Towards a New, Macro-Sociological Theory of Performance

This essay provides an outline and a history of the theory of performance. This new macro-sociological theory reconfigures the concept of ritual into a more complex model of social action as lying in the continuum between the analytic poles of successful and failed performances. I argue that the more complex and segmented social and cultural structures become, the more the elements of performance become defused, and the harder it is for individual and collective actors to refuse them and achieve successful performances Over the last two years, an overlapping group of professors and graduate students has been developing and debating a new, macro-sociological theory of performance. During a telephone conversation with Bernhard Giesen in summer 2001, after I had completed the first draft of a paper on performance, “Cultural Pragmatics” (Alexander 2003), my friend and colleague mentioned that “performance represents the next frontier”, or something to that effect. I was delighted and more than a little intrigued, since I had just completed the first draft of a lengthy paper on exactly that topic. Giesen and his German research group had been working on topics related to rituals and performances for many years. So had my students and myself. Our subsequent communication not only helped to establish the worthiness of the topic but clarified the different approaches that we were taking to it. What follows is, then, “one man’s” approach to a theory of performance, and a history of that theory. My own interest in performance as a theoretical topic began with an effort to account for the findings and arguments that Jason Mast generated in his 1999 UCLA Masters Thesis, “National Rituals in Democratic Societies: Monicagate as Failed Ritual”. Building upon the stated and unstated implications of my earlier account of how Watergate became a purging ritual in American democratic politics (Alexander 1988), Mast had asked why ©    ,  ,  a similarly powerful and unifying civic ritual had failed to unfold during the “Monicagate” impeachment crisis focusing on U.S. President Bill Clinton. In my effort to respond to Mast’s discussion of what he called a “failed ritual”, I reluctantly concluded that it is necessary to discard “ritual” as a foundational concept, even in the kind of late-Durkheimian or “strong program” cultural sociology to which I have for so long been dedicated. Instead of focusing on ritual, sociological theory must develop a complex theory of the elements and dimensions of macrosciological performance. Depending on how these elements come together in particular empirical instances, one can say that an individual or collective actor’s performance is more or less successful. Insofar as the goal of a social action depends on affecting the perceptions of other actors, it involves to that degree a performative action. 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 which they, as social actors, consciously or unconsciously wish to have others believe. Rather than declaring that an action is or is not a ritual, it seems better to use the language of variation: the more successful a social performance is, the more likely it is to achieve ritual status. Ritual status means, first, that the ontological reality of the performance is taken for granted. Second, it means that the audience observing the performance identifies strongly with the goals and values of the performative actor, and that, at the same time, the members of the audience experience solidarity with one another. Such success represents the boundary conditions, or the outer limits, of social performance. It is a condition that actors rarely achieve but one that they continually hope for. Because he took his cues from early, simplified forms of social organization in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim succeeded in bringing symbolic action back into the center of sociological theorizing but he failed to appreciate the fact that symbolic action in complex societies only rarely achieves a ritual form. In contrast to Durkheim’s nostalgia for the ritual-like processes that centered earlier societies, it is necessary to develop a purely analytical conception of social performance. We can conceptualize empirical social performance as moving between two hypothesized conditions, or poles –complete failure and complete success. Social performances move back and forth along this continuum. It is the dynamic movements that comprise the focus for performance theory. 46    