A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
tendencies to treat culture as epiphenomenal, as a "tool kit" (Swidler 1986), as a reflection of material domination (Bourdieu 1984), or as homologous with social power (Foucault 1972). As the new century gets under way, cultural sociology now takes a performative turn. The theory of cultural pragmatics interweaves meaning and action in a nonreductive way, pointing toward culture structures while recognizing that only through the actions of concrete social actors is meaning's influence realized. Cultural pragmatics is a social scientific response to the conditions of a post-metaphysical world in which institutional and cultural differentiation makes successful symbolic performance difficult to achieve. To develop a theory of cultural practice, we must take these historical limitations seriously. Cultural life has radically shifted, both internally and in its relation to action and social structure. Yet, despite these changes, culture can still be powerfully meaningful; it can possess and display coherence, and ii can exert immense social effect. To understand how culture can be meaningful, but may not be, we must accept history but reject radical historicism. Life is different but not completely so. Rather than sweeping allegorical theory, we need allegorical deconstruction and analytic precision. We need to break the "whole" of symbolic action down into its component parts. Once we do so, we will see that cul tural performance covers the same ground that it always has, but in a radically different way.
iOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
ii lis are episodes of repeated and simplified cultural communica-ffl ni which the direct partners to a social interaction, and those ' ■ iving it, share a mutual belief in the descriptive and prescrip-I | validity of the communication's symbolic contents and accept llithenticity of one another's intentions. It is because of this
......I understanding of intention and content, and of the intrinsic
llldlty ni the interaction, that rituals have their effect and affect. Ill 'I effectiveness energizes the participants and attaches them to other, increases their identification with the symbolic objects unmuiiication, and intensifies the connection of the participants 1 iIh symbolic objects with the observing audience, the relevant
.....unity" at large.
Ii iIicit is one cultural quality that marks the earliest forms of i nil organization, it is the centrality of rituals. From births ii|iir.,il relationships, from peaceful foreign relations to the
......"ii lor war, from the healing of the sick to the celebration
lln live well-being, from transitions through the age structure to I   inn pi ion of new occupational and political roles, the affirma-I' hlciship and the celebration of anniversaries - in earlier i ,i» iciy such social processes tended to be marked by ritual-Mil"     communication. If there is one cultural quality that mi,lies more contemporary, large-scale, and complex social
......I nun earlier I onus, ir is that the centrality of such ritual
Ii r. I mci i displaced. Contemporary societies revolve around hid i diillkts between parties who do not necessarily share i' ■ |• i*■ 1111v do not accept the validity ol one another's inten-I "in ii disagree even about the descriptions ih.it people offer
A CULTURAL "I'l IfiOKY Ol SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND strategy
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 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 the 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 2003c). 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 1991) to wars (Smith 2005), revolutions (Apter and Saich 1994; Hunt 1984; Sewell 1980), political transitions (Edles 1998; Giesen 2006; Goodman 2007), and scandals (Mast 2006) 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 (Barber 1983; Sztompka 1999). 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 sham I identity (Giesen 1998; Ringmar 1996; Spillman 1997), even if these are forged, as they all too often are, in opposition to simplistic con structions of those who are putatively on the other side (Chan I 999\ Jacobs 2000; Ku 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 i hat very central processes in complex societies are symbolic, and that •■ometimes they are also integrative, at the group, intergroup, and even ©cietal level. But we also clearly sense that these processes are not iiinals in the traditional sense (see also Lukes 1977). Even when they ,i If inn validity and authenticity and produce integration, their effervescence is short lived. If they have achieved simplicity, it is unlikely i hey will be repeated. If they are repeated, it is unlikely that the sym-1'u|if communication can ever be so simplified in the same way again.
This is the puzzle to which the present chapter is addressed. Is it possible to develop a theory that can explain how the integration -I i'articular groups and sometimes even whole collectivities can be h liu'ved through symbolic communications, while continuing to i' 11 Hint for cultural complexity and contradiction, for institutional dif-i' i <'i11 iation, contending social power, and segmentation? Can a theory im- lull credence to the continuing role of belief while acknowledging 111 ii unbelief and criticism are also the central hallmarks of our time?
In order to solve this puzzle, I will develop a systematic, macro-"• Li 'logical model of social action as cultural performance. In so doing, I will enter not only into the historical origins of theatrical l" i I.-nuance and dramaturgical theory (e.g., Auslander 1997; Austin ' ' • '; Burke 1965; Carlson 1996; Geertz 1980; Goffman 1974;
hi i liner 2002; Turner 2002) but also into the history and theories ■ I locial performance. This means looking at how, and why, sym-bolii action moved from ritual to theater (Turner 1982) and why it so ii. ii moves back to "ritual-like" processes again (Schechner 1976).
Hu gist of my argument can be briefly stated. The more simple 11" ' "llcctive organization, the less its social and cultural parts are H" nted and differentiated, the more the elements of social perform-IIU'cn are fused. The more complex, segmented, and differentiated the 'II. i nvity, the more these elements of social performance become Ii fused. To be effective in a society of increasing complexity, social I rfonnances must engage in a project of re-fusion. To the degree i. hieve re-fusion, social performances become convincing and ffVuive    more ritual-like. To the degree that social performances
•......       ilc fused, they seem artificial and contrived, less like rituals
■I' in like performances in the pejorative sense. They are less effective • i result, Failed performances arc those- in which the actor, whether ni.lni.lii.il hi collective, has been unable in sew back together the
27
a cultural i1ilory of social performance
elements of performance to make them appear seamlessly connected. 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. 1 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 perform ance, one that leads those to whom their actions and gestures arc directed to accept their motives and explanations as a reasonable account (Garfinkel 1967; Scott and Lyman 1968). As Gerth and Mills (1964: 55) once put it, "Our gestures do not necessarily 'express' oui prior feelings," but rather "they make available to others a sign." Successful performance depends on the ability to convince others thai one's performance is true, with all the ambiguities that the notion ol 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 some thing 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 litis borrowed language."
28
I
I.
•.<>« IAI  I'l KI'OKMANCIi BUTWKUN RITUAL AND STRATHGY
I ii is desi i iliing here the systems of collective representations that |i ii I r.iMiiiul every performative act.
U'tors present themselves as being motivated by and toward
i ti iiii.il, emotional, and moral concerns, the meanings of which defined by patterns of signifiers whose referents are the social, i ill, natural, and cosmological worlds within which actors and
ludii ni is live. One part of this symbolic reference provides the deep | n I r.i omul of collective representations for social performance; • ■ i 111 i ■ i part ci imposes the foreground, the scripts that are the immedi-|| n I' i int for action. These latter can be understood as constituting ■ I- performance's immediate referential text. As constructed by the 11 11. >i mativc imagination, background and foreground symbols are 11111 lined by codes that provide analogies and antipathies and by
ii i ii ims that provide chronologies. In symbolizing actors' and audi-worlds, these narratives and codes simultaneously condense
Mttl • 1.1borate, and they employ a wide range of rhetorical devices,
.....etaphor to synecdoche, to configure social and emotional life
umpelling and coherent ways. Systems of collective representa-i.itige from "time immemorial" myths to invented traditions iled nght on the spot, from oral traditions to scripts prepared by
pei ialists as playwrights, journalists, and speech writers. I il i  any other text, these collective representations, whether round or foreground, can be evaluated for their dramatic iivcik'ss. I will say more about this later, but what is important Ins point is to see that no matter how intrinsically effective, col-
■ iepresentations do not speak themselves. Boulton (1960: 3) ili si ribed theater as "literature that walks and talks before our
Ii is this need for walking and talking - and seeing and listen-Ill^ In i he walking and talking - that makes the practical pragmatics
■ i"i niauce different from the cultural logic of texts. It is at this inn inre that cultural pragmatics is born.
Actors
p.illerned representations are put into practice, or are encoded
II ill I ''SO), by flesh-and-blood people. As Reiss (1971: 138) suggests
Hiilv oi the relation between theatrical technique and meaning ■ 111on1111 century hrench theater, "the actor is as real as the Mm; In- is in laci preseni in their midst." Whether or not they
■ H i si in us I v a ware oi t he distinct ion between c< elective represen-n  .iiu! their walking and talking, the ai tor's aim is to make this
mi. i h hi , 11-,. 1111 mm i As kciss i r1 ' I: i I 1) | Hir, ii, the actor's desire
21'
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
	y	
Scripts		
	Text	
■Qecoding '^etpretati^T'
^AWtal Extent
Figure 2.1. Successful performance: re-fusion.
is "to cause the spectator to confuse his emotions with those of the stage character." While performers must be oriented to background 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. See Figure 2.1.
Observers/a udience
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. Empirically, cultural extension and psychological identification are variable. Audiences may be focused or distracted, attentive or uninterested (Berezin 1997: 28, 35, 250; Verdery 1991: 6). Even if actors cathect to cultural texts, and even if they themselves possess high levels of cultural proficiency, theil projections still may not be persuasive to the audience/observer.. Observation can be merely cognitive, An audience can sec and can
Figure 2.2. Performance failure: de-fusion.
.....lerstand without experiencing emotional or moral signification.
we will see in the following section, there are often "social" expla-
......»ns of this variability. Audiences may represent social statuses
rrhogonal to the status of performers. Audience attendance may be required, or it may be merely compelled. Critics can intervene vt'on performance and audience. There might not be an audience the contemporary sense at all, but only participants observing imelves and their fellow performers. This latter condition facili-
.....1 ultural identification and psychological extension, though it is
nulition much less frequently encountered in the complex societies 1 I lie present day. See Figure 2.2.
Means of symbolic production
irilci to perform a cultural text before an audience, actors need in I Ik- mundane material things that allow symbolic projections made. They need objects that can serve as iconic representations liHp them dramatize and make vivid the invisible motives and ili l hey are trying to represent. This material ranges from clothing ■ i\ other sort of "standardized expressive equipment" (Goffman M 51). Actors also require a physical place to perform and the .....assure the transmission of their performance to an audience.
Mise-en-scene
1  >•   is and incur, m hand, and audienee(s) before them, social ii',< hi di ani.iiii soii.il action, entering into and projecting
11
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
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 such as 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, arc 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 per formance, and with what means? Who will be allowed attendance? What kinds of responses will be permitted from audience/observer? Are there powers that have the authority to interpret performanci", independently of those that have the authority to produce them? Air these interpretive powers also independent of the actors and the 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 languagi of hermeneutics, this sketch of interdependent elements provides ,i framework for the interpretive reconstruction of the meanings of pel formative action. In the language of explanation, it provides a mod. I 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 analytical!) but empirically vis-á-vis the others. Taken together, they determini and measure, whether and how a performance occurs, and the degia to which it succeeds or fails in its effect. Two pathwayi Lead oui from the discussion thus far, The analytii mode! i hi be developed furthi i
32
i
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
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 I 'uzzle of ritual and rationalization with which I introduced this essay •iiid that defines its central question.
The conditions for performativity: Historical transformations
I lie model of performance I am developing here provides a new way "I looking at cultural and organizational change over broad spans of historical time. We can see differently how and why rituals were once i entral to band and tribal societies and why the nature of symbolic " lion changed so remarkably with the rise of states, empires, and hurdles. We can understand why both the theater and the demo-' 'i i< polis arose for the first time in ancient Greece and why theater rged once again during the early modern period at the same
.....' »s open-ended social dramas became central to determining
nature of social and political authority. We can understand why mianticism, secularization, and industrial society made the authen-.....y 1,1 symbolic action such a central question for modern times.
Old-fashioned rituals: Symbolic performances in early societies
' "'.....and modernist thinkers were deeply impressed by the ritu-
H processes that explorers and anthropologists observed when encountered societies that had not experienced "civilization" modernity." Some associated the frequency of rituals with tit.' putative purity of early societies (Huizinga 1950 [1938]) and i   with some sort of distinctively primitive, nonrational mental-liw I'.mhl 1923). Huizinga (1950 [1938]: 14), for example, i'd ih.ii rituals create not a "sham reality" but "a mystical one," I'i' 11 "something invisible and in actual takes beautiful, actual,
......•" I-ess romantic observers still emphasized the automatic,
Ii i 'Me, engulfing, and spontaneous qualities of ritual life. Weber mplihed iliis understanding in a sociological manner. It also ' d 11 if modern anthropological approach to ritual that became
.....Hi'    luriK'i (I '»77: I S3) ilelined rituals as "stereotyped"
mt.l .is "lequestercd"; < Joody (I ?86i 11) called diem "homeostatie";
L 33
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
and 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 ol Turner's posthumous essays, Schechner (1987: 7) suggested that "all performance has at its core a ritual action." Actually, this statement must be reversed. All ritual has at its core a performative act.
This is not to deny the differences between rituals and perform ances of a less affecting kind. 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. Early 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 conditions of led complex societies, but it occurs in complex societies as well.
To see why performances in simpler societies more frequent lv 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 metaphysii .il 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 collectivitin of 60 to 80 members, people supported themselves by hunting UM gathering and participated in a small set of social roles with win. I every person was thoroughly familiar. By all accounts, the subject[\ ity that corresponded with this kind of social organization resemblM what Stanner (1972), when speaking of the Australian Aborir.m.l called "dream time." Such consciousness merged mundane and prat tical dimensions with the sacred and metaphysii d co the extent chil
34
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
Pi ligion did not exist as a separate form. In such societies, as Service I '62: 109) once remarked, "there is no religious organization" that i-parated from family and band."
I In- structural and cultural organization of such early forms of ii lies suggests differences in the kinds of social performance they
hi produce. The collective representations to which these social per-' iu.11ices refer are not texts composed by specialists for segmented "I'rKHips in complex and contentious social orders. Nor do these ■II' i live representations form a critical "metacommentary" (Geertz : ' kl) on social life, for there does not yet exist deep tension between
.......luie and transcendental spheres (Bellah 1970; Eisenstadt 1982;
"lv 1986; Habermas 1984). The early anthropologists Spencer ■ l ' lilien (1927) were right at least in this, for they suggested that I ni'.wura ritual cycle of the Australian Arunta recapitulated the Uta I lifestyle of the Arunta males. A century later, when Schechner 197) observed the Tsembaga dance of the Kaiko, he confirmed
II dl the basic moves and sounds-even the charge into the central
are adaptations and direct lifts from battle." I In tight intertwining of cultural text and social structure that •'l ■ social performances in early societies provides a contextual lor Durkheim's theoretical argument about religion as simply writ large. While claiming to propose a paradigm for study -i i v religion at all times, Dürkheim might better be understood 1 ii uliing the context for social performances in early societies.
"M......       insists that culture is identical with religion, that any
• ■■ 'i" i" religious belief is shared by every member of the group, and llu    shared beliefs are always translated into the practices he ill i minis, or rites. "Not only are they individually accepted by all i ■■ ol that group, but they also belong to the group and unify \ lociety whose members are united because they imagine the l wi a Id and its relation with the profane world in the same way, ■ in.«- they translate this common representation into identi-•i i'i H ii« cs, is called a Church" (Dürkheim [1912] 1996: 41, italics
4.1.1. di 1
in Ii ritualized performances, the belief dimension is experienced i-i "ii.il, immediate, and iconographic. Through the painting, nid reconfiguring of the physical body, the actors in these ni.iii.es seek not only metaphorically but also literally to mi il.. text, tlu'irgoal being to project the fusion of human and in.in and < .'od," sacred and mundane. The symbolic roles that •kill" pai l ti ip.it it hi in such ritualized Performances emerge directly, "Ilm.....rdialloii, Ii.mii the oilier social ode', ,ulors play. In
% IS
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
the Engwura ritual (Spencer and Gillcn 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 (1996 [1912]) 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 a( specific places . . . The concentration takes place when a clan or a portion of the tribe is summoned to come together" (Durkheim 1996 [1912]: 217).
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 ol 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 itl end. Even when they do not participate, ritual audiences are hardh strangers. They are linked to performers by direel (» indirect family i if.
In tonus of the elementary model I have laid mil already, it may U
said that such ritualized so< ial a< tioni fun the varioui o imponents i >i
Collective (Background) Representations
Means of Symbolic Produ
Social Powers
I ■ urc 2.3. The fused elements of performance inside simple social organization.
i - i l"i mance - actors, audiences, representations, means of symbolic Im I ion, social power, and mise-en-scene. See Figure 2.3.
Symbolic production
ll 1» the actor/audience part of this fusion to which Service (1962:109) i rred when he wrote that "the congregation is the camp itself." • Strauss (1963: 179) meant to emphasize the same fusing when h( ipoke of the "fabulation" of ritual as a "threefold experience." It n ists "first of the shaman himself, who, if his calling is a true one Undergoes specific states of a psychosomatic nature; second, that I" .k k person, who may or may not experience an improvement 1 Ins condition; and, finally, that of the public, who also participates I" ' me, experiencing an enthusiasm and an intellectual and emo-M il satisfaction which produce collective support." In the studies
1.....anistic rituals offered by postmodern performance theorists,
m read i heir ethnographic accounts as suggesting fusion in much line way. " I'hey derive their power from listening to the others Iti I ihsnrhiug daily realities. While they cure, they lake into them
I.....nis' possessions ami obsessions and lei the filler's illnesses
'Mm 11 hi is . . . The very i lose relai ionship these healers maintain
.17
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
with their patients remains the determining factor of the cure" (Trinh 1989, in Conquergood 1992: 44).
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 (see also Schechner 1976: 205, 1981: 92-4). As Levi-Strauss 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, Quesalid 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 oi 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 simpU social organizations.
Social complexity and post-ritual performances
Fused performances creating ritual-like effects remain important m more complex societies. There are two senses in which this is true First, and less importantly for the argument 1 am developing here, in primary groups such as families, gangs, and intergeneratioiially Stabll ethnic communities, role performances often seem to reproduce thl macrocosm in the microcosm (Slater I''<><>). Even inside oi comple
SI
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
societies, audiences in such primary groups are relatively homogeneous, actors are familiar, situations are repeated, and texts and traditions, if once invented, eventually take on a time immemorial quality. The second sense in which ritual-like effects remain central - and this is most important for my argument here - is that fusion ■mains the goal of performances even in complex societies. It is the 11 mtext for performative success that has changed.
As I noted earlier, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists have •malyzed the sporadic and uneven processes that created larger-scale JBCieties in innumerably different ways. There is sharply contrasting theorizing about the causes and pathways of the movement away n mi simpler social organization in which ritual played a central role i" more complex social forms, which feature more strategic, reflexive, and managed forms of symbolic communication. But there is Wde consensus that such a transformation did occur, that the proc-lies of "complexification," "rationalization," or "differentiation" Alexander and Colomy 1990; Champagne 1992; Eisenstadt 1963; 11 ibermas 1984; Luhmann 1995; Thrift 1999) produce new and dif-I'niit kinds of symbolic communications. Even Goody (1986: 22) poke confidently of the transition "from worldview to ideology." I his emphasis on ideology is telling, and it leads directly to the
.....ncnt about changes in the conditions for performativity that I
■ hi making here. Earlier sociological and anthropological investiga-'i   into the social causes of the transition from simple forms of id organization emphasized the determining role of economic luuige. Technological shifts created more productivity, which led "i plus and the class system, and finally to the first distinctive |  Ini. nl institutions, whose task was to organize the newly stratified ift> and to administer material and organizational needs. By the 'I the 1950s, however, anthropologists already had begun to 'l less of technological changes than shifts in economic orienta-i   nid regimes. When Fried (1971:103) explained "the move from lilt ii i.m to rank society," he described a shift "from an economy iiiii.iied by reciprocity to one having redistribution as a major in " In the same kind of anti-determinist vein, when Service 171) explained movement beyond the monolithic structures of •itly '."' iciies to the "twin forms of authority" that sustained distinc-
.......nic and political elites, he described it as "made possible by
i productivity" (ll>o2: 143, italics added). Sahlins (1972) built hi I' neiiiiieiii', ici suggest that it was not the economic inability '  id  .iii |»11 j •. ih.it prevented growth bill I he ideological desire to m.........i less productivity driven, more IcilUffh 11 vie ol life. Nolan
W
05
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
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 the 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 necessity or direct 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 "com municative context has changed dramatically both as regards the emitter and as regards the receivers" (Goody 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" (p. 13). Only symbolic projection beyond the local would allow groups to use economic surplus to create more segmented, unequal, and different i ated societies. Without the capacity for such ideological projection, how else would these kinds of more fragmented social orders ever b| coordinated, much less integrated in an asymmetrical way?
These structural and ideological processes suggest a decisive shili 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 || difficult and expensive, priests "have privileged access to the sacred texts." This allows "the effective control of the means of literate com munication," concentrating interpretative authority in elite hanffl (Goody 1986: 16-17). Alongside this new emergence of monopoh power, indeed because of it, there emerges the necessity for exercisinn tight control over performance in order to project ideological contra over distantiated and subordinate groups^ Kvnns l'ritchard (194(li 172, italics aelek'el) once wrote that, in oidei in "allow linn to /day thl part he plays in feuds ami quarn I    thi   luei > hie J needs only "ritud
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, how with the "relative autonomy of the religious sphere and its 'disembeddedness' from the total community ,md from the other institutional spheres," everything about political jjptimation has changed. The sacredness of the economic, political, and ideological elites has to be achieved, not assigned. As Eisenstadt put it, these elites now "tried to maintain dominance" (1963: 65, n.ilics added); it was not given automatically to them. "In all socie-nes studied here, the rulers attempted to portray themselves and the political systems they established as the bearers of special cultural Miibols and missions. They tried to depict themselves as transmit-Bllg distinct civilizations . . . The rulers of these societies invariably "/ei/ to be perceived as the propagators and upholders of [their] tra-> In ions [and they] desirefd] to minimize any group's pretensions to 11 mug the right to judge and evaluate the rulers or to sanction their I' riiimation" (Eisenstadt 1963: 141, italics added).
\n ambitious recent investigation into pharonic Egypt finds the line processes at work. "A state imposed by force and coercing 1' ■ subjects to pay taxes and perform civil and military service," hi.inn (2002: 74) writes, "could hardly have maintained itself if had not rested on a core semiology that was as persuasive as the i H'   11 self was demanding." Reconstructing "the semantics that
.....In lie the establishment of the state" (2002: 75), Assmann finds
1.....i the Old Kingdom Egyptians "clung to the graphic realism of
I'oglyphic writing" with an "astounding tenacity." This "aspira-iimii in permanence" meant that state rituals involved "maximum . . to prevent deviation and improvisation." Only the lector . "knowledge of the script and his ability to recite accurately" llld "ensure that precisely the same text was repeated at precisely line time in the context of the same ritual event, thus bringing "inn',, duration, and action into precise alignment" (Assmann '0-7 I). By the time of the Middle Kingdom, Assmann reports I I N--1 I 9), "the kings of the Twelfth Dynasty were in a fun-nl.illy different position." Social and cultural complexity had deil io such an extent that the pharonic rulers "had to assert in i Ives against a largely literate ami economically and militarily i i"l ,ii isiix. racy . . . ami win over the lower strata." These objec-, i mid not he .u hieveil by Ion e alone," Assmann observes, "but In i lie p. iwer i il eloquent e anil explanation."
in
I I
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
The assertion of political power was no longer a matter of apodic-tic 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 (Assmann 2002: 118-19).
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 carrying out central symbolic actions from their mass audiences. The appearance of seamlessness that made symbolic
Figure 2.4. The tic-fused elements ol pcrlonn.un <• Iniide ( omplex lOi ill
i irgtniztttli m.
action seem ritualistic gives way to the appearance of greater artifice .md planning. Performative action becomes more achieved and less lUtomatic. See Figure 2.4.
The emergence of theatrical from ritual performance
I n this point in our historical discussion, my references to perform-iiui' have been generated analytically, which is to say they have Urn warranted by the theoretical considerations presented in the i u. i section. While it seems clear that the emergence of more seg-iH iiied, complex, and stratified societies created the conditions - and Hn the necessity - for transforming rituals into performances, the ■Iter, more contingent processes of symbolic communication were ■I understood by their creators or their audiences as contrived or ílu nrrical in the contemporary sense. There was social and cultural lillrientiation, and the compulsion to project and not merely to i ..ume the effects of symbolic action, but the elements of perform-
..... were still not de-fused enough to create self-consciousness about
'i" n lificiality of that process.
Iluis, when Frankfort (1948: 135-6) insists on the "absence of I' una" in ancient Egypt, he emphasizes both the continuing fusion i   ľ red texts and actors and the relative inflexibility, or resistance lunge, of ancient societies (see also Kemp 1989: 1-16). "It is Frankfort concedes, "that within the Egyptian ritual the gods sometimes represented by actors." For example, an embalm-i icst might be "wearing a jackal mask" to impersonate the god 11 lis. In fact, one of the best-preserved Egyptian texts, the Mystery i //.'c Succession, "was performed when a new king came to throne." Nonetheless, Frankfort insists, such performances "do n present a new art form." He calls them "simply the 'books' ' rituals." They may be "dramatic," but "they certainly are not ' " In drama, the meaning and consequences of action unfold, • 1 m i liľ. sense are caused by, the theatrical challenge of mise-en-"lu drama, language is integrated with action and a change is
.....he a consequence of that action." In Egyptian rites, by con-
r. m Durkhcim's Aboriginal ones, the "purpose is to translate ln\ m the unchanging form of myth . . . The gods appear and i   'I "Hi e more the words I hoy spoke 'the first time'" (Frankfort I'M H  I i'i  I ((., italics added). It is the actuality of myth that marks
Mtii.il
m iln • ucel i iiv m .i i c. iliil drama m the < nntcmporary sense I In so. i.i I o i    11/.i i n .n. 11 .ind i nli m .i I kick ground for these
I 1
•I t
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
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 (1971 [1953]: 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 noi just metaphorically. We actually see the de-fusion of the elements oi performance in concrete terms. They became more than analytically identifiable: their empirical separation became institutionalized in specialized forms of social structure and available to commonsense reflection in cultural life.
Greek theater emerged from within religious rituals organized around Dionysus, the god of wine (Hartnoll 1968: 7-31). In the ril ual'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 continn ing 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 (1956 [1872]: 51-55, 78-79) put it this way: "In the dithyramb vfl see a community of unconscious actors all of whom see one anothei as enchanted . . . Audience and chorus were never fundamentally set over against each other ... An audience of spectators, such w* we know it, was unknown . . . Each spectator could quite literally imagine himself, in the fullness of seeing, as a chorist [ait]".
As Greek society entered its period of intense and unprecedeniMl social and cultural differentiation (Gouldner 1965), the content ■ the dithyramb gradually widened to include tales of the demi god and fully secular heroes whom contemporary < i recks considered thi ll
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 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 pbject 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 die very art of theatrical performance eventually came to be named, lipped out of the dithyramb chorus to become its leader. During ritual performance, he would assume the role of protagonist, either end or hero, and carry on a dialog with the chorus. Thespius formed i traveling troupe of professional actors. Collecting the means of v mbolic production in a cart whose floor and tailboard could serve po as a stage, Thespius traveled from his birthplace, Icaria, to one ■ pmmunal festival after another, eventually landing in Athens where, in 192 bc, he won the acting prize just then established by the City i Hi mysus festival.
hiiiing this same critical period of social development, systems "I collective representations began for the first time not only to be Minn down - becoming actual texts - but also to separate them-Mlves concretely from religious life. In fifth-century Athens, theater Writing became a specialty; prestigious writing contests were held, and . were awarded to such figures as Aeschylus and Sophocles. Such ■ i ular imagists soon became more renowned than temple priests. At ll ' playwrights chose and trained their own actors, but eventually 1  ' lis ol the Athenian festival assigned actors to playwrights by |M In i nir terms, this can be seen as having the effect of emphasizing hi,I highlighting the autonomy of the dramatic script vis-a-vis the
.....mis or charisma ol its creators (cf. Gouldner 1965: 114).
iu h .in innovation suggests, the independent institution of per-iii e t liticism also had emerged, mediating and pluralizingsocial i in a new way (see also Mt.(ionnick 200^). Rather than being tluuihed bv the performance, as on ritual occasions, interpretation
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
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 (1950 [1938]: 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"; yet 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 society. These questions were critical for sustaining the rule of law and an independent and democratic civil life.
Nietzsche (1956 [1872J: 78-9) 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 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 1 am developim; here, Aristotle's poetics can be understood in a new way. It aimed CO crystallize, in abstract theoretical terms, the empirical differentiation among the elements of performance that pushed ritual to theatci What ritual performers once had known in their guts - without having to be told, much less having to read - Aristotle (1987) now fell compelled to write down. His Poetics makes the natural artificial. Ii provides a kind of philosophical cookbook, instructions for meaning making and effective performance for a society that has moved from fusion to conscious artifice. Aristotle explained that peiformanci consisted of plots and that effective plotting demanded harrativi with a beginning, middle, and end. In his theory of catharsis, hi explained, not teleologically but empirically, how dramas could affei i an audience: tragedies have to evoke sensations oi "terror and pit) if emotional effect is to be achieved,
ISOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY This sketch of how theater emerged from ritual is not teleological or evolutionary. What 1 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) informs 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 liappened in ancient Greece was reiterated later in medieval Europe, when secular drama developed from the Easter passion plays. In twelfth-century Autun, a center of Burgundian religious activity, an HKtute observer named Honorius actually made an analogy between the effects of the Easter Mass and the efforts of the ancient tragedians ll lardison 1965: 40; Schechner 1976: 210). "It is known," Honorius rote, "that those who recited tragedies in theaters presented the ictions of opponents by gestures before the people." He went on In 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 rt demption." Honorius compared each movement of the Mass to an valcnt movement in tragic drama and described what he believed ic similar-tightly bound and fused, in our terms - audience effects. When the sacrifice has been completed, peace and communion are (Ivcn by the celebrant to the people," he wrote, and "then, by the Ite, ,(c.s7, they are ordered to return to their homes [and] they shout i'iy,uijs and return home rejoicing." It is no wonder that Boulton i '(>()) equates such early religious pageants with acting. Suggesting thai "the earliest acting was done by priests and their assistants," she that "one of the causes of the increasing secularization of the in.i was thai laymen hail soon to he called in ro fill in parts in the M|Miidnu; 'cast'" ( I l»f,(); |MS).
|i\ the early seventeenth century in F.....pe, after the rise oi city-
•l.iiiabsolutist  regimes, the mhiiiiIii   revolution, and internal
16
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
religious reforms, the institution of 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, stimulating, and provocative manner. The performance of these scripted representations were furnaces forging metaphors that circulated back to society, marking a figure-eight movement (Schechner 1977a; Turner 1982: 73-4) 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 1989 [1962]) but also from theatrical performances that projected moral valuation even while they entertained. While providing sophisticated amusement, Moliére 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 seventeenth -century drama, Reiss (1971: 122) observes that "the loss of illusion follows when the mise-en-scene 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 play wrights 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 con of this chapter: Why do ritually organized societies give way, not CO social orders regulated simply by instrumentally rational action, km instead to those in which ritual-like processes remain vital in a central way?
It is vital for this story to see ili.it tin emergence oi theater wa more or less simultaneous with the emergen* <■ "I the public sphere t
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
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 1989 [1962]) 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.
In earlier, more archaic forms of complex societies, such as the imperial orders of Egypt or Yucatan, social hierarchies simply iould issue commands, and ritualized ideological performances would provide symbolic mystification. In more loosely knit forms of • 'implex social organization, authority becomes more open to challenge, the distribution of ideal and material resources more subject i" contention, and contests for social power more open-ended and contingent. Often, these dramatic contests unfold without any settled dpt. Through their success at prosecuting such dramas, individual end collective actors gain legitimacy as authoritative interpreters of it k ial texts.
It is a commonplace not only of philosophical but also of politi-I'til history (e.g., Bendix 1964) that during the early modern period the masses of powerless persons gradually became transformed into ■ ni/ens. With the model of social performance now firmly in hand, H seems more accurate to say that non-elites also were transformed lii'in passive receptacles to more active, interpreting audiences.2 With tin constitution of citizen-audiences, even such strategic actors as tni/.ations and class fractions were compelled to develop effective nns ol expressive communication. In order to preserve their social (lower and their ability to exercise social control, elites had to trans-"ii their interest conflicts into widely available performances that ild project persuasive sytnbolii forms. As peripheries gradually mi'' mi "i pi n .ned iiii11 centers, pretenders Io social pi iwer si rove
IS
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
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 .1 grand social drama that personalized and amplified his plight (Tiirnei 1974b). He employed as background representation the dramatii paradigm of Christ's martyrdom to legitimate his contempoi.n script of antagonism to the king. While Henry defeated Sir Thomas in instrumental political terms, the drama Becket enacted captured thi English imagination and provided a new background text of moral action for centuries aftet.
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
Savanorola
(Brucker 1969), conflicts
In the Renaissance city-states ...... -----„
Church and state were played out graphically in the glSfl
.11 r. I       tu______ii.. U..C......
llCl \\ ' |
.................. at pu hi
squares, not only figuratively but often also literally before tin 1 of the increasingly enfranchised populo. Heteronomy ol go< ia was neither merely doctrine nor institutional structure public performance. Savanorola began his mass popular movent! III cleanse the Florentine Republic with a dramatic announcemeni In
pi i\\ It w.e. il
Piazza della Signoria, where open meetings had taken plao
Savanorola's publi followed, were staged
hi
ill iiiilv
; hanging, and the burning ol his corpv vil space. ()bsei vid by nil
111 il i ilicil, ' 'lIlNtl nr.I Ii' Uni
d tin
in the same ci\
flowing audience of citizens and semi i it ix.it-.   tome 111
grimly satisfied (Brut kei I969i 271)   the peri.....lano
Savanorola's arrest, confession, and execution graphically drew the curtain on the reformer's spiritual renewal campaign. It is hardly coincidental that, during this same period, Machiavelli gave advice to Italian princes not only about how to muster dispersed administra-live power but also about how to display power of a more symbolic kind. He wished to instruct the prince about how to perform like one 10 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 li\\ party" was negligible, but its expressive power was so powerful lh.it it created great political effects (Labaree 1979: 246ff). The colli .live performance successfully dramatized colonial opposition to 11" l'i itish crown, and mobilized fervent public support.
I In- undertaking had all the signs of a well-planned operation . . . The i mi Ii.nl stopped, and some people showed up with lanterns to supple-
......i the bright moonlight that now illuminated the scene ... As work
hn'Hi essed, a large crowd gathered at the wharf to watch the proceed-in silent approval. It was so quiet that a witness standing at some
II i iiue could hear rhe steady whack-whack of the hatchets . . . "This I lln most magnificent Movement of all," wrote John Adams in his
.l _----- i •        — ■ '
• lilt
Uti milí
the next day. "There is a Dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity in this I llnii of the Patriots that I great admire . . . This Destruction of ■ i." he concluded, "is so bold, so daring to form, intrepid, and Ible, and it must have so important Consequences and so lasting, l i iiiiioi but consider it as an Epocha [sic] in History." (Labaree 1 l-l-l S)
i, the inaugural military battle of the American Revolution, Ington, Massachusetts, was represented in terms of theatrical ii as "the shot heard 'round the world'." In contemporary il 11 111 the even t, social-dramatic exigencies exercised powerful \111< in .hi and British soldiers were portrayed in the brightly
• •I .....I.....is nl opposed performers. Paul Revere was portrayed
111'11111111prolog, riding through the streets and shouting, "The
....... oming, the Kedcoats are i1lining," though he probably
ni   I In I Hie. lines of soldiers mi both sides often were depicted as ......I l'\ 11Us and drums. IMixuh and olten confusing battles
ili
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
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
A 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 has described as "the recasting of traditional female behavior within a republican mode" (Landes 1988: 109-11). As the revolution unfolded, heroes and villains switched places according t< I the agonistic logic of dramatic discourse (Furet 1981) and theatrical configuring (Hunt 1984), not only in response to political calcula tion. No matter how violent or bloodthirsty in reality, the 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 (1974a, 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 sym bolic dynamics of public life (e.g., Moore and Myerhoff 1975,1977), but with a few significant exceptions (e.g., Alexander 1988b; Edlei 1998; Wagner-Pacifici 1986) the concept has largely faded from view, even in the field of performance studies. One reason has to do with thi triumph of instrumental reason in rational-choice and critical theorii 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 ol thl elements that composed it. Searching for a kind of natural history ..I social drama, on the one hand, and for a gateway to ideological com munitas, on the other, Turner spoke (1982: 75) of the "full fonu.il development" of social dramas; of their "full phase stEUCturi While acknowledging that social complexity created the condition for social drama, he insisted that it "remains to the last simple in ineradicable," locating it in "the developmental cycle of all groups (1982: 78). He believed that the "values and ends" of performaw i were "distributed over a range of actors" and were projected "inlil a system . . . of shared or consensual meaning" (1982: 75). Social dramas can lake place, T.....er (1987) msisieJ, .oils "among thu I
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
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).
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
I he 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 •((tension. The aim is to create, via skillful and affecting performance, the emotional connection of audience with actor and text and [hereby to create the conditions for projecting cultural meaning from performance to audience. To the extent these two conditions have hri-n achieved, one can say that the elements of performance have bfti mie fused.
Nietzsche (1956 [1872]) elegized the "bringing to life [of] the plastic World of myth" (p. 126) as one of those "moments of paroxysm that lilt man beyond the confines of space, time, and individuation" (1956 11K721: 125). He was right to be mournful. As society becomes more nmplex, such moments of fusion become much more difficult to lueve. The elements of performance become separated and inde-jNtidenily variable, and it becomes ever more challenging to bring |i  Is into life.
I he challenge confronting individual and collective symbolic ion in complex contemporary societies, whether on stage or in ■ iv at large, is to infuse meaning by re-fusing performance. Since ii iniu ism, 111is modern challenge has been articulated existentially rtinl philosophy.illy .is the problem oi authenticity (Taylor 1989). While the disc oinse about .llll I n • 111 it llv r. p.iiiu lii.il, m llie sense thai
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
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 undue 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) insists 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 appears 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 repeti tion 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 ili.n Csikszentmihalyi (1975) described as "flow" (see also Scheclim j 1976) in his innovative research on virtuoso performance in art, spoil, and games. In the terms I am developing here, what CsikszentmihaK i (1975) discovered in these widely varying activities was the merglnl of text, context, and actor, a merging that resulted in the loss 01 self-consciousness and a lack of concern for - even awareness oi the scrutiny of observers outside the action itself. IVcausc ol "thl merging of action and awareness," (\ik'./eiiimilulyi (ll'7<>: IS)
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
writes, "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: 53-4).
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 culture and scripted text, between scripted text and actors, between audience and mise-en-scene. Successful performances overcome the deferral of meaning that Derrida (1991) recognized as differance. In a successful performance, the signifiers seem actually to become what they signify. Symbols and referents are one. I ript, direction, actor, background culture, mise-en-scene, audience, means of symbolic production - all these separate elements of ■rformance become indivisible and invisible. The mere action of peril inning accomplishes the performance's intended effect (see also Hlltin 1957). The actor seems to be Hamlet; the man who takes the | 'iih of office seems to be the president.
While re-fusion is made possible only by the deposition of social ■DWer, the very success of a performance masks its existence. When ■rformance is successful, social powers manifest themselves not as
■ Iternal or hegemonic forces that facilitate or oppose the unfolding ■rformance but merely as sign-vehicles, as means of representa-ii"ii, as conveyors of the intended meaning. This is very much what I.....dieu (1990 [1968]: 211) had in mind when he spoke of the
• Pi ise of graceful artistic taste as culture "becoming natural." The (tinnoisseur's poised display of aesthetic judgment might be thought I Hi a successful performance in the sense that it thoroughly conceals
■ manner in which this gracefulness is "artificial and artificially Inquired," the result of a lengthy socialization resting upon class Irtvilcge. "The virtuosi of the judgment of taste," Bourdieu writes, i mi mi iheir knowledge ol art casually, as if it were natural. Their
......n i" present "an experience of aesthetic grace" that appears
Completely treed Irom the constraints ol culture," a performance
' i« marked by the long, patient training ol whu li it is the product."
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
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 post-ritual 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 (1972a [1957]) described m his celebrated essay on "true wrestling." He insisted that the "public spontaneously attunes itsell to the spectacular nature of the contest, like the audience at a sub urban cinema . . . The public is completely uninterested in knowinr, whether the context is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itsell to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motive, and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what u sees" (1972a [1957]: 15).
How does cultural pragmatics work? The inner structures of social performance
Having elaborated the criteria of performative failure and succesi I now turn to a more detailed discussion of the elements and rel.i tions that sustain it. I will draw upon the insights of drama theor) to decompose the basic elements of performance into their mow complex component parts, and I will link these insights to the soi ill dramas that compose the public sphere. To be able to move bad and forth between theatrical and social drama enriches both side'- u| the argument; it also helps document my core empirical claim. So, ul action in complex societies so often is ritual-like because it remain performative. The social conditions that gave rise lo theater also y, V
rise to post 'ritual forms oi i) mbolii at tiotii
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
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, "these roles are made up of collective representations shared by actors and audience, who are usually members of the same culture" (Turner 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, I lie categories within which actors behave. In a complex social order, i Ins knowledge is always a matter of degree. In contrast with Turner (1982), I do not presume that social performance is ritualistic; I wish 111 explain whether and how and to what degree.
It is precisely at this joint of contingency or possible friction between I M« kground representations and the categorical assumptions of actors ind audience that scripts enter into the scene. The emergence of the 1   pi as an independent element reflects the relative freedom of per-
I.....tance from background representations. From within a broader
.....verse of meanings, performers make conscious and unconscious
ho ices a bout the paths they wish to take and the specific set of meanings ihc) wish to project. These choices are the scripts - the action-oriented uhsct ol background understandings. If script is meaning primed to l" ilormance, in theatrical drama this priming is usually, though not always, sketched out beforehand. In social drama, by contrast, scripts
.....i' oli en are inferred by actors. In a meaning-searching process that
lull lies I mm rhe more intuitive to the more witting, actors and audi-i eIleel on performance in the process of its unfolding, gleaning a I i 'i upon which the performance "must have" been based. In .mil social dramatic scripting, actors and audiences actively m<'   m   thawing   the   hermeneutical   circle   (Dilthey 1976). 1 in.nm ". become the foreground parts upon which wholes are
.....i'd, i In l.iner lieinr, understood as the scripts that allow the
"I   in .n I ion In be .iv ei I .lined. Thesi  si lipts become, ill til I'll, llii p.ul'. ol lot tire wholes, li seems only sensible in suggest that an
56
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
FUSION
'Truthful' 'Real'
Figure 2.5. Fusion/de-fusion of background representation, script, and audience.
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 music critic (Margolick 2000: 56) argues against the claim that Billie 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." Holiday's singing was successful 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 actor's dramatic technique, which 1| designed to elicit an effective audience response. In our terms, this is | matter of fusing the script in two directions, with background cultui | on the one side and with audience on the other. If the script creati such fusion, it seems truthful to background representations and real to the audience. The former allows cultural extension; the latter pi) etiological identification. See figure 2.s. The craft ol scripi writing nddt esses these pi issihilities. The writ! i
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
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 (see also Freud 1950 [190(.)|) 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 Peggy Noonan's (1998) manual On Speaking Well, the much-heralded speechwriter for presidents Ronald Reagan and (ieorge H. W. Bush emphasized time and time again that simplification is the key to achieving the fusion among speaker, audience, and background culture (see also Flesch 1946). "You should treat the members ol 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 Bur friends, with the same candor and trust and respect." Noting die "often unadorned quality to sections of great speeches, a direct-I is and simplicity of expression," Noonan (1998: 48) attributes this to the fact that "the speaker is so committed to making his point, to Uinr, understood and capturing the truth." Sentences "must be short itml sayable," she warns, because "your listeners [are] trying to absorb Mat you say" (1998: 35). Noonan praised Bush's acceptance speech .it i lie ll'SS Republican Convention in terms of this two-way fusion. 1 in i he one hand, her script allowed Bush to connect his own life to the I' i. kground represent;!! ions ol American society. Bush "was not only
I iiine. about his life in a way that was truthful and specific |but| was
mUo toiniei iii))' his lite to llistoi v    the llistoi \ ol lliosc who'd fought
SS
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
World War II and then come home to the cities, and married, and gone on to invent the suburbs of America, the Levittowns and Hempsteads and Midlands." On the other hand, the script 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" (Noonan 1998: 28-9).
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 per formance must take place in the confines of one dramatic scene - in one narrative place - and must unfold in 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 investiga tions themselves can unfold in continuous and real, and thus forcefu IIv dramatic time. Ordinary parliamentary business is suspended so that such political-cultural performances, whether grandiose 01 grandiloquent, can achieve the unity of action, place, and time.
Moral agonism
The fusion achieved by successful scripting does not suggest harmoni ous plots. To be effective, in fact, scripts must structure meaning in an agonistic way (Arendt 1958; Benhabib 1996). Agonism implii a dynamic movement that hinges on a conflict pitting good again.i evil (Bataille 1985), creating a wave-like dialectic that highlights thl existential and metaphysical contrast between sacred and prolan, "Performing the binaries" (Alexander 200 W>) creates the basic codei and propels narratives to pass through them.   I lie drama's pro
tagonisrs are aligned forcefully with the Bat red themes and figure* ol
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
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 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 dramatically extended.
Agonistic scripting is exhibited most clearly in grandiloquent performance. Geertz (1973b: 420-1) 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 (1972a [1957]: 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 i mdidates for vice president of the United States, the Republican contender from Indiana, Senator Dan Quayle, sought to gain credibility by i a ing the martyred former president John F. Kennedy. Quayle's opponent, Texas Senator Lloyd Benton, responded with a remark that not ni'-iely scored major debating points but also achieved folkloric status in the years following: "Senator, I had the honor of knowing Jack I onnedy, and you're no Jack Kennedy." Speaking directly to his politi-• 11 opponent, but implicitly to the television audiences adjudicating I he authenticity of the candidates, Senator Benton wished to separate In. opponent's script from the nation's sacred background representations. To prove they were not aligned would block Senator Quayle limn assuming an iconic role. As it turned out, while Senator Quayle's d, hate performance failed, he was elected anyway.
I implicating "the general artistic laws of plot development," Boulton l''i.i i: 41 ft) observed that "a play must have twists and turns to keep
......r.i until the end." To keep the audience attentive and engaged,
Mged dramas "must develop from one crisis to another." After an Inn i.i I clarification, in which "we learn who the chief characters are,
i u they are there loi and wli.it are the problems with which they i in,   there must be "some startling development giving rise to new
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
problems." This first crisis will be followed by others, which "succeed one another as causes and effects."
Turner (1974a) 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 refuse 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 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-Mom 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-scene: Re-fusing script, action, and performative space
Even after a script has been constructed thai allows background culture to walk and talk, the "action" oi llie performance mUSI
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
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-scene, which translates literally as "putting into the scene." Defining mise-en-scene 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 lubject 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
ih ire complex, and the elements of performance more differentiated, the coordinating tasks became more demanding. By the late nine-nth century, according to Chinoy (1963: 3, in McConachie 1992: l '6), there was "so pressing a need" that the new role of director "quickly preempted the hegemony that had rested for centuries with ■•ywrights and actors." Chinoy (1963) believes that "the appear-iii.. of the director ushered in a new theatrical epoch," such that
his experiments, his failures, and his triumphs set and sustained the
iKe" (1963: 3).
When Boulton (1960: 182-3) warned that "overdirected scripts l< ive the producer no discretion," she meant to suggest that, because iters cannot know the particular challenges of mise-en-scene, they hnuld not write specific stage directions into their script. Writers in leave directors "plenty of scope for inventions." Given the iiniingency of performance, those staging it will need a large space Inn which to exercise their theatrical imagination. They will need o.k h actors on the right tone of voice, to choreograph the space .-el imung among actors, to design costumes, to construct props, •tin! to .mange lights. When I'urlhes (1972« | I957]l 15) argued that what makes t he circus or the arena whit they BN ll not the ->ky I but I llli'd I en. I nnr, .ind vert u a I quality < ■ I tin flood »1 light," he points to
62
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
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" (1972a [1957]: 15).
For social dramas, in which scripts are attributed in a more contemporaneous and often retrospective way, mise-en-scene 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 do nol simply "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 (2006) highlights "the physical, geographical aspects of staging and managing collective actions." In theorizing the standoff, Wagner-Pacifici (2000: 192-3) distinguishes between "ur-texts" and "texts-in-action," explaining how the often deadly standoffs between armed legal authorities and their quarric are triggered by "rules of engagement" (2000: 157) that establish "sol points" (2000: 47) in a physical scene, such as barricades. Temporal deadlines also are established, so that the "rhythm of siege" become! structured by the "clock ticking" (2000: 64). Standoffs are endeel In violent assault only when dramatic violations occur vis-ä-vis then 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-s cene 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 h > not been sufficiently taken to heart: "We have given insufficient al ten tion to the assemblages of sign-equipment which large numbers i i
performers can call their own" (1956: 22-3). Of course, in the.....i
typically fused performances of small-scale societies, access to siult means was not usually problematic. Vei even for such naturalisti* .mil
fused performances, the varied elements ol symbolu product..... dl
tlOt appear Ironi nowhere. In his itudy ol the I •■<■inh.ii'.i, for exumpli
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
Schechner (1976) found that peace could be established among the warring tribes when they performed the konjkaiko 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 konjkaiko" (1976: 198). War and peace thus depended on a ritual process that was "tied to the fortunes of the pig population" (p. 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.
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 mate-n.il "base" for every symbolic production. While the latter are not imply shaky superstructures in the vulgar Marxist manner, neither ■ an cultural performances stand up all by themselves. Le Robert VIzero (2006) defines mise-en-scene as "I'organization materielle de Id representation" and the means of symbolic production refers to ilie first half of rhis definition, the material organization. Still, even i he physical platforms of performance must be given symbolic shape. I wry theater is marked by "the style in which it is designed and built," write Aston and Savona (1991: 112), and social dramas are itlleered equally by the design of their place. During the 1998 Clinton impeachment, it was noted widely that the hearings were being held in die old Senate office building, an ornate setting whose symbolic lira vitas had been reinforced by the civil theatrics of Watergate li i ades before.
"t ei the design of theatrical space depends, in part, on technologi-il means. In the preindustrial age, according to Aston and Savona '''I), the "confines" of the "large and inflexible venue" (1991: M 11 ol open-air theaters placed dramatic limits on the intimacy that 1111ucrs could communicate, whatever the director's theatrical (towers or the artistry ol the script. Later, the introduction of lighting "established the convention oi the darkened .iikIiiorium" and "limited the spectator's spatial awareness to the stage area" (1991: I Ml. < line attention is fcx used in I his m.imiei    .is barthes (I s>72b
(el
6 J
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
[1957]) also suggests in his observations on spectacle - 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 dialog 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 large-scale 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 mise-en-scene in hei 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 imagi nation into place, however, was determined by the distribution oi German political and economic power. Because Hitler's party bad triumphed at the level of the state, Nazis controlled the means ol symbolic production. As an artist, Reifenstahl herself was infatuate! by the Nazi cause, and she wrote a script that cast Hitler in a heron light. But the tools for making her drama were controlled by other It was Goebbels who could hire the brilliant young filmmaker and could provide her with the means for staging her widely influential work.
66
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
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 2003a, 2009). 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 (Zelizcr 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 provides not only 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 uncial dramas from live-action transmission. Media events (Boorstin 1961; Dayan and Katz 1992) are social performances whose contents ■ue shaped by writers and photographers and whose distribution is decided by corporate or state 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 «nd audience. As we will see, there are, in fact, many more mediations than that. See Figure 2.6.
Whether those who "report" media effects are employed by institutions whose interests are separated from - and possibly even 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, ii is hardly surprising that newspapers foi io lour, remained hii,mei.illy and o11'.1111/,1111111.111\ in.. .1 wnii |>ii11.111.11 ideologlcah
67
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
Figure 2.6. Mise-en-scene interfacing with social powers.
economic, and political powers (Alexander 1981; Schudson 1981). 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, anil performative success more contingent. Even in the "iron cage" OJ nineteenth-century capitalism, British parliamentary investigation', 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 distrib uted in highly influential "white papers" throughout the class system (Smelser 1959: 291-2). Even after Bismark outlawed the social LSI party in late nineteenth-century Germany, powerful performance! 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: I I1' '• 5) In mid-twentieth-century America, the civil rights movemeni 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 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 necessarily declined. Collegial associations, whether conceived as institutional elites, guilds, or professional associations, increasingly regulate and evaluate the performance of specialized cultural goods (Parsons 1967). In complex societies, continuous criti-' al evaluations are generated from within every performative medium |nd emergent genre - whether theater or feature film, blog or website design, documentary or cartoon, country-and-wcstern song or rap, lassical recording, sitcom, soap opera, news story, news photo, editorial, feature, or nightly newscast. Such self-policing devices aim to "improve" the possibilities lor projecting performance in effective
Ways. These judgments and awards are determined by peer evaluations. I K'spite the power ol the studios and mega media c< irporat ions,
68
69
V
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
Figure 2.7. Double fusion: text-actor-audience.
it is the actors, cinematographers, editors, directors, script and speechwriters, reporters, ad writers, graphic designers, 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 twentieth century, aims to condition and structure the interpretations such critics apply. Such judgments are also the concern of agents and ham dlers, of experts in focus groups, of privately hired pollsters, and spin doctors of every ideological stripe. The more complex and pluralized the society, the tighter this circle of criticism and self-evaluation in 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. See Figure 2.7.
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-scene skillfully set in place, tin i< is no guarantee that a performance will succeed. There remains tin extraordinary challenge of acting it out. Actors must perform thl kl roles effectively, and they often are not up to the task. Thus, wlnl,
Veltrusky (1964: 84) acknowledges thai signifying power residi
"various objects, from parts ol the COStumfl CO the IM," be ins!
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
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 post-ritual 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.3
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 gesture to a text rather than seeking actually to embody it. This overt exhibition 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 eighteenth century, when sacred and traditional social structures were being reconstructed by secular revolutions (Brooks 1976), this "anti-emotionalist" thespian style came uiider criticism. In The Paradox of Acting, Diderot (1957 [1830]) ■Blacked acting that communicated feelings by gesture rather than embodiment. But it was not until the so-called new drama of the late nineteenth century - when social and culture de-fusion were considerably more elaborate - that the intensely psychological and introspective ■eater initiated by Strindberg and Ibsen demanded an acting method 111.11 placed a premium on subjective embodiment, or facsimile.
fust as Aristotle wrote the Poetics as a cookbook for script-writing "in e myth had lost its sway, so did the Russian inventor of modern ■amatic technique Constantin Stanislavski (1989 [1934]) invent iIh system" alter the iconic potency of scripts could no longer be ii' l\ assumed. The challenge was to teach professional actors how i" make their artificial performances seem natural and unassuming. Si.ine.l.iv.ki began by emphasizing the isolation ol the actor from
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
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?" (1989 [1934]: 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 out-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 1989 [1934]: 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" (1989 [1934]: 46). I [| suggests that the actor adopt an "as if" attitude, pretending that thl scripted situation is the actor's in real life. In this way, "the feelingl aroused" in the actor "will express themselves in the acts of tb.il imaginary person"- as if she had actually "been placed in the circum stances made by the play" (1989 [1934]: 49; see also Goffman 1956i 48). If the actor believes herself "actually" to be in the circumstancci that the script describes, she will act in a natural way. She will assumi the inner motivation of the scripted character, in this way re-fusing the separation of actor and script. Only by possessing this subjci tivity 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 pin) (1989 [1934]: 248).
All action in the theater must have an inner justification, be logical coherent and real . . . With this special quality of if. . . everything I clear, honest and above board . .. The secret of the effect of if lies in thl fact that it does not . . . make the artist do anything. On the coiiimi it reassures him through its honesty and encourages him to have conn dence in a supposed situation . . . Il arouses an inner and real .11 in ll and does this by natural means. (Slanislavski I'LS1) | I'' )4]l -l(.   ', itftlll altered)
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 role.
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 Watetgate hearings in the summer of 1973, even Republican senators who privately supported President Richard Nixon felt compelled to join their fellow Democrats in public 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, 2006, 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 politi-i.iI script, the political drama failed because the actors could not, or would not, fuse with their parts.
The causal impact of acting on performance is so large that even bad li i ipts can be a great theatrical success. "We know where a bad play has achieved world fame," Stanislavski (1989 [1934]: 52) observes, "because of having been re-created by a great actor." Simmel (1968: ' I) writes that the "impression of falsehood is generated only by a l" M ir 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 (he actor completely carried away by the play" so that "it ill moves ol its own accord, subconsciously and intuitively" (1989 I I'' >• 11: 13). Only when How is achieved can the actor fuse with ludience as well. To seem real to an audience, "il is necessary that lln spectators feci his inner relationship to what he is saying" (I 989 USM4|: 1A"K original italics; see also Koach ll>'M: U, 17,218).
71
7 \
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
Even the best acting, however, cannot ensure that the audience gets it right.
The challenge of reception: Re-fusing audience with performative text
One-sidedly cultural 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 implicitly 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-scene, 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: 109-10), spoke about "the fundamental asymmetry between text and reader," asserting that the "lack of common situation and a common 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" (1980:207-8).
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) articulates this contingent possibility when she describes the audience as the third side of "the great triangle oi responses which is drama." Will the audience remain apart from thl performative experience, or will it be "cooperative," proving itsoli capable of "submitting itself to a new experience" (1960: 196-7)?
Boulton points here to the psychological identification of audienci
with enacted text. By "accepting a lample oi life and tasting it she writes, an audience it "sharing in the lives, oi Imaginary peoplt not altogether unlike known llvt persons " ii Is revealing that tht
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
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 devel opments 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-perform.im c is "that he is identifying himself with something with which he Ii not identical." Overcoming this paradox is the key to therapeutic sir < ess: "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 (ll>64) or tin-Birmingham School of Cultural Studies (Hall and Jefferson 1976), have sought to accentuate defusion, in theory or in practice, so as to block the cultural extension of dominant ideology. By far the greatei 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 (1955 [1923], 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 refusion 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 lnd shape her/his response" (Aston and Savona 1991:120). Film and television producers ami distributors try to protect their investments In targeting specifu audience demographics and by staging test runs
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
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 candidate-sponsored 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 only a matter of layering (Rauer 2006). 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 (see also 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, and intensified, the growing political consensus about Nixon's impeachment, poll data revealed that some 20 percent oi 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 (1955 [1923]) rightly linked the fusion of audience ami performance to the internal unity of the audience itself. "What I describe as an audience is a gathering in the same place of thosi brought together by the same need, the same desire, the same aspira tions ... for experiencing together human emotions - the ravishmcm of laughter and that of poetry - by means of a spectacle more full) realized than that of life itself" (in Auslander 1997: 16). In comple 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 subcultm> - "multiple public spheres" (Eley 1992; Fraser 1992) - that produi i distinctive pathways for cultural extension and distinctive objects ol psychological identification. More and less divided by ideology, rat i ethnicity, class, religion, and region, citizen-audiences can respond to social performances in diametrically opposed ways (1 iebes and Katz 1990). For this reason, group-affirming BO( ial dramas are nun Ii
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
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) suggests 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. Audiences of social and theatrical dramas judge quality comparatively. Scripts, whether written or attributed, are compared to the great and convincing 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 (Alexander 1987b; Schudson 1992b)? 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? Did President Obama's seemingly hands-off response to the Gulf oil spill represent " another Katrina," such that he was performing as badly as his predecessor, George W. Bush?
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, and neither psychological identification nor cultural I extension will likely occur. Fragmented performance interpretations feed back into the construction of subcultures, providing memo-I ries that in turn segment perceptions of later performances (Jacobs I 2000). If there are some shared memories, by contrast, audiences will I experience social drama in a deeper and broadened way. As audi-I ences become more involved, performance can draw them out of
dcinograpliH and subcultural niches into a more widely shared and
I possibly more universalis!ic liminal spate. See figure 2.8.
7ft
77
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
Social Powers
I-,-J
Figure 2.8. Audiences and performance.
Conclusion: Cultural pragmatics as model and morality
Why are even the most rationalized societies still enchanted and mystified in significant 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 purely symbolic. It means that pragmatic and symbolic dimensions are intertwined.4
It is such a cultural-pragmatic perspective that has informed this chapter. I have developed a macro model of social action as cultural performance. In the first section, I proposed that performances isl composed of a small number of analytically distinguishable elements, which have remained constant throughout the history of social hl< even as their relationship to one another has markedly changed. U the second section, I demonstrated that as social structure and cultUM have become more complex and segmented, so the elements thU compose performance have become not only analytically separiblt but also concretely differentiated - separated, and de fused in Ml empirical way. In the third section, I showed that whether S0< ill and theatrical performances succeed or I.ul depends on whether BCtoi
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 (1996 [1912]) and Mauss (1979) believed, 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 invariant structures, how they 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. Figure 2.9 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 I' implexity. The lower horizontal plot line (b) graphs failed perform-inces, or those that fail to re-fuse the elements of performance, once •gain 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 m< lenient ol social complexity. It has a downward, 45-degree slope, loi each increase in social and cultural complexity stretches farther Spart - further defuses - the elements of performances, which makes I Success that much more difficult to achieve. I'eriormances above the
uiiigon.il (c) .in- more successful than expected, given the historical
Conditions ol peril>i m,mi e; those below are less.
7H
A CULTURAL THEORY OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
Social and Cultural Complexity
Lower Fusion (§<
Higher
Successful }■ Performanci' (Rituals)
Higher thai) \^\ Expected
Success
Lower than m Expected Success
Failed Perfotin "•
(Str.Ut r.i
Figure 2.9. The historical cond.tions of social perfornjaucei structured variation.
Wariness about authenticity is intrinsic to the pluralism and opi 11
ness of complex societies, whether ancient, modern, or posti.....Ii 1
social life. Nietzsche (1956 [1872|: 136) bemoaned dial . culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its 11 1I111 and healthy creativity." But from a moral point ol view, n 1. nil! I
healthy to be skeptical of myths, to see through the efforts "l .....
to seamlessly re-fuse the elements of performance. When polllli I democracy made its first historical appearance, in ancieni Gi Plato (1980) feared that demagogy mighi easih swa) thi poll 1
undertake immoral acts, in terms oi the perspective IBl ..... hil
Plato was an implacable opponent of performance, decplj ut pi I of its cultural-pragmatic effects. In one oi his dialogs, hi porn master ol oratory, Gorgias, as hiagguig uboul Its extraord..... 1
suasive powers. "You might well be ama/ed, Socrates, il yotl I IH
HO
SOCIAL PERFORMANCE BETWEEN RITUAL AND STRATEGY
. . . 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 performative skill by connecting success to mere audience acceptance. "The orator need have no knowledge of the truth about things," Socrates exclaims; "it is enough 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?" 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 does need to he unmasked, and rational deliberation provides the means. From 1 . iiltural-sociological perspective, however, embracing rationality as 1 norm does not mean seeing social action itself as rational. Culture is I ia toolkit than storybook. Why else are critical efforts to question a performance almost always accompanied by creative efforts to mount
......uer-performances 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 liiust acknowledge that even the most democratic and individuated societies depend on performative abilities to sustain collective belief. Myths are generated by ritual-like social performance (Giesen 2006). I Inly il performances achieve fusion can they reinvigorate collective I ■ , allowing them to be "ubiquitous and unnoticed, presiding over lite growth of the child's mind and interpreting to the mature man In. hi. .ind struggles," as Nietzsche (1956 [1872]: 136-7) astutely
llli'.el \ ed.
81