (and in this sense in an opposite way with
the American differentiation)? (multidimensional/multidiscipline).
JA For me the most original development of British sociology is the creation
of a sociological postmodernism, which I see that as a kind of social structural
analysis of why material objects have achieved a symbolic character
(see my discussion of postindustrialism, above). You could read this achievement
as about information or symbolism; you can also connect it with the
new British discussions of the body, of governmentality, of economy, of
science and brands. I welcome these developments and I have learned from
them. I would add to the list of British sociologists you have mentioned
Zygmunt Bauman, who for me is a giant figure for macrosociological theory,
although I cannot say I agree with much of his work.
What I often find frustrating in what you call the new ‘cultural economy’
is, rather precisely, what you find to be so positive. There is, first, a kind
of eclectic multidimensionality, which amounts to a kind of theorizing-asaggregation:
This matters and that matters, and this matters and that
matters too. ‘Of course things are symbolic, but they are also material, so
this is a material symbol.’ There is throughout this work a deep reluctance
to investigate the internal patterning of cultural structures and to allow
such structures to have some forceful causal role. There seems to be a guilt
toward materialism. For example, in Actor-Network Theory, the ontology
is relentlessly material, there is no symbolic imagining to speak of, and a
powerful if implicit resistance to hermeneutics. To me, it seems like
sleight-of-hand to assert that, e.g. a marriage ceremony is a ‘sociotechnical
arrangement’. I do not think so; what it is technical about it?
Why is it a form of materiality? With such formulations, we are, sadly,
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far away from John Austin’s marriage ceremony, which is performatively
sustained as an institution, a symbolic or cultural convention. I think, in
other words, that there is a great fear of idealism in these traditions of British
sociology, and this fear is misplaced, because cultural sociology is not idealistic
(see my debate with Gregor McClennan in Alexander, 2005b).
There is an extraordinary interest in capitalism and the economic, and
this overriding interest has produced important new insights into postmodern
capitalism. By contrast, you can’t learn much about the current
historical face of capitalism from reading American economic sociology,
because it aims to create models for capitalism as such. When, after all, are
markets not ‘imbedded’? The British are much more sensitive to historical
stages and periods. Perhaps the British are so aware of historicity because
they have experienced such a recent movement from an imperial dominant
society to a society without imperial power, moving from the center of
industrial capitalism to an important but still second-tier service economy
in a very dramatic fashion.
Yet, while I find the new British sociology of capitalism challenging and
often compelling, I am disappointed by its reluctance to embrace the relative
autonomy of meaning, to allow there to be meaning ‘for meaning’s sake’.
What if a brand is a material symbolization of styles of being masculine or
feminine, rather than the masculine or feminine brand being formulated
simply as a way to sell goods? Might postindustrial capitalism not be a way
of materializing cultural processes, rather than the other way around? I
think Celia Lury might well respond that, ‘of course it is’, and that Scott
Lash would as well. Yet, while there is quite a different emphasis to the
new cultural economy, I believe that Lash’s recent writing on ‘intensive
culture’, which moves forcibly to embrace Durkhiem’s later cultural sociology,
will have the effect of reducing the intellectual distance between the
two approaches.
Q14 In this sense, would you say that this kind of British sociology is complementary
with your strong program rather than challenging it?
JA You could read it in different ways. I see it as both complementary and
antagonistic. On the one hand, the new cultural economy explains why
symbolic processes are central to contemporary economic life, and it draws
our attention to the permeation of market societies by symbolic processes.
On the other hand, as I have suggested earlier, there is not nearly enough
attention to this relative autonomy of meanings inside these processes. I
would like to ask, moreover, what is outside of economic sociology? Is there
a civil society? Is there a religious sphere? As far as I can make out, most
of the truly creative British sociologists have been concentrating on capitalism
in one form or another, especially if we broaden the production of power
to include govermentality. But there are significant parts of contemporary
society that are not about capitalism or whose primary tension is not with
the economic.
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Q15 Your later work can be understood as a ‘pragmatic’ turn, in the sense that
it is not just about the role of culture, but it is also a theory and method
to understand the way ‘the culture is made flesh’ (performance). In this
path, one of the main break points is with more rigid sociologies such as
the one done by Bourdieu, specially his last works. It seems that French
sociology has also broken with him, developing its own ‘pragmatic turn’,
where action, performance, justification, are central. Do you think your
work can be seen as complementary with French new trends, specifically
‘Conventions’ (Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot) or ‘Actor-Network
Theory’ (Bruno Latour and Michel Callon)?
JA May I turn the tables a bit? Do you actually consider the sociology of
Boltanski and Thévenot as complementary to actor network theory? OK,
both have an element of pragmatism and both break with Bourdieu, but I
think the resemblance stops there.
Whereas I have never found ANT to offer much to cultural sociology,
much less civil sphere theory, I have been following Boltanski andThévenot’s
work since I lived in Paris in the early 1990s. I find there significant parallels
with what the strong program is up to. I have learned a lot from them
and I remain fascinated by various dimensions of their thought. Still, I have
significant criticisms and reservations.
What I like is that it poses actors interpretatively. It looks at the relation
of macro to micro as rules that inform macrospheres, and that these are
translated into action problems; I also am impressed with the manner in
which they deploy multiple spheres which have relative autonomy from
each other, and how they describe actors as having problems of finding out
what sphere actions and things belong normatively to. And how, in doing
so, actors engage not only in struggles but compromises and arguments.
So I think we have a similar understanding of the world. The differences
are that they posit spheres as stable and given – at least in their classic statement,
from 1991, these worlds have more or less always been there. For
me, by contrast, I think of the spheres more as built up from social, mental,
intellectual, and cultural histories. They also are, again at least in the work
De la Justificiation (1991), more interested in developing a kind of logic of
argumentation explaining how inter-sphere discussions and decisions are
made. I do understand why the Boltanski and Thévenot group moved away
from Bourdieu, and I share their reservations. Thevenot and I spoke a lot
about this in the early 1990s, and realized we were moving in the same
direction.
Regarding ANT, I also understand, of course, that they have always
been in a critical relationship with Bourdieu. From the beginnings of my
writings in the 1980s I developed an appreciation of the traditions of
ethnomethodology, phenomenology, and symbolic interactionism within
which ANT works. I also explained, in those early theoretical works of mine,
what I called ‘the individualist dilemma’ that haunts these traditions, and
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which, for me, vitiates their criticisms of Durkheim and their championing
of Tarde. It is not that I agree with Durkheim that individual action is not
important. The importance of contingent effort is something I have tried
to incorporate from ‘Action and Its Environments’ (1987b) – which drew
on microsociological, more individually-centered traditions – to my
performance theory in the present day. I have always tried to pay attention
to what I call the concrete individual, not just the analytic, to the person
in time and space, to the group in an actual situation. It is such concreteness
that fascinates and preoccupies ANT, which emerges out of phenomenology
and ethnomethodology. Yet, I have a big problem with such an
overweening focus on concrete individuals and objects. It is too one-sidedly
pragmatic, concerned with problem solving, practical action, inventiveness,
observation, and experience in the immediate sense. That ignores the
collective representations which to me are there. I believe there is much
more of a dialectical and simultaneous relation between background representations
and the embeddedness of action in a set of practical problems.
This marks the difference between my performance approach and their
own. They have notions of text as materiality, such that pragmatics is about
practice, as truly practical action. For me, by contrast, pragmatics must be
put into a relation with the ‘cultural’. It is not wise to cut ourselves off from
the tradition of the late Durkheim, which developed into structuralism,
semiotics, and post-structuralism. I do see performance as a grounding
concept that has the potential to combine a non-instrumental understanding
of action and an interest and appreciation of constraining environments
and interactional processes. I also have become deeply interested in
objects and am developing a theory of what I call ‘iconic consciousness’
(Alexander, 2008a, 2008b).
Cultural Sociology and the End of the Social
Q16 Cultural Sociology is necessarily based on a strong sense of the social.
Nevertheless, the relevance and value of this concept for current social
sciences has been put into question. In this context, how has your Cultural
Sociology rethought the notion of the social?
JA In terms of my own intellectual biography, my experience with this
argument for ‘the end of the social’ has been my decade and a half
‘love/hate’ relationship with the ideas of Alain Touraine and his group,
throughout which time we have remained personally on very friendly
terms. I benefited greatly from Touraine’s redirection of social movement
theory and his emphasis on the cultural framing of industrial and postindustrial
societies, and also, as well, from his insistence that there should
be a political connection to sociological theorizing. At the same time, I have
always resisted, and in fact been deeply perplexed by, Touraine’s insistence
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that ‘society’ has ceased to exist. What can this mean, exactly? Certainly,
for Touraine, it is clear most recently that it means there has been an extraordinary
enlargement for the scope of individual formation. But would one
say that the expansion, much less the formation, of the self can be understood
without reference to cultural texts, or to a broader and more tolerant
and diverse civil sphere? The bottom line in all this is that social actors
themselves continually make reference to ‘society’. They believe that society
exists, and that is good enough for me. As a cultural sociologist, it is my
job to find out what they mean.
Acknowledgement
The interview was carried out on 4 June 2007 at Goldsmiths, University of London. The
interview transcription was later reviewed and edited by the interviewers and Jeffrey
Alexander.
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■ Jeffrey Alexander is the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at
Yale University and Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Sociology (CCS). He
works in the areas of theory, culture, and politics. An exponent of the ‘strong
program’ in cultural sociology, he has investigated the cultural codes and narratives
that inform diverse areas of social life. He is the author of The Meanings of
Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (Oxford, 2003); Cultural Trauma and Collective
Identity (with Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser, and Sztompka, University of California
Press, 2004); The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim (edited with Philip Smith,
2005). With Bernhard Giesen and Jason Mast, he is the editor of Social Performance:
Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual (Cambridge, 2006). In the field of
politics, Alexander has written The Civil Sphere (Oxford, 2006), which includes
discussions of gender, race, and religion, as well as new theorizing about social
movements and incorporation. Recently he has edited with Kenneth Thompson
A Contemporary Introduction to Sociology: Culture and Society in Transition
(Paradigm, 2008). ■
■ Rodrigo Cordero is PhD Candidate at the Department of Sociology, University
of Warwick. He holds a BA and MA in Sociology from the Pontificia Universidad
Católica de Chile. Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, Universidad
Diego Portales (Santiago de Chile) [r.a.cordero-vega@warwick.ac.uk] ■
■ Francisco Carballo is PhD Candidate at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths,
University of London. He holds a BA and MA from the National Autonomous
University of Mexico (UNAM) and the New School for Social Research, respectively.
Until recently he lectured in social theory and political thought at UNAM. His
publications range from topics in political and social theory to analyses of the
conditions of law and order in Latin American societies. [cup01fc@gold.ac.uk] ■
■ José Ossandón is PhD Candidate at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths
University of London. He holds BA and MA in Sociology from the Pontificia Universidad
Católica de Chile. He currently lectures in social theory at Universidad Diego
Portales (Santiago de Chile) [jose.ossandon@upd.cl] ■
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