The Drama of Social Life

The ‘‘strong program’’ that Jeffrey Alexander promoted has long become mainstream. The idea that culture—as the study of meaning—is causally important is now part of our disciplinary common sense. But then, how do we analyze and conceive of meaning-making? Here, a thousand flowers bloom, most of them blithely ignoring each other. And while Alexander and his students made important contributions with their work on binary semiotic codes, this was only a first step in Alexander’s stream of research. The Drama of Social Life represents a second move in Alexander’s work, a performativedramaturgical turn. Thus, from the early 2000s, Alexander has increasingly emphasized that the binary codes he earlier wrote of need to be enacted and put in narrative motion; and, moreover, that the narrative and dramaturgical structure of such enactments is where the sociological action is. In that way, Alexander is fashioning a dramaturgical approach that seems to be quite distinct from Victor Turner’s or Erving Goffman’s—one where the exercise and performance of shared meaning is paramount, where Durkheimian moments of solidarity and emotion become potent not through interaction rituals, but through the meaningful fusion of text, actors, and audiences. The book exemplifies this approach. It is itself a performance. Bookended by two theoretical chapters, it provides case studies of this dramaturgical-cultural analysis, from political mobilization to the power of intellectuals. To set the stage, Alexander begins by tying his dramaturgical approach to a more general performative conceptualization of culture through what he terms the problem of defusion and refusion of cultural performance. Whereas performances in less differentiated societies were ‘‘fused’’—as ritual was enacted as an ongoing part of social life and spoke to the experiences of the group in a more or less unproblematic fashion—the increase of social differentiation became also a moment of performative defusion between audiences, texts, and actors. From this perspective, what we think of as heightened moments of dramatic performances are always-temporary ‘‘refusions’’ of texts, actors, and audiences, forming a powerful nexus of mobilization and emotion. The Drama mostly follows successful moments of modern performative refusion. From the Black Lives Matter movement through the Arab Spring, Mao’s ability to mobilize the Chinese peasantry, Obama’s presidential debate with Romney, or Frantz Fanon’s writing, Alexander’s chapters constantly reiterate the importance of actual dramatic performance for political mobilization and solidarity. But while the project is thus important, and the writing is superb throughout, making for an enjoyable read, the book also made this reader, at least, wonder about the theoretical distance the author still needs to cover in order to make good on his theoretical project. Time and again, I tried and failed to recreate his argument and to understand how a reader could use this work as a model that would allow her to recreate this kind of cultural sociology. Performance is important, but to which parts of the performance should I pay attention? What aspects of the structure of performance explain its power? Along which dimensions do they vary? As a way to understand this difficulty, it is useful to compare the approach to that of sociology’s other dramaturgist, Goffman. Like Alexander, Goffman was undoubtedly a brilliant observer of human life. But Goffman, often rather pedantically, parceled out the different ways in which performances can be understood. His work is strewn with technical language: ‘‘line,’’ ‘‘face-work,’’ ‘‘role distance,’’ the ‘‘interaction membrane,’’