Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance Between Ritual and Strategy*
JEFFREY C. ALEXANDER
Yale University
From its very beginnings, the social study of culture has been polarized between structuralist
theories that treat meaning as a text and investigate the patterning that provides
relative autonomy and pragmatist theories that treat meaning as emerging from the
contingencies of individual and collective action—so-called practices—and that analyze
cultural patterns as reflections of power and material interest. In this article, I present a
theory of cultural pragmatics that transcends this division, bringing meaning structures,
contingency, power, and materiality together in a new way. My argument is that the
materiality of practices should be replaced by the more multidimensional concept of
performances. Drawing on the new field of performance studies, cultural pragmatics
demonstrates how social performances, whether individual or collective, can be analogized
systematically to theatrical ones. After defining the elements of social performance, I
suggest that these elements have become ‘‘de-fused’’ as societies have become more complex.
Performances are successful only insofar as they can ‘‘re-fuse’’ these increasingly
disentangled elements. In a fused performance, audiences identify with actors, and cultural
scripts achieve verisimilitude through effective mise-en-sce` ne. Performances fail when this
relinking process is incomplete: the elements of performance remain apart, and social
action seems inauthentic and artificial, failing to persuade. Refusion, by contrast, allows
actors to communicate the meanings of their actions successfully and thus to pursue their
interests effectively.
Rituals are episodes of repeated and simplified cultural communication in which the
direct partners to a social interaction, and those observing it, share a mutual belief in
the descriptive and prescriptive validity of the communication’s symbolic contents
and accept the authenticity of one another’s intentions. It is because of this shared
understanding of intention and content, and in the intrinsic validity of the interaction,
that rituals have their effect and affect. Ritual effectiveness energizes the participants
and attaches them to each other, increases their identification with the symbolic
objects of communication, and intensifies the connection of the participants and the
symbolic objects with the observing audience, the relevant ‘‘community’’ at large.
If there is one cultural quality that marks the earliest forms of human social
organization, it is the centrality of rituals. From births to conjugal relationships, from
peaceful foreign relations to the preparation for war, from the healing of the sick to
the celebration of collective well-being, from transitions through the age structure to
the assumption of new occupational and political roles, the affirmation of leadership and
the celebration of anniversaries—in earlier forms of society such social processes tended
to be marked by ritualized symbolic communication. If there is one cultural quality
that differentiates more contemporary, large-scale, and complex social organizations
*I am grateful to the members of the Yale-Konstanz seminars for feedback on earlier versions of this
essay, and particularly to Bernhard Giesen and Jason Mast. Address correspondence to: Jeffrey Alexander,
Department of Sociology, Yale University, PO Box 208265, New Haven, CT 06520-8265; e-mail:
Jeffrey.Alexander@yale.edu.
Sociological Theory 22:4 December 2004
# American Sociological Association. 1307 New York Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20005-4701
from earlier forms, it is that the centrality of such ritual processes has been displaced.
Contemporary societies revolve around open-ended conflicts between parties who do
not necessarily share beliefs, frequently do not accept the validity of one another’s
intention, and often disagree even about the descriptions that people offer for acts.
Social observers, whether they are more scientific or more philosophical, have
found innumerable ways to conceptualize this historical transformation, starting
with such thoroughly discredited evolutionary contrasts as primitive/advanced or
barbarian/civilized, and moving on to more legitimate but still overly binary distinctions
such as traditional/modern, oral/literate, or simple/complex. One does not have
to be an evolutionist or to accept the simplifying dichotomies of meta-history to see that
a broad change has occurred. Max Weber pitted his contingent historical approach
against every shred of evolutionary thinking, yet this decentering of ritual was precisely
what he meant by the movement from charisma to routinization and from traditional to
value and goal-rational society. Rather than being organized primarily through rituals
that affirm metaphysical and consensual beliefs, contemporary societies have opened
themselves to processes of negotiations and reflexivity about means and ends, with the
result that conflict, disappointment, and feelings of bad faith are at least as common as
integration, affirmation, and the energizing of the collective spirit.
Still, most of us who live in these more reflexive and fragmented societies are also
aware that, for better and for worse, such processes of rationalization in fact have not
completely won the day (Alexander 2003a). There is a continuing symbolic intensity
based on repeated and simplified cognitive and moral frames (Goffman 1967, 1974)
that continues to mark all sorts of individual and private relationships. More public
and collective processes—from social movements (Eyerman and Jamison 1990) to
wars (Smith 1993), revolutions (Apter and Saich 1994; Hunt 1984; Sewell 1980), and
political transitions (Giesen forthcoming; Edles 1998), and even to the construction of
scientific communities (Hagstrom 1965)—continue to depend on the simplifying
structures of symbolic communications and on cultural interactions that rely on,
and to some degree can generate, intuitive and unreflective trust (Sztompka 1999;
Barber 1983). It might even be said that, in a differentiated, stratified, and reflexive
society, a strategy’s success depends on belief in the validity of the cultural contents of
the strategist’s symbolic communication and on accepting the authenticity and even the
sincerity of another’s strategic intentions. Virtually every kind of modern collectivity,
moreover, seems to depend at one time or another on integrative processes that create
some sense of shared identity (Giesen 1998; Spillman 1997; Ringmar 1996), even if these
are forged, as they all too often are, in opposition to simplistic constructions of those
who are putatively on the other side (Jacobs 2000; Ku 1999; Chan 1999).
At both the micro and the macro levels, both among individuals and between and
within collectivities, our societies still seem to be permeated by symbolic, ritual-like
activities. It is precisely this notion of ‘‘ritual-like,’’ however, that indicates the puzzle
we face. We are aware that very central processes in complex societies are symbolic,
and that sometimes they are also integrative, at the group, intergroup, and even
societal level. But we also clearly sense that these processes are not rituals in the
traditional sense (cf. Lukes 1977). Even when they affirm validity and authenticity
and produce integration, their effervescence is short lived. If they have achieved
simplicity, it is unlikely they will be repeated. If they are repeated, it is unlikely that
the symbolic communication can ever be so simplified in the same way again.
This is the puzzle to which the present article is addressed. Is it possible to develop
a theory that can explain how the integration of particular groups and sometimes
even whole collectivities can be achieved through symbolic communications, while
528 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
continuing to account for cultural complexity and contradiction, for institutional
differentiation, contending social power, and segmentation? Can a theory give full
credence to the continuing role of belief while acknowledging that unbelief and
criticism are also the central hallmarks of our time?
In order to solve this puzzle, I will develop a systematic, macro-sociological model of
social action as cultural performance. In so doing, I will enter not only into the historical
origins of theatrical performance and dramaturgical theory (e.g., Turner 2002; Schechner
2002; Auslander 1997; Carlson 1996; Geertz 1980; Goffman 1974; Burke 1965; Austin
1957) but also into the history and theories of social performance.1
This means looking at
how, and why, symbolic action moved from ritual to theater (Turner 1982) and why it
so often moves back to ‘‘ritual-like’’ processes again (Schechner 1976).
The gist of my argument can be stated simply. The more simple the collective organization,
the less its social and cultural parts are segmented and differentiated, the more
the elements of social performances are fused. The more complex, segmented, and
differentiated the collectivity, the more these elements of social performance become
de-fused. To be effective in a society of increasing complexity, social performances
must engage in a project of re-fusion. To the degree they achieve re-fusion,
social performances become convincing and effective—more ritual-like. To the degree
that social performances remain de-fused, they seem artificial and contrived, less like
rituals than like performances in the pejorative sense. They are less effective as a result.
Failed performances are those in which the actor, whether individual or collective, has
been unable to sew back together the elements of performance to make them seem
connected seamlessly. This performative failure makes it much more difficult for the
actor to realize his or her intentions in a practical way.
This argument points immediately to the question of just what the elements of
social performance are. I will elucidate these in the section immediately following.
Then, with this analytical model of social performance safely in hand, I will turn back
to the historical questions of what allowed earlier societies to more frequently make
their performances into rituals and how later social developments created the
ambiguous and slippery contexts for performative action in which we find ourselves
today. Once this historical argument is established, I will come back to the model of
performative success and failure and will elaborate its interdependent elements in
more detail.
THE ELEMENTS OF CULTURAL PERFORMANCE
Cultural performance is the social process by which actors, individually or in concert,
display for others the meaning of their social situation. This meaning may or may not
be one to which they themselves subjectively adhere; it is the meaning that they, as
social actors, consciously or unconsciously wish to have others believe. In order for
their display to be effective, actors must offer a plausible performance, one that leads
those to whom their actions and gestures are directed to accept their motives and
explanations as a reasonable account (Scott and Lyman 1968; Garfinkel 1967). As
Gerth and Mills (1964:55) once put it, ‘‘Our gestures do not necessarily ‘express’ our prior
feelings,’’ but rather ‘‘they make available to others a sign.’’ Successful performance
1
The aim of the present article is to develop theory at the middle range. For a more meta-theoretical
investigation of the intellectual history of performance theory and its relationship to more textual cultural
theories, and for the positioning of cultural pragmatics vis-a` -vis other contemporary theoretical orientations
in the social sciences and humanities, see Alexander and Mast (forthcoming).
CULTURAL PRAGMATICS 529
depends on the ability to convince others that one’s performance is true, with all
the ambiguities that the notion of aesthetic truth implies. Once we understand
cultural performance in this way, we can easily make out the basic elements that
compose it.
Systems of Collective Representation: Background Symbols and Foreground Scripts
Marx ([1852] 1962:247) observed that ‘‘just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing
themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed,’’ social
actors ‘‘anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow
from them names, battle cries, and costumes in order to present the new scene of
world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.’’ Marx is
describing here the systems of collective representations that background every
performative act.
Actors present themselves as being motivated by and toward existential, emotional,
and moral concerns, the meanings of which are defined by patterns of signifiers whose
referents are the social, physical, natural, and cosmological worlds within which
actors and audiences live. One part of this symbolic reference provides the deep
background of collective representations for social performance; another part composes
the foreground, the scripts that are the immediate referent for action. These
latter can be understood as constituting the performance’s immediate referential text.
As constructed by the performative imagination, background and foreground symbols
are structured by codes that provide analogies and antipathies and by narratives
that provide chronologies. In symbolizing actors’ and audiences’ worlds, these narratives
and codes simultaneously condense and elaborate, and they employ a wide range
of rhetorical devices, from metaphor to synecdoche, to configure social and emotional
life in compelling and coherent ways. Systems of collective representations range from
‘‘time immemorial’’ myths to invented traditions created right on the spot, from oral
traditions to scripts prepared by such specialists as playwrights, journalists, and
speech writers.
Like any other text, these collective representations, whether background or foreground,
can be evaluated for their dramatic effectiveness. I will say more about this
later, but what is important at this point is to see that no matter how intrinsically
effective, collective representations do not speak themselves. Boulton (1960:3) once
described theater as ‘‘literature that walks and talks before our eyes.’’ It is this need for
walking and talking—and seeing and listening to the walking and talking—that makes
the practical pragmatics of performance different from the cultural logic of texts. It is
at this conjuncture that cultural pragmatics is born.
Actors
These patterned representations are put into practice, or are encoded (Hall 1980), by
flesh-and-blood people. As Reiss (1971:138) suggested in his study of the relation
between theatrical technique and meaning in 17th-century French theater, ‘‘the actor
is as real as the spectator; he is in fact present in their midst.’’ Whether or not they are
consciously aware of the distinction between collective representations and their
walking and talking, the actor’s aim is to make this distinction disappear. As Reiss
(1971:142) put it, the actor’s desire is ‘‘to cause the spectator to confuse his emotions
with those of the stage character.’’ While performers must be oriented to background
530 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
and foreground representations, their motivations vis-a` -vis these patterns are
contingent. In psychological terms, the relation between actor and text depends
on cathexis. The relation between actor and audience, in turn, depends on the
ability to project these emotions and textual patterns as moral evaluations. If
those who perform cultural scripts do not possess the requisite skills (Bauman
1989), then they may fail miserably in the effort to project their meanings
effectively.
Observers/Audience
Cultural texts are performed so that meanings can be displayed to others. ‘‘Others’’
constitutes the audience of observers for cultural performance. They decode what
actors have encoded (Hall 1980), but they do so in variable ways. If cultural texts are
to be communicated convincingly, there needs to be a process of cultural extension
that expands from script and actor to audience. Cultural extension must be accompanied
by a process of psychological identification, such that the members of the
audience project themselves into the characters they see onstage. There is empirical
variation in the extent to which cultural extension and psychological identification
actually occur. Audiences may be focused or distracted, attentive or uninterested
(Verdery 1991:6; Berezin 1997:28, 35, 250). Even if actors cathect to cultural texts,
and even if they themselves possess high levels of cultural proficiency, their projections
still may not be persuasive to the audience/observers. Observation can be merely
cognitive. An audience can see and can understand without experiencing emotional or
moral signification. As we will see in the following section, there are often social
explanations of this variability. Audiences may represent social statuses orthogonal to
the status of performers. Audience attendance may not be required, or it may be
merely compelled. Critics can intervene between performance and audience. There
might not be an audience in the contemporary sense at all, but only participants
observing themselves and their fellow performers. This latter condition facilitates
cultural identification and psychological extension, though it is a condition much
less frequently encountered in the complex societies of the present day.
Background
Representations
Psychological Identification
Cultural Extension
Interpretation
Cathexis
Decoding
Audience
Scripts
Text Actor(s)
Figure 1. Successful performance: re-fusion.
CULTURAL PRAGMATICS 531
Means of Symbolic Production
In order to perform a cultural text before an audience, actors need access to the
mundane material things that allow symbolic projections to be made. They need
objects that can serve as iconic representations to help them dramatize and make
vivid the invisible motives and morals they are trying to represent. This material
ranges from clothing to every other sort of ‘‘standardized expressive equipment’’
(Goffman 1956:34–51). Actors also require a physical place to perform and the
means to assure the transmission of their performance to an audience.
Mise-en-Sce`ne
With texts and means in hand, and audience(s) before them, social actors engage in
dramatic social action, entering into and projecting the ensemble of physical and
verbal gestures that constitutes performance. This ensemble of gestures involves more
than the symbolic devices that structure a nonperformed symbolic text. If a text is to
walk and talk, it must be sequenced temporally and choreographed spatially (e.g.,
Berezin 1997:156). The exigencies of time and space create specific aesthetic demands;
at some historical juncture new social roles like director and producer emerge that
specialize in this task of putting text ‘‘into the scene.’’
Social Power
The distribution of power in society—the nature of its political, economic, and status
hierarchies, and the relations among its elites—profoundly affects the performance
process. Power establishes an external boundary for cultural pragmatics that parallels
the internal boundary established by a performance’s background representations.
Not all texts are equally legitimate in the eyes of the powers that be, whether
possessors of material or interpretive power. Not all performances, and not all parts
of a particular performance, are allowed to proceed. Will social power (Mann 1986)
seek to eliminate certain parts of a cultural text? Who will be allowed to act in a
performance, and with what means? Who will be allowed to attend? What kinds of
responses will be permitted from audience/observer? Are there powers that have the
authority to interpret performances independently of those that have the authority to
produce them? Are these interpretive powers also independent of the actors and the
Text
Audience
Background
Representations
Scripts
Actor(s)
Figure 2. Performance failure: de-fusion.
532 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
audience itself, or are social power, symbolic knowledge, and interpretive authority
much more closely linked?
***
Every social performance, whether individual or collective, is affected fundamentally
by each of the elements presented here. In the language of hermeneutics, this
sketch of interdependent elements provides a framework for the interpretive reconstruction
of the meanings of performative action. In the language of explanation, it
provides a model of causality. One can say that every social performance is determined
partly by each of the elements I have laid out—that each is a necessary but not
sufficient cause of every performative act. While empirically interrelated, each element
has some autonomy, not only analytically but empirically vis-a` -vis the others. Taken
together, they determine, and measure, whether and how a performance occurs, and
the degree to which it succeeds or fails in its effect.
Two pathways lead out from the discussion thus far. The analytic model can be
developed further, elaborating the nature of each factor and its interrelations with the
others. I will take up this task in a later section. Before doing so, I will engage in
a historical discussion. I wish to explore how the analytical model I have just laid out,
despite the fact it is so far only presented very simply, already provides significant
insight into the central puzzle of ritual and rationalization with which I introduced
this article and that defines its central question.
THE CONDITIONS FOR PERFORMATIVITY:
HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS
The model of performance I am developing here provides a new way of looking at
cultural and organizational change over broad spans of historical time. We can see
differently how and why rituals were once so central to band and tribal societies and
why the nature of symbolic action changed so remarkably with the rise of states,
empires, and churches. We can understand why both the theater and the democratic
polis arose for the first time in ancient Greece and why theater emerged once again
during the early modern period at the same time as open-ended social dramas became
central to determining the nature of social and political authority. We can understand
why Romanticism, secularization, and industrial society made the authenticity of
symbolic action such a central question for modern times.
Old Fashioned Rituals: Symbolic Performances in Early Societies
Colonial and modernist thinkers were deeply impressed by the ritualistic processes
that explorers and anthropologists observed when they encountered societies that had
not experienced ‘‘civilization’’ or ‘‘modernity.’’ Some associated the frequency of
rituals with the putative purity of early societies (Huizinga [1938] 1950) and others
with some sort of distinctively primitive, nonrational mentality (Levy-Bruhl 1923).
Huizinga ([1938] 1950:14), for example, stressed that rituals create not a ‘‘sham
reality’’ but ‘‘a mystical one,’’ in which ‘‘something invisible and inactual takes
beautiful, actual, holy form.’’ Less romantic observers still emphasized the automatic,
predictable, engulfing, and spontaneous qualities of ritual life. Weber exemplified this
understanding in a sociological manner; it also marked the modern anthropological
approach to ritual that became paradigmatic. Turner (1977:183) defined rituals as
‘‘stereotyped’’ and as ‘‘sequestered’’; Goody (1986:21) called them ‘‘homeostatic’’; and
CULTURAL PRAGMATICS 533
Leach (1972:334), insisting also on ‘‘repetition,’’ expresses his wonderment at how, in
the rituals he observed, ‘‘everything in fact happened just as predicted’’ (1972:199).
Against these arguments for the essential and fundamental difference of symbolic
interactions in earlier societies, critical and postmodern anthropologists have argued
for their more ‘‘conjunctural’’ (Clifford 1988:11) quality. Those mysterious rituals that
aroused such intense admiration and curiosity among earlier observers, it is argued,
should be seen not as expressions of some distinctive essence but simply as a different kind
of practice (Conquergood 1992). The model I am developing here allows us to frame this
important insight in a more nuanced, less polemical, and more empirically oriented way.
Rituals in early societies, I wish to suggest, were not so much practices as performances,
and in this they indeed are made of the same stuff as social actions in more complex
societies. In an introduction to his edition of Turner’s posthumous essays, Schechner
(1987:7) suggested that ‘‘all performance has at its core a ritual action.’’ It is better, I think,
to reverse this statement, and to say that all ritual has at its core a performative act.
This is not to deny the differences between rituals and performances of other kinds.
What it does suggest, however, is that they exist on the same continuum and that the
difference between them is a matter of variation, not fundamental type. Ritual
performances reflect the social structures and cultures of their historically situated
societies. They are distinctive in that they are fused. Fusion is much more likely to be
achieved in the conditionsof lesscomplex societies, but it occurs in complex societies as well.
To see why performances in simpler societies more frequently became rituals, we
must examine how early social structure and culture defined the elements of performance
and related them to one another in a distinctive way. The explanation can be
found in their much smaller size and scale; in the more mythical and metaphysical
nature of their beliefs; and in the more integrated and overlapping nature of their
institutions, culture, and social structures. Membership in the earliest human societies
(Service 1962, 1979) was organized around the axes of kinship, age, and gender.
Forming collectivities of 60 to 80 members, people supported themselves by hunting
and gathering and participated in a small set of social roles with which every person
was thoroughly familiar. By all accounts, the subjectivity that corresponded with this
kind of social organization resembled what Stanner (1972), when speaking of the
Australian Aboriginals, called ‘‘dream time.’’ Such consciousness merged mundane
and practical dimensions with the sacred and metaphysical to the extent that religion
did not exist as a separate form. In such societies, as Service (1962:109) once remarked,
‘‘there is no religious organization’’ that is ‘‘separated from family and band.’’
The structural and cultural organization of such early forms of societies suggests
differences in the kinds of social performance they can produce. The collective
representations to which these social performances refer are not texts composed by
specialists for segmented subgroups in complex and contentious social orders. Nor do
these collective representations form a critical ‘‘metacommentary’’ (Geertz 1973) on
social life, for there does not yet exist deep tension between mundane and transcendental
spheres (Goody 1986; Habermas 1982–1983; Eisenstadt 1982; Bellah 1970). The early
anthropologists Spencer and Gillen (1927) were right at least in this, for they suggested
that the Engwura ritual cycle of the Australian Arunta recapitulated the actual life style
of the Arunta males. A century later, when Schechner (1976:197) observed the Tsembaga
dance of the Kaiko, he confirmed that ‘‘all the basic moves and sounds—even the charge
into the central space—are adaptations and direct lifts from battle.’’
The tight intertwining of cultural text and social structure that marks social
performances in early societies provides a contextual frame for Durkheim’s theoretical
argument about religion as simply society writ large. While claiming to propose a
534 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
paradigm for studying every religion at all times, Durkheim might better be understood
as describing the context for social performances in early societies. Durkheim
insists that culture is identical with religion, that any ‘‘proper’’ religious belief is shared
by every member of the group, and that these shared beliefs are always translated into
the practices he calls rituals, or rites. ‘‘Not only are they individually accepted by all
members of that group, but they also belong to the group and unify it . . . A society
whose members are united because they imagine the sacred world and its relation with
the profane world in the same way, and because they translate this common representation
into identical practices, is called a Church’’ (Durkheim [1912] 1995:41, italics
added).2
In such ritualized performances, the belief dimension is experienced as personal,
immediate, and iconographic. Through the painting, masking, and reconfiguring of
the physical body, the actors in these performances seek not only metaphorically but
literally to become the text, their goal being to project the fusion of human and totem,
‘‘man and God,’’ sacred and mundane. The symbolic roles that define participation in
such ritualized performances emerge directly, and without mediation, from the other
social roles actors play. In the Engwura ritual (Spencer and Gillen 1927), the Arunta
males performed the parts they actually held in everyday Arunta life. When social
actors perform such roles, they do not have a sense of separation from them; they
have little self-consciousness about themselves as actors. For participants and
observers, rituals are not considered to be a performance in the contemporary sense
at all but rather to be a natural and necessary dimension of ongoing social life. As for
the means of symbolic production, while not always immediately available, they
generally are near at hand—a ditch dug with the sharp bones of animals, a line
drawn from the red coloring of wild flowers, a headdress made from bird feathers,
an amulet fashioned from a parrot’s beak (Turner 1969:23–37).
In this type of social organization, participation in ritual performance is not
contingent, either for the actors or the observers. Participation is determined by the
established and accepted hierarchies of gender and age, not by individual choices that
respond to the sanctions and rewards of social powers or segmented social groups.
Every relevant party in the band or tribe must attend to ritual performances. Many
ceremonies involve the entire community, for they ‘‘regard their collective well-being
to be dependent upon a common body of ritual performances’’ (Rappaport 1968, in
Schechner 1976:211). Turner (1982:31, original italics) attested that ‘‘the whole
community goes through the entire ritual round.’’ Durkheim ([1912] 1995) also
emphasized obligation, connecting it with the internal coherence of the audience. In
the ritual phase of Aboriginal society, he wrote, ‘‘the population comes together,
concentrating itself at specific places . . . The concentration takes place when a clan
or a portion of the tribe is summoned to come together’’ ([1912] 1995:217).
2
Because Durkheim is the founder of virtually every strong program for cultural analysis in the human
sciences (Smith and Alexander forthcoming), it is particularly unfortunate that he equated socially
meaningful symbolic action with ritual rather than conceptualizing ritual as one moment along a
continuum of social performance that ranges from fused to defused. One result has been the very broad
usage of ‘‘ritual’’ as a synonym for symbolic action (e.g., Goffman 1967; Collins 2004), a usage that
camouflages the contingency of symbolic action. Another result has been the restriction of symbolic
action to highly integrated and repetitive, i.e., ‘‘ritualized,’’ situations, a restriction that conceptualizes
acultural, strategic, and materialistic ‘‘practices’’ as taking up the rest of the action space. In his ‘‘religious
sociology’’ of aboriginal societies, Durkheim wished to establish the basic elements of a cultural sociology of
contemporary life. While he succeeded in laying the foundations for such a theory, he failed to sufficiently
differentiate, in an analytical manner, the conditions for symbolic action in simpler and more complex
societies. He could not have fully succeeded in his ambition, then, without the kind of differentiated and
variable theory of the social conditions for symbolic activity I am presenting here.
CULTURAL PRAGMATICS 535
Nor are attendees only observers. At various points in the ritual, those merely watching
the ritual performance are called upon to participate—sometimes as principals and at
other times as members of an attentive chorus providing remonstrations of approval
through such demonstrative acts as shouting, crying, and applause. At key phases in
male initiation ceremonies, for example, women attend closely and, at particular
moments, play significant ritual roles (Schechner 2002). They express indifference and
rejection early in the performance and display physical signs of welcome and admiration
in order to mark its end. Even when they do not participate, ritual audiences are hardly
strangers. They are linked to performers by direct or indirect family ties.
In terms of the elementary model I have laid out already, it seems clear that such
ritualized social actions fuse the various components of performance—actors, audiences,
representations, means of symbolic production, social power, and mise-en-sce`ne.
It is the actor/audience part of this fusion to which Service (1962:109) referred
when he wrote that ‘‘the congregation is the camp itself.’’ Levi-Strauss (1963:179)
meant to emphasize the same fusing when he spoke of the ‘‘fabulation’’ of ritual as a
‘‘threefold experience.’’ It consists ‘‘first of the shaman himself, who, if his calling is a
true one . . . undergoes specific states of a psychosomatic nature; second, that of the
sick person, who may or may not experience an improvement of his condition; and,
finally, that of the public, who also participates in the cure, experiencing an enthusiasm
and an intellectual and emotional satisfaction which produce collective support.’’
In the studies of shamanistic rituals offered by postmodern performance
theorists, we can read their ethnographic accounts as suggesting fusion in much the
same way. ‘‘They derive their power from listening to the others and absorbing daily
realities. While they cure, they take into them their patients’ possessions and obsessions
and let the latter’s illnesses become theirs . . . The very close relationship these
healers maintain with their patients remains the determining factor of the cure’’ (Trinh
1989, in Conquergood 1992:44).
Audience
Mise-en
-scène
Collective
(Background)
Representations
Social
Powers
Means of
Symbolic Production
Actor(s)
Figure 3. The fused elements of performance inside simple social organization.
536 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
With sacred texts tied to mundane society, actors’ roles tied to social roles,
performance directly expressing symbolic text and social life, obligatory participation,
and homogeneous and attentive audiences it is hardly surprising that the effects of
ritual performances tend to be immediate and only infrequently depart from the
expectations of actors and scripts (cf. Schechner 1976:205, 1981:92–94). As LeviStrauss
attested (1963:168, italics added), ‘‘There is . . . no reason to doubt the efficacy
of certain magical practices’’ precisely because ‘‘the efficacy of magic implies a belief in
magic.’’ Rites not only mark transitions but also create them, such that the participants
become something or somebody else as a result. Ritual performance not only
symbolizes a social relationship or change; it also actualizes it. There is a direct effect,
without mediation.
Anthropologists who have studied rituals in earlier forms of society reported that
the tricks of ritual specialists rarely were scrutinized. Levi-Strauss (1963:179) emphasized
the role of ‘‘group consensus’’ when he began his famous retelling of Boas’s
ethnography of Quesalid. The Kwakiutl Indian was so unusually curious as to insist
(at first) that the sorcerer’s rituals indeed were tricks. Yet after persuading ritual
specialists to teach him the tricks of their trade, Queslid himself went on to become a
great shaman. ‘‘Quesalid did not become a great shaman because he cured his
patients,’’ Levi-Strauss assures us; rather, ‘‘he cured his patients because he had
become a great shaman’’ (1963:180, italics added). Shamans effect cures, individual
and social, because participants and observers of their performances believe they have
the force to which they lay claim. Shamans, in other words, are institutionalized
masters of ritual performance. The success of this performance depends, in the first
place, on their dramatic skills, but these skills are intertwined with the other dimensions
that allow performances to be fused in simple social organizations.
Social Complexity and Postritual Performances
Fused performances creating ritual-like effects remain important in more complex
societies. There are two senses in which this is true. First, and less importantly for the
argument I am developing here, in primary groups such as families, gangs, and
intergenerationally stable ethnic communities, role performances often seem to reproduce
the macrocosm in the microcosm (Slater 1966). Even inside of complex societies,
audiences in such primary groups are relatively homogeneous, actors are familiar,
situations are repeated, and texts and traditions, while once invented, eventually take
on a time immemorial quality. The second sense in which ritual-like effects remain
central, more importantly for my argument here, is that fusion remains the goal of
performances even in complex societies. It is the context for performative success that
has changed.
As I noted earlier, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists have analyzed the
sporadic and uneven processes that created larger-scale societies in innumerably
different ways. There is sharply contrasting theorizing about the causes and pathways
of the movement away from simpler social organization in which ritual played a
central role to more complex social forms, which feature more strategic, reflexive, and
managed forms of symbolic communication. But there is wide consensus that such a
transformation did occur, that the processes of ‘‘complexification,’’ ‘‘rationalization,’’
or ‘‘differentiation’’ (Thrift 1999; Luhmann 1995; Champagne 1992; Alexander and
Colomy 1990; Habermas 1982–1983; Eisenstadt 1963) produce different kinds of
symbolic communications today. Even Goody (1986:22) spoke confidently of the
transition ‘‘from worldview to ideology.’’
CULTURAL PRAGMATICS 537
This emphasis on ideology is telling, and it leads directly to the argument about
changes in the conditions for performativity that I am making here. Earlier sociological
and anthropological investigations into the social causes of the transition from
simple forms of social organization emphasized the determining role of economic
change. Technological shifts created more productivity, which led to surplus and the
class system, and finally to the first distinctive political institutions, whose task was to
organize the newly stratified society and to administer material and organizational
needs. By the end of the 1950s, however, anthropologists already had begun to speak
less of technological changes than shifts in economic orientations and regimes. When
Fried (1971:103) explained ‘‘the move from egalitarian to rank society,’’ he described a
shift ‘‘from an economy dominated by reciprocity to one having redistribution as a
major device.’’ In the same kind of anti-determinist vein, when Service (1962:171)
explained movement beyond the monolithic structures of early societies to the ‘‘twin
forms of authority’’ that sustained distinctive economic and political elites, he
described it as ‘‘made possible by greater productivity’’ (1962:143, italics added).
Sahlins (1972) built on such arguments to suggest that it was not the economic
inability to create surplus that prevented growth but the ideological desire to
maintain a less productivity-driven, more leisurely style of life. Nolan and Lenski
(1995) made the point of this conceptual-cum-empirical development impossible
to overlook: ‘‘Technological advance created the possibility of a surplus, but to
transform that possibility into a reality required an ideology that motivated farmers
to produce more than they needed to stay alive and productive, and persuaded them
to turn that surplus over to someone else’’ (1995:157, italics added). As this last
comment makes clear, this whole historiographic transition in the anthropology of
early transitions points to the critical role of ideological projects. The creation of
surplus depended on new motivations, which could come about only through the
creation of symbolic performances to persuade others, not through their material
coercion.
The most striking social innovation that crystallized such a cultural shift to
ideology was the emergence of written texts. According to Goody (1986:12), the
emergence of text-based culture allowed and demanded ‘‘the decontextualization or
generalization’’ of collective representations, which in oral societies were intertwined
more tightly with local social structures and meanings. With writing, the ‘‘communicative
context has changed dramatically both as regards the emitter and as regards
the receivers’’ (1986:13): ‘‘In their very nature written statements of the law, of norms,
of rules, have had to be abstracted from particular situations in order to be addressed
to a universal audience out there, rather than delivered face-to-face to a specific group
of people at a particular time and place’’ (1986:13). Only symbolic projection beyond
the local would allow groups to use economic surplus to create more segmented,
unequal, and differentiated societies. Without the capacity for such ideological projection,
how else would these kinds of more fragmented social orders ever be coordinated,
much less integrated in an asymmetrical way?
These structural and ideological processes suggest a decisive shift in actors’
relation to the means of symbolic production. In text-based societies, literacy
is essential if the symbolic processes that legitimate social structure are to be
carried out successfully. Because literacy is difficult and expensive, priests ‘‘have
privileged access to the sacred texts.’’ This allows ‘‘the effective control of the
means of literate communication,’’ concentrating interpretative authority in elite
hands (Goody 1986:16–17). Alongside this new emergence of monopoly power,
indeed because of it, there emerges the necessity for exercising tight control over
538 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
performance in order to project this ideological control over distantiated and
subordinate groups. Evans-Pritchard (1940:172, italics added) once wrote that,
in order to ‘‘allow him to play the part he plays in feuds and quarrels,’’ the
Nuer chief needs only ‘‘ritual qualifications.’’ Because the Nuer ‘‘have no law or
government,’’ or any significant social stratification, obeying their chief follows
from the perception that ‘‘they are sacred persons’’ (1940:173). In his study of the
origins of political empires, Eisenstadt (1963:65) demonstrated, by contrast, that:
with the ‘‘relative autonomy of the religious sphere and its ‘disembeddedness’ from
the total community and from the other institutional spheres,’’ everything about
political legitimation has changed. The sacredness of the economic, political, and
ideological elites now has to be achieved, not assigned. As Eisenstadt put it, these
elites now ‘‘tried to maintain dominance’’ (1963:65, italics added); it was not given
automatically to them. ‘‘In all societies studied here, the rulers attempted to portray
themselves and the political systems they established as the bearers of special cultural
symbols and missions. They tried to depict themselves as transmitting distinct civilizations.
. . The rulers of these societies invariably tried to be perceived as the propagators
and upholders of [their] traditions [and they] desire[d] to minimize any group’s
pretensions to having the right to judge and evaluate the rulers or to sanction their
legitimation’’ (Eisenstadt 1963:141, italics added).
The most ambitious recent investigation into pharonic Egypt finds the same
processes at work. ‘‘A state imposed by force and coercing its subjects to pay taxes
and perform civil and military service,’’ Assmann (2002:74) wrote, ‘‘could hardly have
maintained itself if it had not rested on a core semiology that was as persuasive as the
state itself was demanding.’’ Reconstructing ‘‘the semantics that underlie the establishment
of the state’’ (2002:75), Assmann finds that in the Old Kingdom Egyptians
‘‘clung to the graphic realism of hieroglyphic writing’’ with an ‘‘astounding tenacity.’’
This ‘‘aspiration to permanence’’ meant that state rituals involved ‘‘maximum
care . . . to prevent deviation and improvisation.’’ Only the lector priest’s ‘‘knowledge
of the script and his ability to recite accurately’’ could ‘‘ensure that precisely the same
text was repeated at precisely the same time in the context of the same ritual event,
thus bringing meaning, duration, and action into precise alignment’’ (2002:70–71). By the
time of the Middle Kingdom, Assmann reported (2002:118–119), ‘‘the kings of the
Twelfth Dynasty were in a fundamentally different position.’’ Social and cultural
complexity had proceeded to such an extent that the pharonic rulers ‘‘had to assert
themselves against a largely literate and economically and militarily powerful
aristocracy . . . and win over the lower strata.’’ These objectives ‘‘could not be achieved
by force alone,’’ Assmann wrote, ‘‘but only by the power of eloquence and explanation.’’
The assertion of political power was no longer a matter of apodictic self-glorification,
but was accomplished.. .by the power of the word. ‘‘Be an artist in speech,’’ recommends
one text, ‘‘then you will be victorious. For behold: the sword-arm of a king is his
tongue. Stronger is the word than all fighting.’’ The kings of the Twelfth Dynasty
understood the close links between politics and the instantiation of meaning
(2002:118–119).
In terms of the model I am developing here, these empirical accounts suggest
de-fusion among the elements of performance: (1) the separation of written foreground
texts from background collective representations; (2) the estrangement of the means of
symbolic production from the mass of social actors; and (3) the separation of the elites
who carried out central symbolic actions from their mass audiences. The appearance of
CULTURAL PRAGMATICS 539
seamlessness that made symbolic action seem ritualistic gives way to the appearance of
greater artifice and planning. Performative action becomes more achieved and less
automatic.
The Emergence of Theatrical from Ritual Performance
To this point in our historical discussion, my references to performance have been
generated analytically, which is to say they have been warranted by the theoretical
considerations presented in the first section. While it seems clear that the emergence
of more segmented, complex, and stratified societies created the conditions—and
even the necessity—for transforming rituals into performances, the latter, more
contingent processes of symbolic communication were not understood by their
creators or their audiences as contrived or theatrical in the contemporary sense. There
was social and cultural differentiation, and the compulsion to project and not merely to
assume the effects of symbolic action, but the elements of performance were still not
defused enough to create self-consciousness about the artificiality of that process.
Thus, when Frankfort (1948:135–136) insisted on the ‘‘absence of drama’’ in ancient
Egypt, he emphasized both the continuing fusion of sacred texts and actors and the
relative inflexibility, or resistance to change, of ancient societies (cf. Kemp 1989:1–16).
‘‘It is true,’’ Frankfort conceded, ‘‘that within the Egyptian ritual the gods were
sometimes represented by actors.’’ For example, an embalming priest might be ‘‘wearing
Mise-en-scène
Collective
(Background)
Representations
Social
Powers
Audience
Means of
Symbolic
Production
Scripts
Actor(s)
Figure 4. The de-fused elements of performance inside complex social organization.
540 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
a jackal mask’’ to impersonate the god Anubis. In fact, one of the best-preserved
Egyptian texts, the Mystery Play of the Succession, ‘‘was performed when a new king
came to the throne.’’ Nonetheless, Frankfort insists, such performances ‘‘do not
represent a new art form.’’ He calls them ‘‘simply the ‘books’ of rituals.’’ They may be
‘‘dramatic,’’ but ‘‘they certainly are not drama.’’ In drama, the meaning and consequences
of action unfold, and in this sense are caused by, the theatrical challenge of
mise-en-sce`ne: ‘‘In drama, language is integrated with action and a change is shown to
be a consequence of that action.’’ In Egyptian rites, by contrast, as in Durkheim’s
Aboriginal ones, the ‘‘purpose is to translate actuality in the unchanging form of
myth . . . The gods appear and speak once more the words they spoke ‘the first time’’’
(Frankfort 1948:135–136, italics added). It is the actuality of myth that marks ritual.
Only in the Greek city-states did drama in the contemporary sense emerge. The
social organizational and cultural background for these developments was crucial, of
course, even as the emergence of dramatic performance fed back into social and
cultural organization in turn. As compared to the fused and ascriptive hierarchies
that ruled urban societies in the Asian empires, in Greece there emerged urban
structures of a new, more republican kind. They were organized and ruled by elites,
to be sure, but these elites were internally democratic. As Schachermeyr ([1953]
1971:201) emphasized in his widely cited essay, the historically unprecedented ‘‘autonomy
of the citizen body’’ in the Greek cities was accompanied by the equally distinctive
‘‘emancipation of intellectual life from Greek mythology.’’ These new forms of
organizational and culture differentiation fostered, according to Schachermeyr, a
‘‘revolutionary spirit’’ that engaged in ‘‘a constant fight against the monarchical,
dictatorial, or oligarchic forms of government.’’
This marked opening up of social and cultural space focused attention on the
projective, performative dimension of social action, subjecting the ritualized performances
of more traditional life to increased scrutiny and strain (e.g., Plato 1980). In
Greek society, we can observe the transition from ritual to performance literally and
not just metaphorically. We actually see the de-fusion of the elements of performance
in concrete terms. They became more than analytically identifiable: their empirical
separation became institutionalized in specialized forms of social structure and
available to common sense reflection in cultural life.
Greek theater emerged from within religious rituals organized around Dionysus,
the god of wine (Hartnoll 1968:7–31). In the ritual’s traditional form, a dithyramb, or
unison hymn, was performed around the altar of Dionysus by a chorus of 50 men
drawn from the entire ethnos. In terms of the present discussion, this meant continuing
fusion: actors, collective representations, audiences, and society were united in a
putatively homogeneous, still mythical way. In expressing his nostalgia for those earlier,
pre-Socratic days, Nietzsche ([1872] 1956:51–55, 78–79) put it this way: ‘‘In the
dithyramb we see a community of unconscious actors all of whom see one another
as enchanted . . . Audience and chorus were never fundamentally set over against each
other . . . An audience of spectators, such as we know it, was unknown . . . Each spectator
could quite literally imagine himself, in the fullness of seeing, as a chorist [sic].’’
As Greek society entered its period of intense and unprecedented social and
cultural differentiation (Gouldner 1965), the content of the dithyramb gradually
widened to include tales of the demi-gods and fully secular heroes whom contemporary
Greeks considered their ancestors. The background representational system, in
other words, began to symbolize—to code and to narrate—human and not only
sacred life. This interjection of the mundane into the sacred introduced symbolic
dynamics directly into everyday life and vice versa. During communal festivals
CULTURAL PRAGMATICS 541
dedicated to performing these new cultural texts, the good and bad deeds of secular
heroes were recounted along with their feuds, marriages and adulteries, the wars they
started, the ethnic and religious ties they betrayed, and the sufferings they brought on
their parents and successors. Such social conflicts now provided sources of dramatic
tension that religious performers could link to sacred conflicts and could perform on
ritual occasions.
As the background representations became reconfigured in a more socially oriented
and dramaturgical way—as everyday life became subject to such symbolic reconstruction—the
other elements of performance were affected as well. The most extraordinary
development was that the social role of actor emerged. Thespius, for whom the
very art of theatrical performance eventually came to be named, stepped out of the
dithyramb chorus to become its leader. During ritual performance, he would assume
the role of protagonist, either god or hero, and would carry on a dialogue with the
chorus. Thespius formed a traveling troupe of professional actors. Collecting the
means of symbolic production in a cart whose floor and tailboard could serve also
as a stage, Thespius traveled from his birthplace, Icaria, to one communal festival
after another, eventually landing in Athens where, in 492 B.C., he won the acting prize
just then established by the City Dionysus festival.
During this same critical period of social development, systems of collective
representations began for the first time not only to be written down, or to become
actual texts, but also to separate themselves concretely from religious life. In
fifth-century Athens, theater writing became a specialty; prestigious writing contests
were held, and prizes were awarded to such figures as Aeschylus and Sophocles. Such
secular imagists soon became more renowned than temple priests. At first, playwrights
chose and trained their own actors, but eventually officials of the Athenian
festival assigned actors to playwrights by lot. In our terms, this can be seen as having
the effect of emphasizing and highlighting the autonomy of the dramatic script visa`
-vis the intentions or charisma of its creators (cf. Gouldner 1965:114).
As such an innovation suggests, the independent institution of performance
criticism also had emerged, mediating and pluralizing social power in a new way.
Rather than being absorbed by the performance, as on ritual occasions, interpretation
now confronted actors and writers in the guise of judges, who represented aesthetic
criteria separated from religious and even moral considerations. At the same time,
judges also represented the city that sponsored the performance, and members of the
polis attended performances as a detached audience of potentially critical observers.
Huizinga ([1938] 1950:145) emphasized that, because the state did not organize
theatrical competitions, ‘‘audience criticism was extremely pointed.’’ He also suggested
that the public audience shared ‘‘the tension of the contest like a crowd at a football
match,’’ but it seems clear that they were not there simply to be entertained. The
masked performers of Greek tragedies remained larger than life, and their texts talked
and walked with compelling emotional and aesthetic force, linking performance to
the most serious and morally weighted civic issues of the day. From Aeschylus
to Sophocles to Euripedes, Greek tragic drama (Jaeger 1945:232–381) addressed civic
virtue and corruption, exploring whether there existed a natural moral order more
powerful than the fatally flawed order of human social life. These questions were critical
for sustaining the rule of law and an independent and democratic civil life.
Nietzsche ([1872] 1956:78–79) complained that, with the birth of tragedy, ‘‘the poet
who writes dramatized narrative can no more become one with his images’’ and that
he ‘‘transfigures the most horrible deeds before our eyes by the charm of illusion.’’ In
fact, however, the de-fusion of performative elements that instigated the emergence of
542 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
theater did not necessarily eliminate performative power; it just made this power more
difficult to achieve. This increased difficulty might well have provided the social
stimulus for Aristotle’s aesthetic philosophy. In terms of the theoretical framework
I am developing here, Aristotle’s poetics can be understood in a new way. It aimed to
crystallize, in abstract theoretical terms, the empirical differentiation among the
elements of performance that pushed ritual to theater. What ritual performers once
had known in their guts—without having to be told, much less having to read—
Aristotle (1987) now felt compelled to write down. His Poetics makes the natural
artificial. It provides a kind of philosophical cookbook, instructions for meaningmaking
and effective performance for a society that had moved from fusion to
conscious artifice. Aristotle explained that performances consisted of plots and that
effective plotting demanded narratives with a beginning, middle, and end. In his
theory of catharsis, he explained, not teleologically but empirically, how dramas
could affect an audience: tragedies would have to evoke sensations of ‘‘terror and
pity’’ if emotional effect were to be achieved.
This sketch of how theater emerged from ritual is not teleological or evolutionary.
What I have proposed, rather, is a universally shared form of social development,
one that responds to growing complexity in social and cultural structure.
Ritual moved toward theater throughout the world’s civilizations in response to
similar social and cultural developments—the emergence of cities and states, of
religious specialists, of intellectuals, and of needs for political legitimation. ‘‘There
were religious and ritual origins of the Jewish drama, the Chinese drama, all
European Christian drama and probably the Indian drama,’’ Boulton (1960:194)
informed us, and ‘‘in South America the conquering Spaniards brought Miracle
Plays to Indians who already had a dramatic tradition that had development out of
their primitive cults.’’
Social complexity waxes and wanes, and with it the development of theater from
ritual. Rome continued Greek theatricality, but with the decline of the empire and the
rise of European feudalism the ritual forms of religious performance dominated once
again. What happened in ancient Greece was reiterated later in medieval Europe,
when secular drama developed from the Easter passion plays. In 12th-century
Autun, a center of Burgundian religious activity, an astute observer named Honorius
actually made an analogy between the effects of the Easter Mass and the efforts of the
ancient tragedians (Schechner 1976: 210; Hardison 1965:40). ‘‘It is known,’’ Honorius
wrote, ‘‘that those who recited tragedies in theaters presented the actions of opponents
by gestures before the people.’’ He went on to suggest that, ‘‘in the theatre of the
Church before the Christian people,’’ the struggle of Christ against his persecutors
is presented by a similar set of ‘‘gestures’’ that ‘‘teaches to them the victory of his
redemption.’’ Honorius compared each movement of the Mass to an equivalent
movement in tragic drama and described what he believed were similar—tightly
bound and fused, in our terms—audience effects. ‘‘When the sacrifice has been
completed, peace and communion are given by the celebrant to the people,’’ he
wrote, and ‘‘then, by the Ite, missa est, they are ordered to return to their homes
[and] they shout Deo gratias and return home rejoicing.’’ It is no wonder that Boulton
(1960) equated such early religious pageants with acting. Suggesting that ‘‘the earliest
acting was done by priests and their assistants,’’ she notes that ‘‘one of the causes of
the increasing secularization of the drama was that laymen had soon to be called in to
fill in parts in the expanding ‘cast’’’ (1960:195).
By the early 17th century in Europe, after the rise of city-states, absolutist
regimes, the scientific revolution, and internal religious reforms, the institution of
CULTURAL PRAGMATICS 543
criticism was already fully formed: ‘‘Nearly every play had a prologue asking for the
goodwill of the critics’’ (Boulton 1960:195). Long before the rise of the novel and the
newspaper, theatrical performances became arenas for articulating powerful social
criticisms. Playwrights wove texts from the fabric of contemporary social life, but they
employed their imagination to do so in a sharply accented, highly stimulating, and
provocative manner. The performance of these scripted representations were furnaces
that forged metaphors circulating back to society, marking a kind of figure-eight
movement (Turner 1982:73–74; Schechner 1977) from society to theater and back to
society again. Secular criticism did not emerge only from rationalist philosophy or
from the idealized arguments in urban cafes (Habermas [1962] 1989) but also from
theatrical performances that projected moral valuation even while they entertained.
While providing sophisticated amusement, Molie` re pilloried not only the rising
bourgeois but also the Catholic Church, both of which returned his vituperation in
kind. Shakespeare wrote such amusing plays that he was patronized as low brow by
the more intellectual playwrights and critics of his day. Yet Shakespeare satirized
every sort of conventional authority and dramatized the immorality of every sort of
social power. Reviled by the Puritan divines, such Elizabethan drama was subject to
strenuous efforts at censorship. The Restoration comedies that followed were no less
caustic in their social ambitions or stinging in their effects. In his study of 17thcentury
drama, Reiss (1971:122) observed that ‘‘the loss of illusion follows when the
mise-en-sce`ne is designed with no attempt at vraisemblance,’’ and he concludes that
‘‘the theater relied . . . on the unreality of the theatrical situation itself . . . to maintain a
distance’’ (1971:144). Taking advantage of performative de-fusion, these playwrights
used stagecraft to emphasize artificiality rather than to make it invisible, producing a
critical and ironic space between the audience and the mores of their day.
The Emergence of Social Drama
The historical story I am telling here addresses the puzzle at the core of this article:
Why do ritually organized societies give way not to social orders regulated simply by
instrumentally rational action but instead to those in which ritual-like processes
remain vital in some central way?
It is vital for this story to see that the emergence of theater was more or less
simultaneous with the emergence of the public sphere as a compelling social stage. For
it was, in fact, roughly during the same period as theatrical drama emerged that social
drama became a major form of social organization—and for reasons that are much
the same.
When society becomes more complex, culture more critical, and authority less
ascriptive, social spaces open up that organizations must negotiate if they are to
succeed in getting their way. Rather than responding to authoritative commands
and prescriptions, social processes become more contingent, more subject to conflict
and argumentation. Rationalist philosophers (Habermas [1962] 1989) speak of the rise
of the public sphere as a forum for deliberative and considered debate. A more
sociological formulation would point to the rise of a public stage, a symbolic forum
in which actors have increasing freedom to create and to project performances of their
reasons, dramas tailored to audiences whose voices have become more legitimate
references in political and social conflicts. Responding to the same historical changes
that denaturalized ritual performance, collective action in the wider society comes
increasingly to take on an overtly performative cast.
544 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
In earlier, more archaic forms of complex societies, such as the imperial orders of
Egypt or Yucatan, social hierarchies simply could issue commands, and ritualized
ideological performances would provide symbolic mystification. In more loosely knit
forms of complex social organization, authority becomes more open to challenge, the
distribution of ideal and material resources more subject to contention, and contests
for social power more open ended and contingent. Often, these dramatic contests
unfold without any settled script. Through their success at prosecuting such dramas,
individual and collective actors gain legitimacy as authoritative interpreters of social
texts.
It is a commonplace not only of philosophical but also of political history (e.g.,
Bendix 1964) that during the early modern period the masses of powerless persons
gradually became transformed into citizens. With the model of social performance
more firmly in hand, it seems more accurate to say that nonelites also were transformed
from passive receptacles to more active, interpreting audiences.3
With the
constitution of audience publics, even such strategic actors as organizations and class
fractions were compelled to develop effective forms of expressive communication. In
order to preserve their social power and their ability to exercise social control, elites
had to transform their interest conflicts into widely available performances that could
project persuasive symbolic forms. As peripheries gradually became incorporated into
centers, pretenders to social power strived to frame their conflicts as dramas. They
portrayed themselves as protagonists in simplified narratives, projecting their
positions, arguments, and actions as exemplifications of sacred religious and secular
texts. In turn, they ‘‘cast’’ their opponents as narrative antagonists, as insincere and
artificial actors who were only role playing to advance their interests.
These are, of course, broad historical generalizations. My aim here is not to
provide empirical explanations but to sketch out theoretical alternatives, to show
how a performative dimension should be added to more traditional political and
sociological perspectives. But while my ambition is mainly theoretical, it certainly
can be amplified with illustrations that are empirical in a more straightforward way.
What follows are examples of how social processes that are well known both to
historical and lay students of this period can be reconstructed with the model of
performance in mind.
Thomas Becket. When Thomas Becket opposed the effort of Henry II to exercise
political control over the English church, he felt compelled to create a grand social
drama that personalized and amplified his plight (Turner 1974:60–97). He employed
as background representation the dramatic paradigm of Christ’s martyrdom to legitimate
his contemporary script of antagonism to the king. While Henry defeated Sir
Thomas in instrumental political terms, the drama Becket enacted captured the
English imagination and provided a new background text of moral action for
centuries after.
Savanorola. In the Renaissance city-states (Brucker 1969), conflicts between church and
state were played out graphically in the great public squares, not only figuratively but
3
Normative theorizing about the deliberative aspects of democracy has been allergic to its aesthetic and
symbolic dimensions, implicitly equating the latter with anti-democratic, irrationalist commitments. The
cultural pragmatics of social performance can provide an important corrective. For their part, Marxian
hegemony and Foucaultian power-knowledge perspectives fail to conceptualize the myriad of contingencies
that successful symbolic reproduction entails. It is very difficult to hyphenate power with knowledge and to
gain the fusion that is indicated by an audience’s inability to perceptually differentiate these two dimensions.
CULTURAL PRAGMATICS 545
often also literally before the eyes of the increasingly enfranchised populo. Heteronomy
of social power was neither merely doctrine nor institutional structure. It was also public
performance. Savanorola began his mass popular movement to cleanse the Florentine
Republic with a dramatic announcement in the Piazza della Signoria, where open meetings
had taken place already. Savanorola’s public hanging, and the burning of his corpse
that followed, were staged in the same civil space. Observed by an overflowing audience
of citizens and semi-citizens—some horrified, others grimly satisfied (Brucker
1969:271)—the performance instigated by Savanorola’s arrest, confession, and execution
graphically drew the curtain on the reformer’s spiritual renewal campaign. It is hardly
coincidental that Machiavelli’s advice to Italian princes offered during this same period
concerned not only how to muster dispersed administrative power but also instructions
about how to display power of a more symbolic kind. He wished to instruct the prince
about how to perform like one so that he could appear, no matter what the actual
circumstances, to exercise power in a ruthlessly efficient and supremely confident way.
The American Revolution. In 1773, small bands of anti-British American colonialists
boarded three merchant ships in the Boston harbor and threw 90,000 tons of Indian tea
into the sea. The immediate, material effect of what immediately became represented in the
popular imagination as ‘‘the Boston tea party’’ was negligible, but its expressive power was
so powerful that it created great political effects (Labaree 1979:246ff). The collective
performance successfully dramatized colonial opposition to the British crown,4
clarified
a key issue in the antagonism, and mobilized fervent public support. Later, the inaugural
military battle of the American Revolution, in Lexington, Massachusetts, was represented
in terms of theatrical metaphor as ‘‘the shot heard ‘round the world.’’ In contemporary
memorials of the event, social dramatic exigencies exercised powerful sway. American and
British soldiers were portrayed in the brightly colored uniforms of opposed performers.
Paul Revere was portrayed as performing prologue, riding through the streets and shouting,
‘‘The Redcoats are coming, the Redcoats are coming,’’ though he probably did not.
The long lines of soldiers on both sides often were depicted as accompanied by fifes and
drums. Bloody and often confusing battles of the War for Independence were narrated
retrospectively as fateful and dramatic contests, their victors transformed into icons by
stamps and etchings.
The French Revolution. The similar staging of radical collective action as social drama
also deeply affected the revolution in France. During its early days, sans coulottes
women sought to enlist a promise of regular bread from King Louis. They staged the
‘‘momentous march of women to Versailles,’’ an extravagantly theatrical pilgrimage
that one leading feminist historian described as ‘‘the recasting of traditional female
behavior within a republican mode’’ (Landes 1988:109–111). As the revolution
unfolded, heroes and villains switched places according to the agonistic logic of
dramatic discourse (Furet 1981) and theatrical configuring (Hunt 1984), not only in
response to political calculation. No matter how violent or bloodthirsty in reality, the
4
‘‘The undertaking had all the signs of a well-planned operation . . . The rain had stopped, and some
people showed up with lanterns to supplement the bright moonlight that now illuminated the scene . . . As
work progressed, a large crowd gathered at the wharf to watch the proceedings in silent approval. It was so
quiet that a witness standing at some distance could hear the steady whack-whack of the hatchets . . . ‘This is
the most magnificent Movement of all,’ wrote John Adams in his diary the next day. ‘There is a Dignity, a
Majesty, a Sublimity in this last Effort of the Patriots that I great admire . . . This Destruction of the Tea,’ he
concluded, ‘is so bold, so daring to form, intrepid, and inflexible, and it must have so important
Consequences and so lasting, that I cannot but consider it as an Epocha [sic] in History’’’ (Labaree
1979:144–145).
546 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
victors and martyrs were painted, retrospectively, in classical Republican poses and
togas, as in David’s celebrated portrait of Marat Sade (Nochlin 1993).
It was Turner (1974, 1982) who introduced the concept of social drama into the
vocabulary of social science more than 30 years ago. For a time, this idea promised to
open macro-sociology to the symbolic dynamics of public life (e.g., Moore and
Myerhoff 1975, 1977), but with a few significant exceptions (e.g., Edles 1998;
Alexander 1988; Wagner-Pacific 1986) the concept has largely faded from view,
even in the field of performance studies. One reason has to do with the triumph of
instrumental reason in rational-choice and critical theories of postmodern life. There
were also, however, basic weaknesses in the original conceptualization itself. Turner
simplified and moralized social performance in a manner that obscured the autonomy
of the elements that composed it. Searching for a kind of natural history of social
drama on the one hand and for a gateway to ideological communitas on the other,
Turner spoke (1982:75) of the ‘‘full formal development’’ of social dramas, of their
‘‘full phase structure.’’ While acknowledging that social complexity created the
conditions for social drama, he insisted that it ‘‘remains to the last simple and
ineradicable,’’ locating it in ‘‘the developmental cycle of all groups’’ (1982:78). He
believed that the ‘‘values and ends’’ of performances were ‘‘distributed over a range of
actors’’ and were projected ‘‘into a system . . . of shared or consensual meaning’’
(1982:75). Social dramas can take place, Turner (1987) insisted, only ‘‘among those
members of a given group . . . who feel strongly about their membership [and] are
impelled to enter into relationships with others which become fully ‘meaningful’, in
the sense that the beliefs, values, norms, and symbolism ‘carried’ in the group’s culture
become . . . a major part of what s/he might regard as his/her identity’’ (1987:46; for
similar emphases, see Myerhoff 1978:32; Schechner 1987).
However, from the perspective on social dramas I am developing here, this is
exactly what does not take place. The elements of social-dramatic performances are
de-fused, not automatically hung together, which is precisely why the organizational
form of social drama first emerged. Social drama is a successor to ritual, not its
continuation in another form.
We are now in a position to elaborate the propositions about performative success
and failure set forth in the first section.
RE-FUSION AND AUTHENTICITY: THE CRITERIA FOR PERFORMATIVE
SUCCESS AND FAILURE
The goal of secular performances, whether on stage or in society, remains the same as
the ambition of sacred ritual. They stand or fall on their ability to produce psychological
identification and cultural extension. The aim is to create, via skillful and
affecting performance, the emotional connection of audience with actor and text and
thereby to create the conditions for projecting cultural meaning from performance to
audience. To the extent these two conditions have been achieved, one can say that the
elements of performance have become fused.
Nietzsche ([1872] 1956) elegized the ‘‘bringing to life [of] the plastic world of myth’’
([1872] 1956:126) as one of those ‘‘moments of paroxysm that lift man beyond the
confines of space, time, and individuation’’ ([1872] 1956:125). He was right to be
mournful. As society becomes more complex, such moments of fusion become much
more difficult to achieve. The elements of performance become separated and independently
variable, and it becomes ever more challenging to bring texts into life.
CULTURAL PRAGMATICS 547
The challenge confronting individual and collective symbolic action in complex
contemporary societies, whether on stage or in society at large, is to infuse meaning by
re-fusing performance. Since Romanticism, this modern challenge has been articulated
existentially and philosophically as the problem of authenticity (Taylor 1989). While the
discourse about authenticity is parochial, in the sense that it is specifically European, it
provides a familiar nomenclature for communicating the sense of what performative
success and failure mean. On the level of everyday life, authenticity is thematized by such
questions as whether a person is ‘‘real’’—straightforward, truthful, and sincere. Action
will be viewed as real if it appears sui generis, the product of a self-generating actor who is
not pulled like a puppet by the strings of society. An authentic person seems to act
without artifice, without self-consciousness, without reference to some laboriously
thought-out plan or text, without concern for manipulating the context of her actions,
and without worries about that action’s audience or its effects. The attribution of
authenticity, in other words, depends on an actor’s ability to sew the disparate
elements of performance back into a seamless and convincing whole. If authenticity
marks success, then failure suggests that a performance will seem insincere and faked:
the actor seems out of role, merely to be reading from an impersonal script, pushed
and pulled by the forces of society, acting not from sincere motives but to manipulate
the audience.
Such an understanding allows us to move beyond the simplistic polarities of ritual
versus rationality or, more broadly, of cultural versus practical action. We can say,
instead, that re-fusion allows ritual-like behavior, a kind of temporary recovery of the
ritual process. It allows contemporaries to experience ritual because it stitches seamlessly
together the disconnected elements of cultural performance. In her performative
approach to gender, Butler (1999:179) insisted that gender identity is merely ‘‘the
stylized repetition of acts through time’’ and ‘‘not a seemingly seamless identity.’’ Yet
seamless is exactly what the successful performance of gender in everyday life makes it
appear to be. ‘‘In what sense,’’ Butler (1999:178) then asks, ‘‘is gender an act?’’ In the
same sense, she answers, ‘‘as in other ritual social dramas . . . the action of gender
requires a performance that is repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactment and
reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; and it is the mundane
and ritualized form of their legitimation.’’
In psychological terms, it is this seamless re-fusion that Csikszentmihalyi (1975)
described as ‘‘flow’’ (cf. Schechner 1976) in his innovative research on virtuoso performance
in art, sport, and games. In the terms I am developing here, what Csikszentmihalyi
(1975) discovered in these widely varying activities was the merging of text, context, and
actor, a merging that resulted in the loss of self-consciousness and a lack of concern for—
even awareness of—the scrutiny of observers outside the action itself. Because of ‘‘the
merging of action and awareness,’’ Csikszentmihalyi (1975:38) wrote, ‘‘a person in flow
has no dualistic perspective.’’ The fusion of the elements of performance allows not only
actors but also audiences to experience flow, which means they focus their attention on
the performed text to the exclusion of any other possible interpretive reference: ‘‘The
steps for experiencing flow . . . involve the . . . process of delimiting reality, controlling
some aspect of it, and responding to the feedback with a concentration that excludes
anything else as irrelevant’’ (Csikszentmihalyi 1975:53–54).
Performances in complex societies seek to overcome fragmentation by creating
flow and achieving authenticity. They try to recover a momentary experience of ritual,
to eliminate or to negate the effects of social and cultural de-fusion. Speaking
epigrammatically, one might say that successful performances re-fuse history. They
break down the barriers that history has erected—the divisions between background
548 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
culture and scripted text, between scripted text and actors, between audience and miseen-sce`ne.
Successful performances overcome the deferral of meaning that Derrida (1991)
recognized as diffe´rance. In a successful performance, the signifiers seem actually to
become what they signify. Symbols and referents are one. Script, direction, actor,
background culture, mise-en-sce`ne, audience, means of symbolic production—all these
separate elements of performance become indivisible and invisible. The mere action of
performing accomplishes the performance’s intended effect (cf. Austin 1957). The actor
seems to be Hamlet; the man who takes the oath of office seems to be the president.
While re-fusion is made possible only by the deposition of social power, the very
success of a performance masks its existence. When performance is successful, social
powers manifest themselves not as external or hegemonic forces that facilitate or
oppose the unfolding performance but merely as sign-vehicles, as means of representation,
as conveyors of the intended meaning. This is very much what Bourdieu
([1968] 1990:211) had in mind when he spoke of the exercise of graceful artistic taste
as culture ‘‘becoming natural.’’ The connoisseur’s poised display of aesthetic judgment
might be thought of as a successful performance in the sense that it thoroughly
conceals the manner in which this gracefulness is ‘‘artificial and artificially acquired,’’
the result of a lengthy socialization resting upon class privilege. ‘‘The virtuosi of the
judgment of taste,’’ Bourdieu wrote, present their knowledge of art casually, as if it
were natural. Their aim is to present ‘‘an experience of aesthetic grace’’ that appears
‘‘completely freed from the constraints of culture,’’ a performance ‘‘little marked by
the long, patient training of which it is the product.’’
Attacking the hegemonic exercise of sexual rather than class power, Butler (1999)
makes a similar argument. The successful performance of gender, she claims, makes
invisible the patriarchal power behind it. The difference is that, by drawing upon the
theories of Austin and Turner, Butler (1999) can explicitly employ the language of
performance. ‘‘Gender is . . . a construction that regularly conceals its genesis; the tacit
collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as
cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions . . . The appearance
of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment
which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe
and to perform in the mode of belief’’ (1999:179).
When postritual drama emerged in ancient Greece, Aristotle (1987) explained
that a play is ‘‘an imitation of action, not the action itself.’’ When re-fusion occurs,
this cautionary note goes unheeded. The performance achieves verisimilitude—the
appearance of reality. It seems to be action, not its imitation. This achievement of the
appearance of reality via skillful performance and flow is what Barthes ([1957] 1972)
described in his celebrated essay on ‘‘true wrestling.’’ He insisted that the ‘‘public
spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of the contest, like the audience
at a suburban cinema . . . The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether
the context is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of
the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not
what it thinks but what it sees’’ ([1957] 1972:15).
HOW DOES CULTURAL PRAGMATICS WORK? THE INNER STRUCTURES
OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
Having elaborated the criteria of performative failure and success, I now turn to a
more detailed discussion of the elements and relations that sustain it. I will draw upon
the insights of drama theory to decompose the basic elements of performance into
CULTURAL PRAGMATICS 549
their more complex component parts, and I will link these insights to the social
dramas that compose the public sphere. To be able to move back and forth between
theatrical and social drama enriches both sides of the argument; it also helps
document my core empirical claim. Social action in complex societies so often is
ritual-like because it remains performative. The social conditions that gave rise to
theater also gave rise to postritual forms of symbolic action.
The Challenge of the Script: Re-Fusing Background Representations with
Contingent Performance
Behind every actor’s social and theatrical performance lies the already established skein
of collective representations that compose culture—the universe of basic narratives and
codes and the cookbook of rhetorical configurations from which every performance
draws. In a theatrical performance, the actor strives to realize ‘‘individual character,’’ as
Turner (1982:94) put it, but he or she can do so only by taking ‘‘partly for granted the
culturally defined roles supposedly played by that character: father, businessman, friend,
lover, fiance´ , trade union leader, farmer, poet’’ (1982:94). For Turner (1982), ‘‘these roles
are made up of collective representations shared by actors and audience, who are usually
members of the same culture’’ (1982), but we do not have to accept his consensual
assumptions to get his point. The ability to understand the most elementary contours
of a performance depends on an audience knowing already, without thinking about it,
the categories within which actors behave. In a complex social order, this knowledge is
always a matter of degree. In contrast with Turner (1982), I do not presume that social
performance is ritualistic; I wish to explain whether and how and to what degree.
It is precisely at this joint of contingency or possible friction between background
representations and the categorical assumptions of actors and audience that scripts
enter into the scene. The emergence of the script as an independent element reflects
the relative freedom of performance from background representations. From within a
broader universe of meanings, performers make conscious and unconscious choices
about the paths they wish to take and the specific set of meanings they wish to project.
These choices are the scripts—the action-oriented subset of background understandings.
If script is meaning primed to performance, in theatrical drama this priming is
usually, though not always, sketched out beforehand. In social drama, by contrast,
scripts more often are inferred by actors. In a meaning-searching process that
stretches from the more intuitive to the more witting, actors and audiences reflect
on performance in the process of its unfolding, gleaning a script upon which the
performance ‘‘must have’’ been based.
In such social-dramatic scripting, actors and audiences actively engage in drawing
the hermeneutical circle (Dilthey 1976). Performances become the foreground parts
upon which wholes are constructed, the latter being understood as the scripts that
allow the sense of an action to be ascertained. These scripts become, in turn, the parts
of future wholes. It seems only sensible to suggest that an authentic script is one that
rings true to the background culture. Thus, as one critic of rock music suggests,
‘‘authenticity is often located in current music’s relationship to an earlier, ‘purer’ moment
in a mythic history of the music’’ (Auslander 1999:71). Yet, while this seems sensible, it
would be misleading, since it suggests the naturalistic fallacy. It is actually the illusory
circularity of hermeneutic interpretation that creates the sense of authenticity, and not
the other way around. A script seems to ring true to the background culture precisely
because it has an audience-fusing effect. This effectiveness has to do with the manner in
which it articulates the relationship among culture, situation, and audience. Another
550 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
recent music critic (Margolick 2000:56) argued against the claim that Billy Holiday’s
recording of ‘‘Strange Fruit’’—the now almost-mythical, hypnotic ballad about black
lynching—succeeded because lynching was ‘‘already a conspicuous theme in black
fiction, theater, and art.’’ She had success, rather, because ‘‘it was really the first time
that anyone had so. . . poetically transmitted the message.’’ The existence of the background
theme is a given; what is contingent is the dramatic technique, which is designed
to elicit an effective audience response. In our terms, this is a matter of fusing the script in
two directions, with background culture on the one side and with audience on the other.
If the script creates such fusion, it seems truthful to background representations and real
to the audience. The former allows cultural extension; the latter psychological identifica-
tion.
The craft of script writing addresses these possibilities. The writer aims to ‘‘achieve
concentration’’ (Boulton 1960:12–13) of background meaning. Effective scripts compress
the background meanings of culture by changing proportion and by increasing intensity.
They provide such condensation (cf. Freud [1900] 1950) through dramatic techniques.
Cognitive Simplification. ‘‘In a play,’’ Boulton (1960:12–13) wrote, ‘‘there are often
repetitions even of quite simple facts, careful explanations, addressing of people by
their names more frequently than in real conversation and various oversimplifications
which to the reader of a play in a study may seem almost infantile.’’ The same sort of
simplifying condensation affects the less consciously formed scripts of successful
social dramas. As they strive to become protagonists in their chosen narrative, such
social performers as politicians, activists, teachers, therapists, or ministers go over
time and time again the basic story line they wish to project. They provide not
complex but stereotyped accounts of their positive qualities as heroes or victims,
and they melodramatically exaggerate (Brooks 1976) the malevolent motives of the
actors they wish to identify as their antagonists, depicting them as evildoers or fools.
Professional speechwriters plotting social dramas are as sensitive to this technical
exigency as screenwriters and playwrights plotting theatrical ones. In Noonan’s (1998)
Script Audience
Success
Failure
Success
Failure
FUSION
De - Fusion
Background
Representations
“Seems Fake” “Contrived”
“Truthful” “Real”
Figure 5. Fusion/de-fusion of background representation, script, and audience.
CULTURAL PRAGMATICS 551
manual On Speaking Well, the much-heralded speechwriter for Presidents Ronald
Reagan and George Bush emphasized time and time again that simplification is the
key to achieving the fusion among speaker, audience, and background culture (cf.
Flesch 1946). ‘‘You should treat the members of the audience as if they’re friends,’’
Noonan (1998:23) instructs, which means ‘‘that you’re going to talk to them the way
you talk to your friends, with the same candor and trust and respect.’’ Noting the
‘‘often unadorned quality to sections of great speeches, a directness and simplicity
of expression,’’ Noonan (1998:48) attributes this to the fact that ‘‘the speaker is so
committed to making his point, to being understood and capturing the truth.’’
Sentences ‘‘must be short and sayable,’’ she warns, because ‘‘your listeners [are] trying
to absorb what you say’’ (1998:35). Noonan praised Bush’s acceptance speech at the
1988 Republican Convention in terms of this two-way fusion. On the one hand, her
script allowed Bush to connect his own life to the background representations of
American society. Bush ‘‘was not only telling about his life in a way that was truthful
and specific [but] was also connecting his life to history—the history of those who’d
fought World War II and then come home to the cities, and married, and gone on to
invent the suburbs of American, the Levittowns and Hempsteads and Midlands.’’ On
the other hand, the script also allowed Bush to fuse speaker with audience: ‘‘He was
also connecting his life to yours, to everyone who’s had a child and lived the life that
children bring with them . . . You were part of the saga’’ (1998:28–29).
Time-Space Compression. Responding to the emergence of theater from ritual,
Aristotle (1987) theorized that every successful drama contains the temporal sequence
of beginning, middle, and end. In early modern Europe, when ritual was secularized
and de-fused once again, the demand for narrative coherence became a stricture that
dramatists must stress ‘‘three unities’’—of action, place, and time (Boulton 1960:13ff).
Given the material and behavioral constraints on performance, the classic dramatists
argued, theatrical action must be clearly of one piece. If the background culture is to
be articulated clearly and if the audience is to absorb it, then performance must take
place in the confines of one dramatic scene—in one narrative place—and must unfold
in one continuous time.
Such social dramas as congressional hearings or televised investigations strive strenuously
to compress time and space in the same way. With large visual charts, lead
investigators display time lines for critical events, retrospective plottings whose aim is
to suggest continuous action punctuated by clearly interlinked causes and effects. Daytime
television is interrupted so that the representations of these investigations themselves
can unfold in continuous and real, and thus forcefully dramatic time. Ordinary
parliamentary business is suspended so that such political-cultural performances,
whether grandiose or grandiloquent, can achieve the unity of action, place, and time.
Moral Agonism. The fusion achieved by successful scripting does not suggest
harmonious plots. To be effective, in fact, scripts must structure meaning in an agonistic
way (Benhabib 1996; Arendt 1958). Agonism implies a dynamic movement that hinges
on a conflict pitting good against evil (Bataille 1985), creating a wave-like dialectic that
highlights the existential and metaphysical contrast between sacred and profane.
‘‘Performing the binaries’’ (Alexander 2003a) creates the basic codes and propels narratives
to pass through them. The drama’s protagonists are aligned forcefully with the
sacred themes and figures of cultural myth and, through this embodiment, become new
icons and create new texts themselves. Signaling their antipathy to the profane, to the evil
themes and figures that threaten to pollute and to overwhelm the good, one group of
552 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
actors casts doubt on the sincerity and verisimilitude of another. If a protagonist
successfully performs the binaries, audiences will pronounce the performer to be an
‘‘honest man,’’ the movement to be ‘‘truly democratic,’’ an action to be the ‘‘very epitome
of the Christian spirit.’’ If the performance is energetically and skillfully implanted in
moral binaries, in other words, psychological identification can be achieved and elements
from the background culture can be extended dramatically.
Agonistic scripting is exhibited most clearly in grandiloquent performance. Geertz
(1973:420–421) portrayed the Balinese cockfight as ‘‘a blood sacrifice offered . . . to the
demons,’’ in which ‘‘man and beast, good and evil, ego and id, the creative power of
aroused masculinity and the destructive power of loosened animality fuse in a bloody
drama.’’ Barthes ([1957] 1972:17) recounted how the wrestler’s ‘‘treacheries, cruelties,
and acts of cowardice’’ are based in an ‘‘image of ignobility’’ portrayed by ‘‘an obese
and sagging body’’ whose ‘‘asexual hideousness always inspires . . . a particularly
repulsive quality.’’ But performing the binaries is also fundamental to the emergent
scripts of everyday political life. In 1980, in the debate among Republican and
Democratic candidates for vice president of the United States, the Republican contender
from Indiana, Senator Dan Quayle, sought to gain credibility by citing the
martyred former president John F. Kennedy. Quayle’s opponent, Texas Senator
Lloyd Benton, responded with a remark that not merely scored major debating points
but also achieved folkloric status in the years following: ‘‘Senator, I had the honor of
knowing Jack Kennedy, and you’re no Jack Kennedy.’’ Speaking directly to his
political opponent, but implicitly to the television audiences adjudicating the authenticity
of the candidates, Senator Benton wished to separate his opponent’s script from
the nation’s sacred background representations. To prove they were not aligned
would block Senator Quayle from assuming an iconic role. As it turned out, of course,
while Senator Quayle’s debate performance failed, he was elected anyway.
Twisting and Turning. Explicating ‘‘the general artistic laws of plot development,’’
Boulton (1960:41ff) observed that ‘‘a play must have twists and turns to keep interest
until the end.’’ To keep the audience attentive and engaged, staged dramas ‘‘must
develop from one crisis to another.’’ After an initial clarification, in which ‘‘we learn
who the chief characters are, what they are there for and what are the problems with
which they start,’’ there must be ‘‘some startling development giving rise to new
problems.’’ This first crisis will be followed by others, which ‘‘succeed one another
as causes and effects.’’
Turner (1974) found almost exactly the same plot structure at work in social
drama. He conceptualized it as involving successive phase movements, from breach
to crisis, redress, and reintegration or schism. The initial breach that triggers a drama
‘‘may be deliberately, even calculatedly, contrived by a person or party disposed to
demonstrate or challenge entrenched authority.’’ But a breach also ‘‘may emerge
[simply] from a scene of heated feelings’’ (Turner 1982:70), in which case the initiation
of a social drama is imputed, or scripted, by the audience, even when it is not intended
by the actors themselves.
The naturalism underlying Turner’s dramaturgical theory prevents him from seeing
twisting and turning as a contingent effort to re-fuse background culture and audience
with performative text. In her revisions of Turner’s scheme, Wagner-Pacifici (1986, 1994,
2000) demonstrated just how difficult it is for even the most powerful social actors to plot
the kind of dramatic sequencing that an effective script demands. Her study of the 1978
kidnapping and assassination of the Italian prime minister Aldo Moro (Wagner-Pacifici
1986) can be read as a case study of failed performance. Despite Moro’s status as the
CULTURAL PRAGMATICS 553
most influential Italian political figure of his day, the popular prime minister could not
convince other influential collective actors to interpret his kidnapping in terms of his own
projected script. He wished to portray himself as still a hero, as the risk-taking and
powerful protagonist in a performance that would continue to demonstrate the need for
a historic ‘‘opening to the Left’’ and, thus, the necessity to negotiate with his terrorist
kidnappers to save his life. Against this projected script, other social interpreters, who
turned out to be more influential, insisted that Moro’s kidnapping illuminated a script
not of romantic heroism but of a tragic martyrdom, which pointed to a narrative not of
reconciliation but of revenge against a terrorist Left. Wagner-Pacifici herself attributes
the failure of Moro’s performance primarily to unequal social power and the control that
anti-Moro forces exercised over the means of symbolic production. The more multidimensional
model I am elaborating here would suggest other critically important causes
of the failed performance as well.
The Challenge of Mise-en-Sce`ne: Re-Fusing Script, Action, and Performative Space
Even after a script has been constructed that allows background culture to walk and talk,
the ‘‘action’’ of the performance must begin in real time and at a particular place. This
can be conceptualized as the challenge of instantiating a scripted text, in theatrical terms
as mise-en-sce`ne, which translates literally as ‘‘putting into the scene.’’ Defining mise-ensce`ne
as the ‘‘confrontation of text and performance,’’ Pavis (1988:87) spoke of it as
‘‘bringing together or confrontation, in a given space and time, of different signifying
systems, for an audience.’’ This potential confrontation has developed because of the
segmentation that social complexity rends among the elements of performance. It is a
challenge to put them back together in a particular scene.
Rouse (1992:146) saw the ‘‘relationship between dramatic text and theatrical
performance’’ as ‘‘a central element in the Occidental theatre.’’ Acknowledging
that ‘‘most productions here continue to be productions ‘of’ a preexisting play text,’’
he insists that ‘‘exactly what the word ‘of’ means in terms of [actual] practices is,
however, far from clear,’’ and he suggests that ‘‘the ‘of’ of theatrical activity is subject
to a fair degree of oscillation.’’ It seems clear that the specialized dramatic role of
director has emerged to control this potential oscillation. In Western societies, theatrical
performances long had been sponsored financially by producers and had been
organized, in their dramatic specifics, by playwrights and actors. As society became
more complex, and the elements of performance more differentiated, the coordinating
tasks became more demanding. By the late 19th century, according to Chinoy
(1963:3, in McConachie 1992:176), there was ‘‘so pressing a need’’ that the new role
of director ‘‘quickly preempted the hegemony that had rested for centuries with
playwrights and actors.’’ Chinoy (1963) believes that ‘‘the appearance of the director
ushered in a new theatrical epoch,’’ such that ‘‘his experiments, his failures, and his
triumphs set and sustained the stage’’ (1963:3).
When Boulton (1960:182–183) warned that ‘‘overdirected scripts leave the producer
no discretion,’’ she meant to suggest that, because writers cannot know the particular
challenges of mise-en-sce`ne, they should not write specific stage directions into
their script. Writers must leave directors ‘‘plenty of scope for inventions.’’ Given the
contingency of performance, those staging it will need a large space within which to
exercise their theatrical imagination. They will need to coach actors on the right tone
of voice, to choreograph the space and timing among actors, to design costumes,
to construct props, and to arrange lights. When Barthes ([1957] 1972:15) argued
that ‘‘what makes the circus or the arena what they are is not the sky [but] the
554 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
drenching and vertical quality of the flood of light,’’ he points to such directorial
effect. If the script demands grandiloquence, Barthes observes, it must contrast
darkness with light, for ‘‘a light without shadow generates an emotion without
reserve’’ ([1957] 1972:15).
For social dramas, in which scripts are attributed in a more contemporaneous and
often retrospective way, mise-en-sce`ne more likely is initiated within the act of
performance itself. This coordination is triggered by the witting or unwitting sensibilities
of collective actors, by the observing ego of the individual—in Mead’s terms, her ‘‘I’’ as
compared with her ‘‘me’’—or by suggestions from an actor’s agents, advisors, advance
men, or event planners. This task of instantiating scripts and representations in an actual
scene underscores, once again, the relative autonomy of symbolic action from its
so-called social base. The underlying strains or interest conflicts in a social situation simply
do not ‘‘express’’ themselves. Social problems not only must be symbolically plotted, or
framed (Eyerman and Jamison 1990; Snow et al. 1986), but also must be performed on the
scene. In analyzing ‘‘how social movements move,’’ Eyerman (forthcoming) highlights ‘‘the
physical, geographical aspects of staging and managing collective actions.’’ In theorizing
the standoff, Wagner-Pacifici (2000:192–193) distinguishes between ‘‘ur-texts’’ and ‘‘textsin-action,’’
explaining how the often deadly standoffs between armed legal authorities and
their quarries are triggered by ‘‘rules of engagement’’ (2000:157) that establish ‘‘set points’’
(2000:47) in a physical scene, such as barricades. Temporal deadlines also are established,
so that the ‘‘rhythm of siege’’ becomes structured by the ‘‘clock ticking’’ (2000:64).
Standoffs are ended by violent assault only when dramatic violations occur vis-a` -vis
these specific spatial and temporal markers in a particular scene.
The Challenge of the Material Base: Social Power and the Means of
Symbolic Production
While mise-en-sce`ne has its own independent requirements, it remains interdependent
with the other performative elements. One thing on which its success clearly depends
is access to the appropriate means of symbolic production. Goffman’s (1956) early
admonishment has not been sufficiently taken to heart: ‘‘We have given insufficient
attention to the assemblages of sign-equipment which large numbers of performers
can call their own’’ (1956:22–23). Of course, in the more typically fused performances of
small-scale societies, access to such means was not usually problematic. Yet even for
such naturalistic and fused performances, the varied elements of symbolic production
did not appear from nowhere. In his study of the Tsembaga, for example, Schechner
(1976) found that peace could be established among the warring tribes when they
performed the konj kaiko ritual. While the ritual centered on an extended feast of
wild pig, it took ‘‘years to allow the raising of sufficient pigs to stage a konj kaiko’’
(1976:198). War and peace thus depended on a ritual process that was ‘‘tied to the
fortunes of the pig population’’ (1976:198).
One can easily imagine just how much more difficult and consequential access to
the means of symbolic production becomes in large-scale complex societies. Most
basic of all is the acquisition of a venue. Without a theater or simply some makeshift
stage, there can be no performance, much less an audience. Likewise, without some
functional equivalent of the venerable soapbox, there can be no social drama. The
American presidency is called ‘‘the bully pulpit’’ because the office provides its
occupant with extraordinary access to the means for projecting dramatic messages
to citizens of the United States.
CULTURAL PRAGMATICS 555
Once a performative space is attained, moreover, it must be shaped materially.
Aston and Savona (1991:114) remarked that ‘‘the shape of a playing space can be
altered by means of set construction.’’ There is, in the literal and not the figurative or
metaphysical sense, a material ‘‘base’’ for every symbolic production. The latter are
not simply shaky superstructures in the vulgar Marxist manner, but neither can
cultural performances stand up all by themselves. Le Micro-Robert (1992) defines
mise-en-sce`ne as ‘‘l’organization mate´rielle de la repre´sentation,’’ and the means of
symbolic production refers to the first half of this definition, the material organization.
Still, even the physical platforms of performance must be given symbolic shape.
Every theater is marked by ‘‘the style in which it is designed and built,’’ said Aston and
Savona (1991:112), and social dramas are affected equally by the design of their place.
During the Clinton impeachment, it was noted widely that the hearings were being
held in the old Senate office building, an ornate setting whose symbolic gravitas had
been reinforced by the civil theatrics of Watergate decades before.
Yet the design of theatrical space depends, in part, on technological means. In the
preindustrial age, according to Aston and Savona (1991), the ‘‘confines’’ of the ‘‘large
and inflexible venue’’ (1991:114) of open-air theaters placed dramatic limits on the
intimacy that performers could communicate, whatever the director’s theatrical
powers or the artistry of the script. Later, the introduction of lighting ‘‘established
the convention of the darkened auditorium’’ and ‘‘limited the spectator’s spatial
awareness to the stage area’’ (1991:114). Once attention is focused in this manner,
as Barthes ([1957] 1972) also suggested in his observations on spectacle (as mentioned
previously), a ‘‘space can be created within a space’’ (Aston and Savona 1991:114),
and greater communicative intimacy is possible.
Equally significant dramatic effects have followed from other technical innovations
in the means of symbolic production. The small size of the television as compared
with the movie screen limited the use of long-distance and ensemble shots, demanded
more close-up camera work, and required more editing cuts to create a scene. Greater
possibilities for dramatic intimacy and agonistic dialogue entered into televised
performance as a result. The availability of amplification pushed the symbolic content
of performance in the opposite way. With the new technological means for electronically
recording and projecting the human voice, recordings proliferated and largescale
commercial musicals became amplified electronically through microphones.
Such developments changed the criteria of authenticity. Soon, not only concerts
but also most nonmusical plays needed to be amplified as well, ‘‘because the results
sound more ‘natural’ to an audience whose ears have been conditioned by stereo
television, high fidelity LPs, and compact disks’’ (Copeland 1990, in Auslander
1999:34).
It is here that social power enters into performance in particular ways. Certainly,
censorship and intimidation have always been employed to prevent the production
and distribution of symbolic communication and, thus, to prevent or control
political dissent. What is more interesting theoretically and empirically, however,
and perhaps more normatively relevant in complex semi-democratic and even
democratic societies, is the manner in which social power affects performance by
mediating access to the means of symbolic production (e.g., Berezin 1991, 1994).
The use of powerful arc lights, for example, was essential to Leni Riefenstahl’s miseen-sce`ne
in her infamous propaganda film, Triumph of the Will, which reconstructed
Adolph Hitler’s triumphant evening arrival at the Nuremberg rally in 1933. Whether
Riefenstahl had the opportunity to put her imagination into place, however, was
determined by the distribution of German political and economic power. Because
556 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
Hitler’s party had triumphed at the level of the state, Nazis controlled the means of
symbolic production. As an artist, Reifenstahl herself was infatuated by the Nazi
cause, and she wrote a script that cast Hitler in a heroic light. But the tools for
making her drama were controlled by others. It was Goebbels who could hire the
brilliant young filmmaker and could provide her with the means for staging her
widely influential work.
In most social-dramatic performances, the effect of social power is even less
direct. To continue with our lachrymose example, when the Nazi concentration
camps remained under control of the Third Reich, their genocidal purpose could
not be dramatized. Performative access to the camps—the critical ‘‘props’’ for
any story—was denied to all but the most sympathetic, pro-Nazi journalists, still
photographers, and producers of newsreels and films. On the few occasions when
independent and potentially critical observers were brought to the camps, moreover,
they were presented with falsified displays and props that presented the treatment
of Jewish prisoners in a fundamentally misleading way. This control over the means
of symbolic production shifted through force of arms (Alexander 2003b). Only after
allied troops liberated the western camps did it become possible to produce the
horrifying newsreels of dead and emaciated Jewish prisoners and to distribute them
worldwide (Zelizer 1998). It would be hard to think of a better example of
performance having a material base and of this base depending on power in turn.
As this last example suggests, in complex societies social power not only provides
the means of symbolic production but of symbolic distribution as well. The more
dependent a dramatic form is on technology, the more these two performative phases
become temporally distinct. It is one thing to perform a drama, and even to film it,
and it is quite another to make it available to audiences throughout the land. In the
movie industry, distribution deals develop only after films are made, for those who
represent theater syndicates insist on first examining the performances under which
they intend to draw their bottom line. Similarly, video technology has separated the
distribution of social dramas from live-action transmission. Media events (Dayan and
Katz 1992; Boorstin 1961) are social performances whose contents are dictated by
writers and photographers and whose distribution is decided by corporate or state
Distributive
Powers
Performance Product
Hermenential Powers
(Criticism)
Audience
Space
Time
Directoral Decisions
Productive
Powers
Mise-en-scène
Social Powers
Figure 6. Mise-en-sce` ne interfacing with social powers.
CULTURAL PRAGMATICS 557
organization. If the former represent ‘‘hermeneutical power’’ and the latter social
power in the more traditional sense, then there is a double mediation between
performance and audience. As we will see, there are, in fact, many more mediations
than that.
Whether those who ‘‘report’’ media effects are employed by institutions whose
interests are separated from—and possibly even are opposed to—those of the
performers is a critical issue for whether or not social power affects performance in
a democratic way. Because control over media is so vital for connecting performances
with audience publics, it hardly is surprising that newspapers for so long remained
financially and organizationally fused with particular ideological, economic, and
political powers (Schudson 1981). This fusion allowed those who held hegemonic
structural positions to decide which of their performances should be distributed and
how they would be framed.
As social power becomes more pluralized, the means of recording and distributing
social dramas have been distributed more widely, media interpretation has become
more subject to disputation, and performative success more contingent. Even in the
‘‘iron cage’’ of 19th-century capitalism, British parliamentary investigations into factory
conditions were able to project their often highly critical performances on the
public stage. Their hearings were reported widely in the press (Osborne 1970:88–90),
and their findings were distributed in highly influential ‘‘white papers’’ throughout the
class system (Smelser 1959:291–292). Even after Bismark outlawed the socialist party
in late 19th-century Germany, powerful performances by militant labor leaders
and working-class movements challenged him in ‘‘rhetorical duels’’ that were recorded
and were distributed by radical and conservative newspapers alike (Roth 1963:
119–135). In mid-20th-century America, the civil rights movement would have failed
if Southern white media had monopolized coverage of African-American protest
activities. It was critical that reporters from independent Northern-owned media
were empowered to record and to distribute sympathetic interpretations, which
allowed psychological identification and cultural extension with the black movement’s
cause (Halberstam 1999).
Differentiating the elements of performance, then, is not just a social and cultural
process but is a political one as well. It has significant repercussions for the pluralization
of power and the democratization of society. As the elements of performance
become separated and relatively autonomous, there emerge new sources of professional
authority. Each of the de-fused elements of performance eventually becomes
subject to institutions of independent criticism, which judge it in relation to criteria
that establish not only aesthetic form but also the legitimacy of the exercise of this
particular kind of performative power. Such judgments issue from ‘‘critics,’’ whether
they are specialized journalists employed by the media of popular or high culture or
intellectuals who work in academic milieux.
Such critical judgments, moreover, do not enter performance only from the outside.
They also are generated from within. Around each of the de-fused elements of
drama there have developed specialized performative communities, which maintain
and deploy their own critical, sometimes quite unforgiving standards of judgment.
The distance from the first drama prizes awarded by the City Dionysius festival in
ancient Greece to the Academy Awards in postmodern Hollywood may be great in
geographic, historical, and aesthetic terms, but the institutional logic (Friedland and
Alford 1991) has remained the same. The aim is to employ, and deploy, autonomous
criteria in the evaluation of social performance. As the elements of performance
have been differentiated, the reach of hegemonizing, hierarchical power has
558 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
necessarily declined. Collegial associations, whether conceived as institutional elites,
guilds, or professional associations, increasingly regulate and evaluate the performance
of specialized cultural goods. In complex societies, continuous critical evaluations are
generated from within every performative medium and emergent genre—whether theater
or feature film, documentary or cartoon, country-and-western song or rap, classical
recording, sitcom, soap opera, news story, news photo, editorial, feature, or nightly
newscast. Such self-policing devices aim to ‘‘improve’’ the possibilities for projecting
performance in effective ways. These judgments and awards are determined by peer
evaluations. Despite the power of the studios and mega-media corporations, it is the
actors, cinematographers, editors, directors, script and speechwriters, reporters, and
costume designers themselves who create the aesthetic standards and prestige
hierarchies in their respective performative communities.
In less formal ways, critical interpretive judgments circulate freely and endlessly
throughout dramatic life, in both its theatrical and social forms. The public relations
industry, new in the 20th century, aims to condition and structure the interpretations
such critics apply. Such judgments are also the concern of agents and handlers,
of experts in focus groups, of privately hired pollsters. The more complex and pluralized
the society, the tighter this circle of criticism and self-evaluation is wound. Normative
and empirical theories of power and legitimacy in the contemporary world must come
to terms with how the conditions of performativity have changed everywhere.
The Challenge of Being Natural: Re-Fusing Actor and Role
Even if the means of symbolic production are sufficient, the script powerfully written,
and the mise-en-sce`ne skillfully set in place, there is no guarantee that the performance
will succeed. There remains the extraordinary challenge of acting it out. Actors must
perform their roles effectively, and they often are not up to the task. Thus, while
Veltrusky (1964:84) acknowledges that signifying power resides in ‘‘various objects,
from parts of the costume to the set,’’ he insists, nevertheless, that ‘‘the important
thing is . . . that the actor centers their meanings upon himself.’’
In smaller-scale societies, ritual performers act out roles they have played in actual
social life or from sacred myths with which they are intimately familiar. In postritual
Naturalness
Flow
Actor(s)
Cultural Extension
Interpretation
Inner Motivation
Cathexis
Decoding
Audience
Background
Representations
Scripts
Text
Figure 7. Double fusion: text-actor-audience.
CULTURAL PRAGMATICS 559
societies, the situation is much more complex. In theatrical performances, actors are
professionals who have no off-screen relation to their scripted role. In a neglected
essay, Simmel (1968:92) put the problem very clearly: ‘‘The role of the actor, as it is
expressed in written drama, is not a total person . . . not a man, but a complex of
things which can be said about a person through literary devices.’’ In social dramas,
actors perform a role they often do occupy, but their ability to maintain their role
incumbency is always in doubt; their legitimacy is subject to continuous scrutiny; and
their feeling for the role is often marked by unfamiliarity.5
As the actor in theatrical drama increasingly became separated from the role, the
challenge of double fusion—actor and text on the one side and actor with audience on
the other—became a topic of increasing intellectual attention. When social texts were
more authoritative, less contested, and less separated from familiar social roles,
professional actors could achieve re-fusion in a more indexical than iconographic
way. In what later came to be seen as histrionic, ‘‘picture acting,’’ performers merely
would point to a text rather than seeking actually to embody it. This overt exhibition
5
The relative autonomy of the ‘‘actor’’ element in contemporary social drama was demonstrated in a worldhistorical
manner by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose televised speech to the United Nations Security
Council on February 5, 2003, provided the crucial legitimation that allowed America and its allies to launch the
Iraq war. By that late date, billions of dollars had been spent already on preparation, American military forces
were primed and ready, and the most powerful military and political leaders in the world’s most powerful nation
were intent on launching the invasion. By their own accounts, however, they felt that they could not do so unless
the war was legitimated on the public stage. This legitimation depended on making the case that Saddam Hussein
possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and that their use was imminent. After several failed efforts to
prepare for such a performance, those who were directing it decided that only one man could play the critical role.
In the following account, the veteran reporter Bob Woodward continually makes resort to performative concepts,
including rehearsal, preparation, background scripts, symbolic polarization, actor motivation and skillfulness,
mise-en-sce`ne, the reading of audience perspective, the role of critics, and audience response.
[President George] Bush and [National Security Advisor Condoleezza] Rice had asked the CIA to put
together the best information in a written document—the ‘‘slam dunk’’ case [for WMDs] that [CIA
Director George] Tenet had promised...The president was determined to hand the evidence over to
experienced lawyers who could use it to make the best possible case. The document was given
to...Scooter Libby...On Saturday, January 25, Libby gave a lengthy presentation in the Situation
Room...Holding a thick sheaf of paper, Libby outlined the latest version of the case against
Saddam...The most important response came from [former presidential assistant] Karen Hughes. As a
communications exercise, she said, it didn’t work...This was a communications problem, not a legal
one...So who then should present the public case?...Powell was the logical choice...To have maximum
credibility, it would be best to go counter to type and everyone knew that Powell was soft on Iraq [and]
when Powell was prepared, he was very persuasive...‘‘I want you to do it,’’ Bush told the secretary of state.
‘‘You have the credibility to do it.’’ Powell was flattered to be asked to do what no one else could. Rice and
Hughes told Powell that he should get three days for the presentation to the Security Council...‘‘No way,’’
Powell said. ‘‘I’m doing it once.’’ Okay, [then] it might be three or four hours long. No, it won’t, ‘‘Powell
insisted. ‘‘You can’t hold these guys for three to four hours.’’ They would fall asleep...Powell won
agreement that the length and content would be his decision...Public expectation was building on
Powell’s presentation. Newspaper stories and cable television were running with it hard: Will Powell
deliver a knockout blow? What does he have? What secrets will finally be let out of the box? Will
Saddam be exposed? Will Powell have an Adlai Stevenson moment? Will Saddam fold? Will Powell fold?
Powell was well aware that the credibility of the United States, of the president, and his own, were going to
be in the Security Council room that day...After the final rehearsal in Washington, Tenet announced that
he thought their case was ironclad...‘‘You’re coming with me,’’ Powell said. He wanted Tenet sitting
behind him at the U.N. as a visible, on-camera validation of the presentation, as if the CIA director were
saying each word himself. Tenet was not the only prop. Powell had a sound and light show, audios and
visuals to be presented on large hanging monitors in the Security Council chamber. He even had a teaspoon
of simulated anthrax in a small vial to wave around. Millions around the world watched and listened on live
television...Dressed in a dark suit and red tie, hands clasped on his desk, Powell began cautiously...He
had decided to add his personal interpretation of the intercepts [of Iraqi military conversations] to his
rehearsed script, taking them substantially further and casting them in the most negative light ...He had
learned in the Army that meaning had to be explained in clear English...The secretary’s presentation took
76 minutes [but] the mixture of understatement, overstatement and personal passion made for riveting
television. Mary McGrory, the renowned liberal columnist for the Washington Post, and a Bush critic,
wrote in the lead column for the next day’s op-ed page....‘I can only say that he persuaded me, and I was as
tough as France to convince...I’m not ready for war yet. But Colin Powell has convinced me that it might
be the only way to stop a fiend, and that if we do go, there is reason’’’ (Woodward 2004:288–312).
560 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
of the separation of actor and role could have theatrical purchase (Aston and Savona
1991:118) only because dramatic texts had a more deeply mythical status than they
typically have today. By the late 18th century, when sacred and traditional
social structures were being reconstructed by secular revolutions (Brooks 1976), this
‘‘anti-emotionalist’’ method came under criticism. In The Paradox of Acting, Diderot
([1830] 1957) attacked acting that communicated feelings by gesture rather than
embodiment. But it was not until the so-called new drama of the late 19th century—
when social and culture de-fusion were considerably more elaborate—that the intensely
psychological and introspective theater initiated by Strindberg and Ibsen demanded an
acting method that placed a premium on subjective embodiment, or facsimile.
Just as Aristotle wrote the Poetics as a cookbook for script-writing once myth
had lost its sway, the Russian inventor of modern dramatic technique, Constantin
Stanislavski ([1934] 1989), invented ‘‘the system’’ to teach professional actors how to
make their artificial performances seem natural and unassuming. He began by
emphasizing the isolation of the actor from scripted text. ‘‘What do you think?’’ he
admonished the novice actor. ‘‘Does the dramatist supply everything that the actors
need to know about the play? Can you, [even] in a hundred pages, give a full account
of the life of the dramatis personae? For example, does the author give sufficient
details of what has happened before the play begins? Does he let you know what will
happen when it is ended, or what goes on behind the scenes?’’ ([1934] 1989:55).
That the answer to each of these rhetorical questions is ‘‘no’’ demonstrates the
challenge of re-fusion that contemporary actors face. ‘‘We bring to life what is hidden
under the words; we put our thoughts into the author’s lines, and we establish our
own relationships to other characters in the play, and the conditions of their lives; we
filter through ourselves all the materials that we receive from the author and the
director; we work over them, supplementing them out of our own imagination’’
(Stanislavski [1934] 1989:52).
The art of acting aims at eliminating the appearance of autonomy. The ambition is
to make it seem that the actor has not exercised her imagination—that she has no self
except the one that is scripted on stage. ‘‘Let me see what you would do,’’ Stanislavski
advised the neophyte, ‘‘if my supposed facts were true’’ ([1934] 1989:46). He suggested
that the actor should adopt an ‘‘as if’’ attitude, pretending that the scripted situation is
the actor’s in real life. In this way, ‘‘the feelings aroused’’ in the actor ‘‘will express
themselves in the acts of this imaginary person’’—as if she had actually ‘‘been placed in
the circumstances made by the play’’ ([1934] 1989:49; cf. Goffman 1956:48). If the actor
believes herself ‘‘actually’’ to be in the circumstances that the script describes, she will
act in a natural way. She will assume the inner motivation of the scripted character,
in this way refusing the separation of actor and script. Only by possessing this
subjectivity can an artfully contrived performance seem honest and real (Auslander
1997:29). ‘‘Such an artist is not speaking in the person of an imaginary Hamlet,’’
Stanislavski concludes, ‘‘but he speaks in his own right as one placed in the circumstances
created by the play’’ ([1934] 1989:248).
All action in the theater must have an inner justification, be logical, coherent and
real. . . With this special quality of if. . . everything is clear, honest and above
board . . . The secret of the effect of if lies in the fact that it does not . . . make the
artist do anything. On the contrary, it reassures him through its honesty and
encourages him to have confidence in a supposed situation . . . It arouses an inner
and real activity, and does this by natural means ([1934] 1989:46–47, italics altered).
CULTURAL PRAGMATICS 561
If social and cultural de-fusion has shifted the focus of theatrical acting, we should
not be surprised that the acting requirements for effective social drama have changed
in a parallel way. When social and political roles were ascribed, whether through
inheritance or through social sponsorship, individuals could be clumsy in their portrayal
of their public roles, for they would continue to possess them even if their
performances failed. With increasing social differentiation, those who assume social
roles, whether ascriptive or achieved, can continue to inhabit them only if they learn
to enact them in an apparently natural manner (e.g., Bumiller 2003; Von Hoffman
1978). This is all the more true in social dramas that instantiate meanings without the
benefit of a script, and sometimes without any prior clarification of an actor’s roles.
It is not at all uncommon, for example, for the putative actors in an emergent
political drama to refuse to play their parts. During the televised Watergate hearings
in the summer of 1973, even Republican senators who privately supported President
Richard Nixon felt compelled to join their fellow Democrats in their expressions of
outrage and indignation at the Republican president’s behavior (Alexander 2003c;
McCarthy 1974). By contrast, during the televised Clinton impeachment hearings in
1998, the Democrats on the House panel distanced themselves from the script,
refusing to participate seriously in what Republicans leaders tried to perform as a
tragic public event (Mast 2003, forthcoming). Their refusal destroyed the verisimilitude
of the social drama. Actors on both sides of the aisle seemed ‘‘political,’’ offering
what appeared to be contrived and artificial performances. Despite the tried-and-true
authenticity of the political script, the political drama failed because the actors could
not, or would not, fuse with their parts.
The causal import of acting to performative success is so large that even bad plays
can be a great theatrical success. ‘‘We know where a bad play has achieved world
fame,’’ Stanislavski ([1934] 1989:52) said, ‘‘because of having been re-created by a
great actor.’’ Simmel (1968:93) also emphasized that the ‘‘impression of falsehood is
generated only by a poor actor.’’ If an actor experiences flow, then he or she has
succeeded in fusing with the scripted role. The idea, according to Stanislavski, is ‘‘to
have the actor completely carried away by the play’’ so that ‘‘it all moves of its own
accord, subconsciously and intuitively’’ ([1934] 1989:13). Only when flow is achieved
can the actor fuse with audience as well. To seem real to an audience, ‘‘it is necessary
that the spectators feel his inner relationship to what he is saying’’ ([1934] 1989:249,
original italics; cf. Roach 1993:16–17, 218).
Even the best acting, however, cannot ensure that the audience gets it right.
The Challenge of Reception: Re-Fusing Audience with Performative Text
One-sided culturalist and pragmatic theories share one thing in common: each eliminates
the contingent relationship between performative projection and audience
reception. Viewing performance purely in textual terms, semioticians tie audience
interpretation directly to the dramatic intentions of the actors and the culture structure
that performance implies. The role of the spectator, according to Pavis (1988:87),
is simply to decipher the mise-en-sce`ne, to ‘‘receive and interpret . . . the system elaborated
by those responsible for the production.’’ If such a theoretical position makes
psychological identification and cultural extension seem easy to achieve, then the
purely pragmatic position makes it seem virtually impossible. The founder of audience
response theory, Iser (1980:109–110), spoke about ‘‘the fundamental asymmetry
between text and reader,’’ asserting that the ‘‘lack of common situation and a common
562 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
frame of reference’’ is so large as to create an ‘‘indeterminate, constitutive blank.’’
Speaking in a more historical vein, his French counterpart, Leenhardt (1980), observed
that ‘‘with the formation of a new reading public,’’ the ‘‘organic relationship to the
producer has nearly disappeared.’’ The ‘‘codes of production of literary works’’ have
now become utterly ‘‘alien’’ to the ‘‘spontaneous codes of readers’’ (1980:207–208).
It is a mark of social and cultural complexity that the audience has become
differentiated from the act of performance. Reception is dictated neither by
background nor foreground representations, nor by social power, effective direction,
or thespian skill. Yet neither is reception necessarily in conflict with them. Every
dramatic effort faces uncertainty, but re-fusion is still possible.
Boulton (1960) articulated this contingent possibility when she described the audience
as the third side of ‘‘the great triangle of responses which is drama.’’ Will the
audience remain apart from the performative experience, or will it be ‘‘cooperative,’’
proving itself capable of ‘‘submitting itself to a new experience’’ (1960:196–197)?
Boulton (1960) pointed here to the psychological identification of audience with
enacted text. By ‘‘accepting a sample of life and tasting it,’’ she wrote, an audience
is ‘‘sharing in the lives of imaginary people not altogether unlike known live persons.’’
It is revealing that the psychoanalyst who created psychodrama, J. L. Moreno,
focuses also on the contingent relation between audience and stage and on the manner
in which this gap is bridged by identification. ‘‘The more the spectator is able to accept
the emotions, the role, and the developments on the stage as corresponding to his own
private feelings, private roles, and private developments, the more thoroughly will his
attentions and his fantasy be carried away by the performance’’ (Moreno 1975:48).
The paradox that defines the patient-performance is ‘‘that he is identifying himself
with something with which he is not identical.’’ Overcoming this paradox is the key to
therapeutic success: ‘‘The degree to which the spectator can enter into the life upon the
stage, adjusting his own feelings to what is portrayed there, is the measure of the
catharsis he is able to obtain on this occasion.’’
The audience-performance split also has preoccupied the theatrical avant-garde.
Some radical dramatists, such as Brecht (1964) or the Birmingham school of cultural
studies (Hall and Jefferson 1976), have sought to accentuate de-fusion, in theory or in
practice, in order to block the cultural extension of dominant ideology. By far the
greater tendency among radical dramatists, however, has been the effort to overcome
the de-fusion that makes theatrical performance artificial and audience participation
vicarious and attenuated. Avant-garde performances have tried to create flow experiences,
to transform mere theater into rituals where script, actors, and audience
become one. In his 1923 Geneva address, Copeau ([1923] 1955, in Auslander
1997:16) observed that ‘‘there are nights when the house is full, yet there is no
audience before us.’’ The true audience is marked by fusion, when its members ‘‘gather
[and] wait together in a common urgency, and their tears or laughter incorporate them
almost physically into the drama or comedy that we perform.’’ Exactly the same
language of re-fusion is deployed 50 years later by Brook (1969) when he describes
the aim of his ‘‘Holy Theatre.’’ Only when the process of ‘‘representation no longer
separates actor and audience, show and public’’ can it ‘‘envelop them’’ them in such a
manner that ‘‘what is present for one is present for the other.’’ On a ‘‘good night,’’ he
comments, the audience ‘‘assists’’ in the performance rather than maintaining ‘‘its
watching role’’ (1969:127).
Postmodern theatrical analysts are acutely aware of the fact that ‘‘theatre is
attended by the ‘non-innocent’ spectator whose world view, cultural understanding
or placement, class and gender condition and shape her/his response’’ (Aston and
CULTURAL PRAGMATICS 563
Savona 1991:120). Film and television producers and distributors try to protect
their investments by targeting specific audience demographics and by staging test
runs that can trigger textual readjustments in response. Politicians may be committed
vocationally rather than aesthetically and financially to generating an audience, but
they display an equally fervent interest in re-fusing the audience-performance gap.
They ‘‘keep their ear to the ground’’ and try to gauge ‘‘feedback’’ from the grassroots
in front of whom their social performances are staged. That this testing of the
demographics and responses of potential audiences is now conducted by candidatesponsored
scientific polling (Mayhew 1997) does not change the performative
principle involved. The goal remains to achieve performative success by overcoming
social-dramatic de-fusion.
If large-scale societies were homogeneous, this segmentation of performance from
an audience would be a matter of layering. Performances are projected first to an
immediate audience of lay and professional interpreters and only subsequently to the
impersonal audience that constitutes the vast beyond (cf. Lang and Lang 1968:36–77).
In real life, however, the problem is much more difficult than this. Audiences are not
only separated from immediate contact with performers but also are internally divided
among themselves. Even after the intensely observed ritual ceremonies that displayed
the political consensus about Nixon’s impeachment, poll data revealed that some
20 percent of Americans did not agree that the president was guilty even of a legal
violation, much less of moral turpitude (Lang and Lang 1983). In opposition to the vast
majority of Americans, this highly conservative group interpreted the impeachment as
political vengeance by Nixon’s enemies (O’Keefe and Mendelsohn 1974).
Copeau ([1923] 1955) rightly linked the fusion of audience and performance to the
internal unity of the audience itself. ‘‘What I describe as an audience is a gathering in
the same place of those brought together by the same need, the same desire, the same
aspirations . . . for experiencing together human emotions—the ravishment of laughter
and that of poetry—by means of a spectacle more fully realized than that of life itself’’
(in Auslander 1997:16). In complex societies, the main structural barrier to re-fusing
social drama and audience is the fragmentation of the citizenry. Social segmentation
creates not only different interests but also orthogonal subcultures, ‘‘multiple
public spheres’’ (Eley 1992; Fraser 1992), that produce distinctive pathways for
cultural extension and distinctive objects of psychological identification. More
and less divided by ideology, race, ethnicity, class, religion, and region, citizenaudiences
can respond to social performances in diametrically opposed ways (Liebes
and Katz 1990). For this reason, group-affirming social dramas are much easier to
carry off than universalizing ones. This particularistic strategy informs recent identity
politics, but it has always been the default position of social drama in complex societies.
When these structured divisions are exacerbated by political and cultural polarization,
the seamless re-fusion of audience and performance becomes more difficult still
(Hunt 1997).
Whether or not some shared culture framework ‘‘really exists’’ is not, however,
simply a reflection of social structure and demographics. It is also a matter of
interpretation. Audience interpretation is a process, not an automatic result. For
example, Bauman (1989) suggested that a consciousness of doubleness is inherent in
the interpretation of performance—that every performance is compared to an
idealized or ‘‘remembered’’ model available from earlier experience. In other words,
audience interpretation does not respond to the quality of the performative elements
per se. Rather, audiences of social and theatrical dramas judge quality comparatively.
Scripts, whether written or attributed, are compared to the great and convincing
564 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
plots of earlier times. Did the fervor over President Reagan’s trading of arms for
hostages constitute ‘‘another Watergate,’’ or did it pale by comparison (Schudson
1992b; Alexander 1987a)? In his role as chair of the House Impeachment Committee,
how did Representative Henry Hyde’s efforts stack up against Sam Ervin’s bravura
performance as chair of the Senate Select Committee during the Watergate
hearings? How do the participants in today’s presidential debates compare to the
towering model of the Lincoln-Douglas debates that, according to American mythology
(Schudson 1992a), made civil-dramatic history more than a century ago?
When audiences interpret the meaning and importance of social dramas, it is such
comparative questions that they keep firmly in mind. If their answers are negative,
even those who are within easy demographic reach will be less likely to invest their
affect in the performance. For those separated further, neither psychological identification
nor cultural extension will likely occur. Fragmented performance interpretations
feed back into the construction of subcultures, providing memories that in turn
segment perceptions of later performances (Jacobs 2000). If there are some shared
memories, by contrast, audiences will experience social drama in a deeper and broadened
way. As audiences become more involved, performance can draw them out of
demographic and subcultural niches into a more widely shared and possibly more
universalistic liminal space.
CONCLUSION: CULTURAL PRAGMATICS AS MODEL AND MORALITY
Why are even the most rationalized societies still enchanted and mystified in
various ways? The old-fashioned rituals that marked simpler organizational
forms have largely disappeared, but ritual-like processes most decidedly remain.
Individuals and collectivities strategically direct their actions and mobilize all their
available resources, but their instrumental power usually depends on success of a
cultural kind. This does not mean that the explanation of their success should be
Earlier
Performance
Memories
Audience
Cohesive
Background
Representations
Scripts
Text
Social Powers
Social Powers
Identification
Psychological
Cultural Extension
Cultural Resistance
Numbness
Estrangement
Cultural Polarization
Mise-en-scène
SUCCESS
FAILURE
Audience
Fragmented
Actor(s)
Figure 8. Audiences and performance.
CULTURAL PRAGMATICS 565
purely symbolic. It means that pragmatic and symbolic dimensions are inter-
twined.6
It is such a cultural-pragmatic perspective that has informed this work. I have
developed a macro model of social action as cultural performance. In the first section,
I proposed that performances are composed of a small number of analytically distinguishable
elements, which have remained constant throughout the history of social life
although their relationship to one another has markedly changed. In the second
section, I demonstrated that, as social structure and culture have become more
complex and segmented, so the elements that compose performance have become
not only analytically but also concretely differentiated, separated, and de-fused in an
empirical way. In the third section, I showed that whether social and theatrical
performances succeed or fail depends on whether actors can re-fuse the elements of
which they are made. In the fourth section, I explored the challenge of modern
performance by investigating the complex nature of the demands that each of its
different elements implies.
In simpler societies, Durkheim believed ([1912] 1995), rituals are made at one time
and place, after which the participants scatter to engage in activities of a more
instrumental and individualistic kind. In complex societies, things are rarely so cut
and dried. All actions are symbolic to some degree. In social science, it is best to
convert such dichotomous either/or questions into matters of variation. The aim is to
discover the invariant structures that vary and to suggest the forces that propel this
change over time.
In complex societies, the relative autonomy and concrete interdependence (Kane
1991) of performative elements ensures variation both within and between groups.
Even for members of relatively homogeneous communities, performances will range
from those that seem utterly authentic to those that seem utterly false, with ‘‘somewhat
convincing,’’ ‘‘plausible,’’ and ‘‘unlikely but not impossible’’ coming somewhere
in between. For performances that project across groups, the range is the same, but
attributions of authenticity are made less frequently. Such attributions also can be
seen to vary broadly across historical time.
It might be worthwhile to offer a figurative rendering of the discussion I have
presented here. Diagram 1 presents a graphical, highly simplified schematization. The
x-axis plots the variation in social and cultural structures, from simpler to more
complex; the y-axis plots the elements that compose/organize a performance, from
fused to de-fused. Three empirical lines are plotted in a hypothetical way. The higher
horizontal plot line (a) traces performances that achieve fusion—ritual or ritual-like
status—no matter what the degree of social complexity. The lower horizontal plot line
(b) graphs failed performances, or those that fail to re-fuse the elements of performance,
once again without regard for the state of social complexity. The diagonal plot line (c)
graphs the average expectations for successful performance, which decline in stepwise
and symmetrical fashion with each increment of social complexity. It has a downward,
6
Twentieth-century linguistic theory—which was central in creating social understandings of discourse—
was marked by a struggle between structuralism and pragmatics. The present theoretical effort can be
understood as a sociological extension, and reformulation, of the series of fundamentally significant
philosophical-linguistic efforts to transcend this divide, e.g., Bakhtin’s (1986) concepts of dialogue and
speech genre, Jakobson’s dynamic synchrony (1990:64) and code/message schema (1987:66), and Morris’s
(1938) syntactic-semantic-pragmatic model. I am also following upon, while challenging and revising,
significant synthetic efforts in sociological theory, e.g., Swidler (1986), Sewell (1992), and most especially
Emirbayer and Mische (1998), which is closest to the analytic synthesis I am pursuing here.
As these latter efforts suggest, 20th-century sociological theory was marked by a sharp tension between
pragmatic and structural approaches, against which some of my own earlier theoretical efforts were directed
as well (Alexander 1998, 1987b, 1987c, 1982–1983).
566 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
45-degree slope, for each increase in social and cultural complexity stretches farther
apart—farther de-fuses—the elements of performances, which makes success that
much more difficult to achieve. Performances above the diagonal (c) are more successful
than expected, given the historical conditions of performance; those below are less.
Wariness about authenticity is intrinsic to the pluralism and openness of complex
societies, whether ancient, modern, or postmodern social life. Nietzsche ([1872]
1956:136) bemoaned that ‘‘every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same
token, its natural and healthy creativity.’’ But from a moral point of view, it is often
healthy to be skeptical of myths, to see through the efforts of actors to seamlessly
re-fuse the elements of performance. When political democracy made its first historical
appearance, in ancient Greece, Plato (1980) feared that demagogy might easily sway the
polis to undertake immoral acts. In terms of the perspective set out here, Plato was an
implacable opponent of performance, deeply suspicious of its cultural-pragmatic effects.
In one of his dialogues, he portrayed a master of oratory, Gorgias, as bragging about its
extraordinary persuasive powers. ‘‘You might well be amazed, Socrates, if you
knew . . . that oratory embraces and controls almost all other spheres of human
activity . . . The orator can speak on any subject against any opposition in such a way
as to prevail on any topic he chooses.’’ Socrates answered caustically, relativizing
peformative skill by connecting success to mere audience acceptance. ‘‘The orator
need have no knowledge of the truth about things,’’ Socrates exclaims; ‘‘it is enough
Lower
Failed
Performance
(Strategies)
(c)Average
Expectation
forSuccess
TheElementsofPerformance
Social and Cultural Complexity
Fusion
De - Fusion
Higher
Successful
Performance
(Rituals)
Higher than
Expected
Success
Lower than
Expected
Success
b
a
x
y
Diagram 1. The historical conditions of social performance: structured variation.
CULTURAL PRAGMATICS 567
for him to have discovered a knack of convincing the ignorant that he knows more than
the experts.’’ Socrates continues in an equally sarcastic vein: ‘‘What happens is that an
ignorant person is more convincing than the expert before an equally ignorant audience.
Am I right?’’ Gorgias responds cynically, asking: ‘‘Isn’t it a great comfort, Socrates, to
be able to meet specialists in all the other arts on equal terms without going to the
trouble of acquiring more than this single one?’’ By this time, Socrates is furious. He
acknowledges that orators need ‘‘a shrewd and bold spirit together with an aptitude for
dealing with men,’’ but he denies that it can be called an art. ‘‘Oratory certainly isn’t a
fine or honorable pursuit,’’ he avows; indeed, ‘‘the generic name which I should give it is
pandering.’’ As a moral philosopher, Plato sees sincerity as the victim of performance.
He insists that ‘‘the supreme object of a man’s efforts, in public and in private life, must
be the reality rather than the appearance of goodness.’’
From the normative point of view, performative fusion must be unmasked, and
rational deliberation provides the means. From a cultural-sociological perspective,
however, embracing rationality as a norm does not mean seeing social action as rational
in an empirical way. Culture is less toolkit than storybook. Why else are critical efforts
to question a performance almost always accompanied by creative efforts to mount
counterperformances in turn (Alexander 2004)? Re-fusion remains critically important
to complex societies. One must insist that social power be justified and that authority be
accountable, but one also must acknowledge that even the most democratic and individuated
societies depend on the ability to sustain collective belief. Myths are generated
by ritual-like social performance (Giesen forthcoming). Only if performances achieve
fusion can they reinvigorate collective codes, allowing them to be ‘‘ubiquitous and
unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child’s mind and interpreting to the mature
man his life and struggles,’’ as Nietzsche ([1872] 1956:136–137) astutely observed.
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