Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy

Abstract

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.*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.

Money, Love, and Sacredness: Generalised Symbolic Media and the Production of Instrumental, Affectual, and Moral Reality

“…Hence, systems defi ned by communication remains vague and unworkable, but seen in performance and ritual, GSM as language and as objects becomes a more powerful concept to both supplement communicative theory and to extend beyond it. An insight, incidentally, that allows for dialogue with dramaturgy [Goffman 1967] and cultural pragmatics [Alexander 2004].…”

An introduction to the 5M framework: reframing change management education

“…In contrast, Mobilisation as drama in the strong view is about the character and use of rhetorically and ritually constructed motivations. It requires an examination of the perspective, power and practices involved in energising participants through understanding and capturing situational vocabularies of motive, and achieving identification with symbolic objects and rituals (Alexander, 2004).…”

“…For the strong view of drama, this process is not similar as much to a theatrical performance, as it is, in essence, the enactment of rhetoric and ritual. It involves the conduct of more or less resonant performances characterised by the fusion or re-fusion of an emotional connection between audiences, actors and text (Alexander, 2004). While overlapping strongly with the weak view of this performance as being akin to theatre, what the strong view adds is a recognition of the ways in which the fragmentation of a complex modern society makes it difficult to achieve resonant transition rituals, and it explores the institutional contexts and internal conversations as well as interpersonal interactions involved in making possible a successful re-fusion of scripts, direction, actors, backstage and frontstage regions, mis-en-scène, and audience (Alexander, 2004).…”

“…They are encouraged to submit their overall interpretations and key themes in the form of images, narratives, music, sculptures, dramatised performances, artwork and games. This has three main purposes: firstly, to provide them with the opportunity to exercise the kind of artistry and creativity necessary to ensure resonant and effective leadership and change performances (Alexander, 2004;Grint, 2001); secondly, to represent, in the evaluation process, the focus on the below the waterline issues of identity, culture, emotion and politics that the course affirms are central components of organisational change and its management; and, thirdly, to assist students in getting out of their heads, and respond in an emotive, bodily and situated way to the learnings they have obtained and how they might employ them.…”

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“…Ce qui ne manque pas d'être surprenant, dit Alexander, c'est de voir les diverses manières et méthodes par lesquelles, très concrè-tement, les mouvements sociaux vont venir rappeler à la société civile son idéalité première dans ce qui est, du coup, une sorte de bouclage de la boucle ou de dialectique de l'abstrait et du tangible, de l'historique et du métaphy-sique: «Derrière les mouvements sociaux se trouve la référence à une communauté hautement idéalisée, qui demande [...] que l'universel devienne concret 54 . » Un autre exemple de ces études thématiques et de la manière dont elles viennent enrichir le projet théorique de Jeffrey C. Alexander renvoie cette fois à la question de ce qu'il nomme les traumatismes culturels"" 5 . Le lien avec ce qui précède est assez facile à voir dans la mesure où il est encore question de frontières symboliques, à savoir qu'un traumatisme culturel est de nature à définir un «nous» contre des «autres».…”