Cultural Sociology

Audience Agency in Social Performance (2022) - Winner of the British Sociological Association’s SAGE Prize for Innovation and Excellence

Cultural pragmatics is a fruitful analytic tradition in sociology. However, theoretical use of this six-element model has largely focused on actors. Despite fusion’s definition as a product made between actor, audience, and text, the audience has been treated as a passive abstraction. Further, there is no methodical way to parse out the performative actions of the actor from those of the audience in a way that reveals the substantive similarities and differences that comprise fusion or de-fusion. This article seeks a solution via a rigorous theorization of the audience in cultural pragmatics, and argues that they are the sole arbiters of performative outcome. In their arbitration, audiences become performers themselves; they perform fusionor de-fusion in dialogic relation back to the actor, and to other audience members around them. With illustrations from US Senator Bernie Sanders’ political rise over the last decade, this process is visualized with a new analytic tool – arcs of fusion – so as to better trace varying trajectories of performative outcome.

American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Harry Potter and the ‘Death of the Actor’: reimagining fusion in cultural pragmatics (2024)

To capture the deep world of meaning between audiences and actors in social performances, cultural pragmatics offers a helpful tool: by its logic, performances are successful when fusion is achieved between the actor, their audience(s), and a text. This paper reimagines fusion from the perspective of the audience. Drawing on illustrations from multi-year ethnographic findings of the podcast “Harry Potter and the Sacred Text,” this paper considers the audience’s relationship to Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who recently published an essay and series of tweets about her belief that biological “sex is real.” In response, her audience fractured into debate about how to respond: some chose to leave the fandom while others, conscious or not of the socio-political implications, stayed on. But amidst the fray, a distinct audience emerged—one that, through the words “the books belong to us,” was simultaneously able to retain their devotion to the text and cut off all ties to Rowling. This theoretical outline synthesizes cultural pragmatics with reader-response theory to reimagine fusion in all social performances as a continuum from complete fusion to complete de-fusion, with fission states possible when audiences wrest interpretive authority over the text away from the actor and appropriate fusion.

Material REligion

Sociologica

“Ideology” and After: Reinscribing the Aesthetics of Symbolic Structure in Geertz (2024) - by Jeffrey C. Alexander and Anne Taylor

This essay explores the transformational effects that Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures had on the development of a meaning-centered cultural sociology. Though “Deep Play” and “Thick Description” were his most popular essays, we argue that it was “Ideology as a Cultural System” that marked Geertz’s most significant contribution. In response to Parsonian functionalism and conflict theory, Geertz’s emphasis on interpretation — inspired by cutting-edge work in the humanities in the mid-20th century — brought the relative autonomy of culture back into focus in the human sciences. While considering how “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” and “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” also helped pave the way for a systematic theory of culture, we argue that they also represented a dangerous new tendency in Geertz’s work, namely his refusal to move beyond empirical description. The late resistance to theorizing undercut the purchase of Geertz’s breakthrough ideas for contemporary efforts at socio-cultural explanation.