Omer Benjakob 20/2/2012

Matthias Revers Sociology of Culture

Hannah Arendt and the Strong Program for Cultural Sociology:

An Arendtian Critique of the Strong Program

In the following pages I will present the Strong Program for Cultural Sociology and attempt to

critique it through the work and thought of Hannah Arendt. Firstly I will present the methodological

program behind the Strong Program (SP). Secondly I will present the political philosophy of Hanna

Arendt so as to lay the theoretical basis needed to critique any social or political theory through her

ideas and concepts. Thirdly I will lay the basis for the comparison and critique through a discussion

of differences in conceptualization of the social and the political in both Arendt and the SP. Next I

will compare the SP's, and specifically that of Jeffery Alexander's, idea of the civil sphere to

Arendt's concept of “space of appearance”. Afterwards I will try to locate, through the Arendtian

concept of vita activia, where in the active life of man does the SP's topic subject fall. I will do so

through the empirical and theoretical treatment by Alexander of the term “social performance” and

Smith's and Jacobs' of “narrative”. Also, in this chapter and as part of this discussion I will compare

and critique the SP's understand of the social in regards to Arendt's understanding of “politics” in

general and political action, specifically. Lastly I will conclude this comparison with a discussion

and comparison of the SP's idea of “solidarity” in comparison to Arendt's “plurality”.

Chapter One

Introduction: The Strong Program (SP)

The “strong program” for cultural sociology, and not sociology of culture, is, as its name suggests,

an attempt to incorporate both the needs for a rigid academic system of thought and methodology,

whilst not loosing both the real life and theoretical implications and manifestations of culture

influence in life. The premise of the strong program is an attempt take in to account and understand

the effects of cultural codes in a scientific endeavor of sociology. This requires a two fold account,

one of the scientific and analytic cultural codes and secondly of the different manifestations of these

codes through real world action; while taking into account the highly dialectic relation between the

both and the highly complex contingent realities of these action through a Geertzian thick

description.

The main premise of this type of sociology is a complete presupposition of cultural autonomy. This

is what makes the program “strong”, in the sense that unlike “weak” cultural sociological schools of

thought, that treat culture as a “feeble and ambivalent variable”1, the strong program assumes

culture as a both an influencing and influenced entity, but does not leave it at that; rather it, for

analytical reason, assumes this dialectic process as first influencing and only then as influenced as

result of this exact process. So while it will treat reality as a cultural text it also assumes that this

very research itself is the creation of a text functioning inside a set of norms, rules and genres that

are an autonomous entity that can be widely called “culture”.

For the scientific and methodological perspective or “half” of the strong program mission

“scientific ideas are cultural and linguistic conventions as much as they are simply the results of

other, more ‘objective’ actions and procedures. [...] science is understood as a collective

representation, a language game that reflects a prior pattern of sense-making activity”2. The

research and scientific project must take into account the fact that it itself functions inside a cultural

structure and speaks in its language. In light of this there is a need to treats culture as an

independent variable, that functions as the back drop not just for the “sociological” action or content

being researched, but also as the research itself. The results of this stand points calls for “a sharp

analytical uncoupling of culture from social structure”3 in such a way that culture can understood

through its manifestations and not just proven to exist as an influencing factor. This is to be

understood as so important that Alexanders claim that a “[c]ommitment to a cultural-sociological

theory that recognizes cultural autonomy is the single most important quality of a strong program4.

In addition to the premise of cultural autonomy, that allows culture to be studied in a detailed way,

discovering its contents, codes and structures; there are “two other defining [methodological]

characteristics [...][1] [o]ne is the commitment to hermeneutically reconstructing social texts in a

rich and persuasive way.[...] It is the notion of the culture structure as a social text that allows [us]

to discover in what ways culture intersects with other social forces, such as power and

instrumental reason in the concrete social world.”5 Alexander is talking about “a Geertzian ‘thick

description’ of the codes, narratives and symbols that create the textured webs of social meaning” 6,

a description that attempts at recreating the specific and contingent realties of the specific subject at

hand. No more of vague and general descriptions, presupposing a social model (be it a la Marx,

Weber or Durkheim) into which realty is poured into, but rather a detailed attempt to treat the text of

realty as such and recreate it as such.

Secondly and in light of such an attempt there is a need to marginalize “abstract systemic logics as

causal processes” and rather to try [2] “to anchor causality in proximate actors and agencies,

1 The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology, chapter 2 - http://ccs.research.yale.edu/about/strong-program/2 The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology, chapter 2 - http://ccs.research.yale.edu/about/strong-program/3 The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology, chapter 2 - http://ccs.research.yale.edu/about/strong-program/4 The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology, chapter 2 - http://ccs.research.yale.edu/about/strong-program/5 The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology, chapter 2, bold added- http://ccs.research.yale.edu/about/strong-

program/6 The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology, chapter 2 - http://ccs.research.yale.edu/about/strong-program/

specifying in detail just how culture interferes with and directs what really happens [...] resolving

issues of detail — who says what, why, and to what effect —[in such a way] that cultural

analysis can become plausible according to the criteria of a social science.”7

In summary the strong program is based on three main points; [1] cultural autonomy, [2] a thick

description that attempts to recreate the realty as a text, through a text and [3] a straight forward

attempt at mapping and understanding the causality between the agents, their motivations and

interests, and the autonomous cultural structure. To state this in purely methodological terms there

is an attempt to create a scientific structure of deductive argumentation in which the presupposed

“universal” is an autonomous structure of culture, and the particulars are the specific and contingent

realties that create or manifest said culture.

The unique or additional point here is that the content itself is not (solely) empirical realty, which in

itself holds no meaning but rather, as an attempt to create a meaning based sociology8, to treat it as

a text, made up of sets of genres and cultural codes that demand detailed clarification and

development. In this way we have on the one hand an academic model that allows for a “scientific”

research while taking into account meaning. Treating reality as a text, while not just leaving it at

that, but rather an attempt to understand the different empirical manifestations as meaning-based-

and-aimed actions, that require the cultural backdrop to have meaning and scientific structure to be

analyzed.

Throughout this paper I will reference two types of sociological content presented via the strong

program and its leading members. The first, which will be referenced vis-a-vis the work of Jeffery

Alexander, will treat performative action as its text. In his work Alexander focuses mainly on how

real world performative action, by agents, is predicated on cultural structures that allows allow

action (social or political) meaning. Secondly I will reference some of the works by Philip Smith

and Ronald N. Jacobs, whose focus is more on narratives and how they reference and are predicated

on other more “classical” cultural forms (such as theater). They use what Alexander calls

“communicative institutions of social civil society”9 to try to uncover the narrative and logic of the

sense-making process of meaning. These narrative sense-making processes are, in their (culturally

autonomous thinking) based on literary and theatrical genres, that help us make the leap from

empirical content to normative judgments and meanings.

Both of these types of research represent perfectly the strong program thinking, in that they assume

cultural autonomy (for example literary genres) and use them to try to untangle the processes of

specific meaning making mechanics (for example newspapers and the “narratives” they create to

explain political and social events). More specifically if we take the newspaper and the narratives

7 The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology, chapter 2 - http://ccs.research.yale.edu/about/strong-program/8 Alexander, 2011; 88-909 Alexander, 2006; 5

they create, we can see they are treated both as the text and the end-result, they are both the

meaning maker and meaning signifier. We use cultural narratives to understand cultural narratives

and in this sense the cultural backdrop is an accurately taken term from the world of theatre, in the

sense that it uses a predefined set of codes and technical procedures to give content meaning.

More so, what both of these have in common is a commitment to cultural autonomy in an attempt to

give empirical data meaning. Without this autonomous presupposition the “thick description” and

the specific casual relations (the two secondary criteria of the strong program mission) lose their

substance, as they lack the cultural “backdrop” to connect (empirical) fact to (social) meaning. All

this comes comes together with the merging of structuralism and hermeneutics, because while the

“former offers possibilities for general theory construction, prediction and assertions of the

autonomy of culture. The latter allows analysis to capture the texture and temper of social life.

When complemented by attention to institutions and actors as causal intermediaries, we have the

foundations of a robust cultural sociology”10.

Chapter Two:

Hanna Arendt

The political philosophical work of Hannah Arendt is as wide as the term itself and covers topic

subjects from history to political action, from communication theory to economics, from the ancient

polis to Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Eichmann's trail in Israel. To narrow her down and

focus on the task at hand I will, in the following chapter, present three concepts that can be found in

her works that are relevant to a critique of any kind of social theory, in general, and one that is

based on a (normative and academic) desire to base such a theory on real world actions and realties,

specifically. These three concepts are vita activia, space of appearance and her definition of

politics, specifically in its relation and contrast to “social”. To do so I will make use of her

philosophical magnum opus “The Human Condition” (1958).

Arendt starts her book with conceptualizing the “human condition” (the situation in which men [and

not man] find themselves) through three different types of activities that “correspond to [...] the

basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man”11. Each one of these

corresponding activities comprise the “vita activia”, the active life of man, and aim to deal or satisfy

mans different needs and realties. The three activities and there corresponding “conditions” are: [1]

“Labor [...] which corresponds to the biological process of the human body”, [2]“Work [...] which

corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence [...and] provides an 'artificial' world of

things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings” and [3] “Action, the only activity that

10 The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology, chapter 6 - http://ccs.research.yale.edu/about/strong-program/11 Arendt, 1958; 7

goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the

human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on earth and inhabit the world”12.

Of the three the most relevant for our discussion are “work” and “action”. “Labor”, the human

activity connected to our biological life, is concerned mostly with satisfying our never ending

physical need; we feed ourselves only to be hungry a few hours later, and much like our modern day

laundry routine, labor is done solely for its temporary end result and never for its completion- we do

our laundry just so we can do it again. Therefore, though influential, it, as an activity, is ever

recurring and never unique, and therefore lacks the ability to be meaningful in and of itself or give

meaning to something.

All three actions that comprise the vita activia require the existence of other men, even labour is

distinct from animal labor in this sense13, however only action “cannot even be imagined outside the

society of men”14. Work, whose corresponding human condition is that of the artificial, of the man

made, of “worldliness”15. This work is the act of populating our world with man made objects, it is a

result of “the work of our hands [...and not] from the labor of our bodies”16. These objects, be them

our houses and cities or the fruits of our more modern industry, are unique and relevant to our

discussion as they help create the human condition of others, “men constantly create their own, self

made condition, which [...] posses the same conditioning power as natural things”17. The reason for

this is that “[m]en are conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns

immediately into a condition for their experience”18.

The fruits of our work are done for the end they produce, this product or artifice is created for its

use, which in turn does not destroy it (unlike with labor). The products we create are durable and

they “possess the durability that [John] Locke needed to establish property [and] the 'value' Adam

Smith needed for the exchange market”19. These, and not the fruits of the labour of our body, are the

base for value and economy and, to a major extent, society itself. They create society in the sense

that they create things of direct use value that survive to the extent that they can have exchange

value, and in this regard they create the world of men (and not nature). This is important in two

respects, firstly, value, as an economic and social term requires and is predicted on social meaning,

value, especially exchange value, is not and cannot be inherently found in the object itself. Value is

only acquired in respect to a social significance. Secondly these products, and their “value” (vis-a-

vis their use and durability) are conditioners themselves, creating the world of worldliness, our

12 Arendt, 1958; 7 (bolds added )13 Arendt, 1958; 2214 Arendt, 1958; 2215 Arendt, 1958; 716 Arendt, 1958; 13617 Arendt, 1958; 2518 Arendt, 1958; 2519 Arendt, 1958; 136

“social” human condition.

Action is the most unique of the three. It corresponds to the human condition of plurality- the fact

that man finds himself in a world inhabited by “men, not Man”20. Each one of these “men” holds a

unique potential to act, to start something that will put others into action; this potential, found in

each one of us is “natality”, our endless potential found in the moment of our birth to begin

something, to act and influence others in a way that will influence the course of life in an

unpredictable way, because “each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new

comes into the world”21.

Acting and action is the vita activia of politics, and it, unlike work and labour, is not done for the

sake of anything but rather only for itself, for my ability and desire to manifest my “naitality” and

influence and gain the respect of the “plurality”. The political action creates the new and testifies to

our natality in the sense that the “fact man is capable of actions means that the unexpected can be

expected [...and that man] is able to preform what is infinitely improbable”22. The action is

connected to language and speech, they are the prerequisite and the main tool for interaction

between men. If “action as beginnings corresponds to the fact of birth, if it is the actualization of

the human condition of natality, then speech corresponds to the fact of distinctness and is the

actualization of the human condition of plurality, that is, of living as a distinct and unique being

among equals”23. Through speaking and acting “men show who they are, [...] and thus make

appearance in the human world”24.

Action is, in Arendt's thought, the sphere of meaning, this is were and how meaning and normative

ideas become connected to the real material world, and her understanding of the political is just

this- the ability to start something, to put something into action through the connection of speech

and action among and with men. Politics is our ability to act, however, beside the basic (human)

conditions that facilitates this, it is predicated on an other criteria, which is not part of our inherent

condition, and this leads us to our second concept- space of appearance.

The space of appearance “comes into being whenever men are together in the manner of speech and

action” 25, this is a result of the meeting of men and therefore “precedes all formal constitution of

the public realm and the various forms of government”. The space of appearance is not the civil

sphere we know today or the result of any organized form of interaction or organizations of men; it

can be also as a result of these, but it precedes them, and more importantly, the active organization

of men can lead to its disappearance. This space is the prerequisite for political action, for the

20 Arendt, 1958; 721 Arendt, 1958; 17822 Arendt, 1958; 17823 Arendt, 1958; 17824 Arendt, 1958; 17825 Arendt, 1958; 199

beginnings; and it is “potentially there, but only potentially, not necessarily and not forever” 26 but

only whenever free men come freely together. However this freedom is not inherently there or

promised to us, especially in a world where political control is axiomatic and non negotiable as a

fact but only as form.

Our vita activia, especially the (political) action and the space of appearance it requires can help us

understand Arendt's main point, and that is that “[n]o human life, not even that of the hermit in

nature's wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence

of other human beings.”27

Chapter Three:

Political vs Social

This space of appearance can lead us to a more clear discussion and understanding of the third

concept- politics- and start to make the move back from political philosophy to a sociological

theory or program. For Arendt the space of appearance and politics are to many extents the

opposite, or at least in constant tension with, the social and the civil sphere. For Arendt action and

plurality are a major problem both for political ruling forces and political philosophy to such an

extent that to battle them we created government and administration, both of our life and our

actions, to manage the “problem” of action and plurality.

Action contains three problematic and frustrating qualities; [1] “the unpredictability of its outcomes,

[2] the irreversibility of the process and [3] the anonymity of its authors”28. In light of this both

political philosophy and administration (vis-a-vis government) have tried to manage managing the

unmanageable. Politically this has been done be raising the political control to an axiomatic

standing via the meshing of the political into social. Philosophically this has been done by

disconnecting acting and speaking and instead connecting action to making, or in other words by

distorting and blurring the distinction between work and action.

Through a long historical and philosophical argument Arendt claims that so as to be able to

minimizing the inherent dangers in action and plurality we have shifted the historical disconnection

found in the greek polis between action and work and merged them together29. In her thinking

political action is done just for the sake of our natality. Politics as a sphere of men amongst men,

communicating through argumentation via our language, was historically distinct from the social or

personal realms of work and labour, which were considered pre-political and based on physical

violent control. To be able to be political in the polis, i.e to be a citizen able to come to the space of

26 Arendt, 1958; 19927 Arendt, 1958; 2228 Arendt, 1958; 22029 Arendt, 1958; 192-195, 220-229

appearance and talk and hopefully act, one had to physically conquer the personal and social realms

of teleological laboring and working30. To act and participate in the normative and political one had

to physically finish and satisfy the needs of our other two human conditions. The realm of politics is

therefore not done for the sake of anything but our naitality if and only if we have mastered the

other two actions.

The social and modern day reality of politics is the exact opposite. We understand politics not as the

end of our physical life but rather as the facilitator of such a life. Politics is not about action and

plurality but rather a teleological undergoing aimed at relieving some of the burdens of our

biological needs and to facilitate our work (vis-a-vis the economy, but not exclusively). Historically

this has been done by placing the contemplative life (vita contempltiva) above the real one active

one (vita activia)31, and more so by making “making” our main goal. In this sense our meaning

making actions have stopped being for the sake of our natality and uniqueness (via action) but

rather have come full circle in an attempt to effectively serve and create our human condition

instead of expanding it. Politics specifically has now become the means to an end and not the end

in-itself. Our function of speech has been ripped apart from acting so as to make space for the

political making- the making of our (new) human condition as only making and laboring “social”

animals and not the zoon politikon that Aristotle knew.

This disconnection is rooted originally in Plato's Republic, in which contemplation becomes

superior to action and real world matters, which become its cheap shadows. However, this historical

philosophical process, though not linear, is more than obvious and rampant up-till today. “The

modern age, in its early concern with tangible products and demonstrable profits or its later

obsession with smooth functioning and sociability, was not the first to denounce the idle uselessness

of action and speech in particular and politics in general”32, but it certainly embraced and

maximized the practice to the level of an art.

A perfect example of this would be our concept of nationality, which connects the political to a

certain geographical area and the administration of it while “the polis, properly speaking, is not the

city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of the acting and

speaking together, and its true space lies between the people living together for this purpose, no

matter where they happen to be”33. In the greek polis one had to defeat the okio, the home, the

biological and social labour and work, to become political solely in the ability to be potentially

available to act and to be part of the creation of the space of appearance and partake in it as a free

equal.

30 Arendt, 1958; 23-2631 Arendt, 1958; 220-22932 Arendt, 1958; 22033 Arendt, 1958; 198

In this extent sociology, was born in “Ardentian” sin, both in the regard that it is a vita contempltiva

(an activity aimed at understanding for the sake of such and not action) and more importantly in the

fact that it is based on the social and not the political reality of life, which treats man as plenum of

men instead of a political multitude of men. Though a very dangerous generalization, sociology is

based on some conception that men (and not man) are organized in such a way that influences them,

and that this organization, be it natural or synthetic, is a prerequisite for (social) plurality.

Though sociology does not by default understand society as contradictory to politics, in most cases

the opposite is true, but Arendt does. The reason for such is her understanding that any “attempt to

do away with plurality is always tantamount to the abolition of the public realm itself”. In other

words, the need to organize society in an administrative way, and the acceptance of such a structure

as axiomatic, as has been the tradition and underlying presupposition of social and political

philosophers since Plato, is exactly this, an attempt to manage the plurality and the resulting action;

and this, for her, initials the death of the space of appearance.

The public realm, the place of the space of appearance, is different to the civil or social sphere

mainly in the sense that we are not free in the civil sphere as we were in the public realm. Arendt's

public realm, which can be reached only by conquering the pre-political and mandatory work and

labour, is where one is free because he is expected “neither to rule or be ruled”34. Our conception

of the civil sphere, where the discourse of civil and social society takes place, is predicated on the

fact that we are free only from politics. In the modern world “politics is a function of society” and

our civil discourse works only in as much as it different from it. We can understand this as the sets

of rights we have allowing us to function in a civil sphere (that they facilitate) and through this

sphere we can influence the political structure to again facilitate our civil and social lives. Our civil

realm is not autonomous from politics but it does fall on the connection between our public and

private lives while willingly disconnecting both from the political. So while politics has been

“nationalized” our public and private lives “constantly flow into each other” thus unifying them and

“privatizing” them in that they are meant to serve the most basic necessities of our private

biological and social life.

Chapter Four:

The Public realm vs the Civil Sphere- prerequisites for action and performance

Sociology in general and the Strong Program of cultural sociology specifically, is not so directly

committed to regulation of the plurality and to meshing the political and social (the public and

private), but it does presuppose both as distinct categories, and therefore (indirectly) accepts them.

Alexander claims that we “need a new concept of civil society as a civil sphere, a world of values

34 Arendt, 1958; 32 (bold added)

and institutions that generates the capacity for social criticism and democratic integration at the

same time. Such a sphere relies on solidarity, on feelings for others whom we do not know but

whom we respect out of principle, not experience, because of our putative commitment to a

common secular faith”35. Beside the basic fact that Alexander understands the underpinning of

political action as based on “solidarity” and not “plurality”, we can clearly see that his civil sphere

is one that “generates the capacity for social criticism” and not political action, which is based on an

unfacilitated and unmediated connection of men, their words and action.

Both the strong program and Arendt agree on the fact that our lives are of those among men, and

more so, that a public (either purely public or civil) space is required for action as it's prerequisites.

In this regard there is common ground between the strong program and Arendt on the topic of

language as well. Arendt says that “the realm of politics rises directly out of acting together, the

“sharing of words and deed”36 and language is as important to the SP as it treats life, culture and

their interactions as such. For Arendt language is what allows us to partake in action and it is also

it's prerequisite. Both her and the SP understand language as the basic most tool needed to create

interactions between men. For Alexander “language tends to be seen as a creative force for the

social imaginary rather than as Nietzsche’s prison house. As a result, discourses and actors are

provided with greater autonomy from power in the construction of identities”37.

Uniquely the SP treats itself, as an academic endeavor, in the same way as it treats language in life-

as a sets of codes and structures the predicate the ability to find and give meaning to actions and

objects. In this regard we can see the basic difference between Alexander's conception of the civil

sphere and Arendt's space of appearance; while language for Arendt is a tool for the call to action

and its actualization, for the SP, language is what gives life and its reflective activities, that try to

comprehend it, their meanings. For Arendt it is a tool for (the vita activia) action and for them it is

the structure of (the vita contmepltiva) of meaning.

However, for Alexander and his fellow SP thinkers, language is not just this contemplative tool, but

also forms and primes us for giving action meaning in a real and not just analytical way. For them,

though reflective and contemplative, language is also the structure of our social thought, and

therefore for our social action. The civil sphere and the actions that take place in it must use the

language of the language (and culture), not (just) as speech, but as meaning making.

However, meaning is not solely derived from language, but also from what we have previous called

“autonomous culture”. This culture and its manifestations will be the major difference between the

SP and Arendt because, as we will see, culture and its different manifestation do not fall solely in

the vita activia of “action” but rather more under “making”.

35 Alexander, 2006; 436 Arendt, 1958; 198 (quoting Homer)37 The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology, chapter 5 - http://ccs.research.yale.edu/about/strong-program/

Through this short discussion of language and its function in both Arendt's and the SP's

understanding of reality we can move on to a more detailed account of the difference between the

two. This difference is, at its most basic, the desire of Arendt to create an activity based

understanding of politics; while the SP is aimed at creating and understanding the meaning based

faculties of society and its reflective discourses, both academically and socially (vis-a-vis the civil

sphere). The manifest differences stem from the fact that the SP wants to untangle the web of

meaning in a meaningful way, and in such presuppose and accept what Arendt fights to correct.

While from a reverse perspective Arendt completely losses the meaning based and meaning giving

mechanics of action, and to a major extent presupposes them as non autonomous vis-a-vis language

and culture.

The SP's search for meaning is rooted in the idea that we can treat culture as a distinctly

autonomous sphere. Through this autonomous sphere we can analytically understand the different

manifestation of this culture and how it facilitates and gives meaning to different activities.

However, like Arendt, they understand that the civil sphere is not a given inherent situation but

rather one that is created under a certain set of conditions. For Alexander “the idea of democracy

[...is] a way of life. Democracy is not a game governed by technical rules. It is a world of great and

idealizing expectations, but also overwhelming feelings of disgust and condemnation. [...]

Democratic life shifts back and forth between a transcendental language of sacred values of the

good and profane symbols of evil, but these shifts are mediated by institutions that push for

agreement in difference, such as voting, the rule of law, and the ethics of office”38. The presupposed

form of organization is understood as the facilitator through both its technical structure and its

idealistic discourse, giving and receiving meaning via a set of language and cultural codes that need

to be studied and uncovered. This discourse and its facilitating forms are very specific, and

interestingly do not immediately fall under anyone of Arendt's categories. The SP's uniqueness in

regards to Arendt is their treatment of culture not as either action or making but as the autonomous

backdrop for both.

This conception of the civil sphere does indeed deepen the Ardentian sin through its presupposition

of some form of political control and the blurring of the social making and the political acting as

distinctly private, and not solely public. Alexander assumes that the “structure of civil society may

rest upon a cultural structure, but it is hardly merely discursive in its shape and form. It is filled with

institutions, organizations of communication and regulation”39. In this very basic sense the civil

sphere is not free, not because it is predicated on an autonomous culture, but rather because it aims

to mold the actions of men so as to synchronize between the language, culture and physical

manifestations and that of the men that attempt to understand and act within it.

38 Alexander, 2006; 439 Alexander, 2006; 4

The content of this culturally based action and its facilitating institutions are mediated, and to

understand them we must “recognize [...] the world of public opinion, which is the sea inside of

which the civil sphere swims”40. The public opinion is very obviously a mediated attempt at

understanding and facilitating action. It and its statistical quality is directly an attempt at managing

the plurality of human, both by disconnecting their action from the direct connection to the world

and by lumping all men together and giving power only to them as a single, yet complex, unit that

reacts and has this or that opinion in regards to the distinctly different (political or social) unit. The

public “opinion is the middle ground between the generalities of high-flown discourse and the

ongoing, concrete events of everyday life. It is filled with collective representations of ideal

civility”41.

We now have a slightly clearer picture of the true face of the SP's civil sphere. It is highly regulated

and mediated, in complete contrast to Arendt's public space. It is made up of representations and is

itself a representation of “ideal civility”. There is a mediated symbolic or representational

connection between what Arendt would call action and its ability to influence. The content itself,

which Alexander treats as performative actions and others from the SP members as content or

narrative is always predicated on a “discursive realm”42. It is in this realm that the the cultural

autonomy can be treated vis-a-vis its different manifestations, and where these manifestations

receive meaning beyond there purely cultural form and language.

Both Alexander's and others understanding of narrative is based on what Alexander calls

“communicative institutions” and the”communicative institutions of civil society are composed in

part of mass media. Newspapers and television news are factual media; they record, but they also

select and reconstruct in civil terms what “actually goes on” in a society’s life. Fictional media—

such as novels, movies, and television comedies and dramas—do much the same thing, but at a

temporal remove from immediacy and under the guise of high and popular art. Mass media

institutions respond to opinion, but they also structure and change it”43 Surprisingly and sadly from

an Arendtian perspective, what we can currently understand as action also partly falls under these

types of institutions; “[c]ivil associations, such as Mothers against Drunk Driving or Moveon.Org,

are also vital communicative institutions in civil life”44.

However these actions, as representations that function as and through the “communicative

institutions of civil society have influence but not power in the more instrumental sense [...;] the

broad solidarity that constitutes “the people” must have teeth in it”45. Like Arendt, Alexander

40 Alexander, 2006; 441 Alexander, 2006; 4-542 Jacobs, 1996a; 123843 Alexander, 2006; 544 Alexander, 2006; 545 Alexander, 2006; 5

understands that the ability to communicate is not enough to ensure the freedom needed to create

either her “space of appearance” or his “civil sphere”. However, unlike Arendt, he accepts that this

freedom comes only through the ability of “the people” to “access to the violence monopolized by

the state [...through v]oting and party competition [that] create civil power. They allow

representatives of civil society not only to insert themselves into state bureaucracy but to formally

control it”46. So while communication is a necessary cause for this space or sphere it is not

sufficient.

More so, and again while exuberayting the Arendtian sin, Alexander accepts the axiomatic control

and suggests to “to rethink law as a form of symbolic representation. Law highlights, stereotypes,

and pollutes actions that are considered threatening to civil society. The regulatory power of such

legal representations is extraordinary. They constitute simultaneously symbolic constructions and

normative judgments, and, in the name of the civil community, they can draw upon coercion and

even control the bureaucratic state. [...]Law applies the sacred principles of civil discourse case by

case, in real historical time; in order to do so, it must identify and punish the profane”47. Or in

Arendt's language, action or the potential for action is not enough, we need the control to facilitate

both the (communicative) institutions and their ability to have meaning. The law and control both

create and give meaning to actions and in this regard make the connection between our actions,

language and normative ideas, and allow these to take hold, or at least influence, the facilitating

structures of society both because of there cultural meaning and significance and through the

democratic structures and rights. These structures themselves are political only in the sense that

they are anti political or social, and function as such in both there content and end result while using

cultural form to give meaning and bring it all together through the different actions or narratives

that desire to influence them.

What can be called action, either in the compromised modern version of an action aiming at

changing the political / social structure, or in the more classic Arendtian sense of a performative act

attempting to influence men to more action via language, are hinged on the existence of a space for

such. However, the SP wants to add that it is also predicated on the specific “ethics and

institutions”48 of the civil sphere and the cultural codes and narratives that allow for it to have

meaning. For this reason, not only must the field of sociology and its attempt to understand society

take (and use) the cultural element, its language and genres, into account but the actual “social

movements must [also] be rethought”49. From an SP perspective there must be both an analytical /

academic shift and a political one.

46 Alexander, 2006; 547 Alexander, 2006; 6 (bold added)48 Alexander, 2006; 649 Alexander, 2006; 6 (bold added)

Academically there must be a shift to a perspective that treats reality as culture and “reading culture

as a text is complemented, [...], by an interest in developing formal models that can be applied

across different comparative and historical cases. In other words, narrative forms such as the

morality play or melodrama, tragedy and comedy can be understood as ‘types’ that carry with them

particular implications for social life”50. Not only is our understanding hinged on culture,

academically we must understand it as such and aim to use the ongoing work in literary and more

classic “cultural” interpretations to create a parallel model that is relevant and helps clarify and

understand society, its working and meaning making practices.

Politically what can be called action will be the use of these genres and cultural language via the

representations, not to destroy or call into dramatic action, but rather reform both the system and

our motivations to interact with it. Actions in the SP sense ”are not motivated simply by cognitive

perceptions of rational interest, and their success hardly depends on mobilizing resources in the

material sense. Social movements are rooted in subjectivity and dependent on symbolic

communication. Anchored in the idealized discourses and communicative institutions of the civil

sphere, social movements have one foot in some particular injustice and the other in promises about

the general good”51.

The reason for this is not only because of what we have called the cultural autonomy but rather

because of the specifically democratic52 form and content the civil sphere functions in. Political

actions and groups aiming at fixing their situation must appeal to the greater good and “this reflects

the duality of social position in complex social systems and fragmented civil spheres. [For example

t]he civil rights and feminist movements were not only about the particular interests of racial and

gender groups. They were about the reconstruction of social solidarity, about its expansion and

repair. To be successful, they had to convince people outside their groups; they could do so only by

interweaving their particular struggles with universal civil themes.”53

Chapter Five:

The Problem of Meaning: Performance and Narratives as Action and Work

As has been stated the SP treats performance and narratives as its main object of study. We have

seen on what background this takes place- cultural autonomy and a civil sphere. Let us now attempt

to treat these through Arendt's perspective, but first let us try to understand how these attempts line

up with what we have already discussed.

Up-till now we have discussed and critiqued the SP through Arendt's thought, but it is only fair to

50 The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology, chapter 5 - http://ccs.research.yale.edu/about/strong-program/51 Alexander, 2006; 752 Democratic in the modern and not Greek polis sense53 Alexander, 2006; 7 (bold added)

do the reverse as well. It is safe to assume that Alexander would not accept Arendt's philosophical

approach or at least complete perspective as they lack any ability to pinpoint meaning and untangle

it vis-a-vis its specific manifestations and uses. In this sense Arendt's thought is a week program

that “stutter[s] on this issue”54 of meaning. For Alexander these types of theories “tend to develop

elaborate and abstract terminological (de)fences that provide the illusion of specifying concrete

mechanisms as well as the illusion of having solved intractable dilemmas of freedom and

determination”. The SP believes that “the quality is in the detail [... and f]or most of its history,

sociology [and other social fields], both as theory and method, has suffered from a numbness

towards meaning”55.

Both theoretically and physically meaning has been completely missed, and this is due to the

misassumption that culture, because it is socially created, must be treated as such, and not as an

autonomous set of codes and language games able to give the very same societies that created it

meaning. This has led to a failure to deal with the specific details and causal relationship between

cultural codes and specific actions. The need is to “understand meanings as infinitely malleable in

response to social settings [and] recognize the dramatic narratives [for example] as inevitably

structured by constraining cultural codes relating to plot and character, for it is the combinations

between these make any kind of drama a possibility”56 and any kind of action in the civil sphere is

just this- drama- drama as a performance or drama as a text.

Specifically the genre is the SP's analytical tool for understanding the connection of culturally

autonomous codes and real world action. The reason for the “growing interest in narrative and genre

theory”57, in both literary and philosophical circles, stems from the fact that “narrative forms such

as the morality play or melodrama, tragedy and comedy can be understood as ‘types’ that carry with

them particular implications for social life”58. The genres help frame action in regard to a certain

order (beginning, middle and end) and connect this order to normative ideas, thus bridging action,

codes and wanted political results. Theoretically, besides all the points and arguments already made

on this subject, genres and this type of thinking allows for specific reconstructions of causal action

together with their underlying dramatic and cultural backdrop while still being able to move to a

generalized theory.

To understand this through Arendt's state of mind I will now check two examples of SP studies

through an Arendtian paradigm, in an attempt to understand where the SP's subject topics are

located in regards to her thought. The first SP paper I will use will be Alexander's (2004) attempt at

presenting the “classic” sociological topic of rituals as social performance that can, while

54 The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology, chapter 2 - http://ccs.research.yale.edu/about/strong-program/55 The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology, chapter 2 - http://ccs.research.yale.edu/about/strong-program/56 The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology, chapter 4 - http://ccs.research.yale.edu/about/strong-program/57 The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology, chapter 5 - http://ccs.research.yale.edu/about/strong-program/58 The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology, chapter 5 - http://ccs.research.yale.edu/about/strong-program/

“[d]rawing on the new field of performance studies, [...demonstrate] how social performances,

whether individual or collective, can be analogized systematically to theatrical ones”59. Or put more

simply: how can rituals be understood as social performances that function through well known

theatrical genres, and thus allow us to understand their specific dynamics better. Secondly I will

reference Smiths work regarding narratives, specifically his work on the narratives of the Second

Gulf War and the process leading up to them, and his treatment of the Rodney King Beatings.

I will try to check and compare these in regards to Arendt's discussion of the vita activia.

Specifically I will try to locate these performances and narratives and understand where they fall-

making or acting- and if so why- for what end- are they done. The premise being that end is the

main difference between working and acting in that acting is done for the sake of our natality and

itself and making to create a useful object. A second criteria I will use is that of durability, in that

products of our work are lasting while our actions are fleeting and exist only while there is a space

of appearance of men amongst men.

Performance

For Alexander “cultural performance is the social process by which actors, individually or in

concert, display for others the meaning of their social situation [through] a plausible performance,

one that leads those to whom their actions and gestures are directed to accept their motives and

explanations as a reasonable account”60. These actors “present themselves as being motivated by

and toward existential, emotional, and moral concerns, the meanings of which are defined by

patterns of signifiers whose referents are the social, physical, natural, and cosmological worlds

within which actors and audiences live”61. So we have two main conditions of the social

performance; [1] actors portraying a social situation and [2] that this situation occurs within a

certain world that is common to both performer and audience. This situation itself and its structure

must be known or understandable to the audience, both in form and content, for there to be a

connection of such.

Alexander understands these conditions as symbolic references, and divides them into foreground

and background, not by mistake borrowing these terms from the world of theatre. “One part of this

symbolic reference provides the deep background of collective representations for social

performance; another part composes the foreground, the scripts that are the immediate referent for

action”62. The foreground is the “performance’s immediate referential text”63 while the deep

background is the symbolic world of content that is being referenced and presupposed by the

performance. Both “grounds” are “are structured by codes that provide analogies and antipathies

59 Alexander, 2004; 52760 Alexander, 2004; 52961 Alexander, 2004; 53062 Alexander, 2004; 53063 Alexander, 2004; 530

and by narratives that provide chronologies, [...]to configure social and emotional life in compelling

and coherent ways”64. These analogies and narratives are not exclusively theatrical and can range

“from 'time immemorial' myths to invented traditions created right on the spot, from oral traditions

to scripts prepared by such specialists as playwrights, journalists, and speech writers”65; or any man

made mode of communication (or “communicative institution”).

Just as these can reference structures that are not solely theatrical the performances themselves are

not solely theatrical, for example “[r]itual performances reflect the social structures and cultures of

their historically situated societies [... and] in early societies, I wish to suggest, were not so much

practices [as has been previously assumed by sociologist, but] as performances, and in this they

indeed are made of the same stuff as social actions in more complex societies” 66. So again, not only

are these performances not based solely on theatrical narratives they themselves are not theatrical,

and any ritual or action that answer to our criteria can be considered a social performance.

Specifically Alexander is claiming that the rituals that so interested the early anthropologists and

sociologist were no so unique or primitive as they assumed, only they were more clear and distinct

from our modern performances. For example the “symbolic roles that define participation in such

ritualized performances emerge directly, and without mediation, from the other social roles actors

play”67. The chief or priest of the society was also the chief or priest in the ritual performance,

unlike today were the connection between real world and performance is less clear.

From an Argentina perspective it can seem we are looking at something that looks like action. These

performances are done by men, amongst men. They exist as such only through the mutual relation

of audience and actors, where without one there is no other. So they, like action, are fleeting and

demand some sort of mutual space for their immediate existence whose survival is based on the

existence of such a space and relation. However, here the social performances start to stray away

from classic definition of action, because not all performances occur in what can properly called a

space of appearance.

The ritual for example takes place in what might be more accurately called a civil sphere, it may be

called this in so much as it is a regulated space that allows for communication to occur via cultural

and technical codes and rules. Alexander himself admits that the existence of such a sphere is

possible even in non democratic societies, in which, though functioning as a space for

communication based on language and codes, and can be understood it such, it lacks the formal

“teeth” that make democracy unique and give actions real meaning68 and not just symbolic one.

64 Alexander, 2004; 53065 Alexander, 2004; 53066 Alexander, 2004; 53467 Alexander, 2004; 53568 Alexander, 2006; 5

Secondly these performances do not occur by free men in an attempt to present their uniqueness

and/or to motivate others. Rather they function as a function of society representing their social

reality and the actors, most times, are just that, and not the “real deal”. Even when they are, say in

the case of the priest in the ritual or the politicians in a political debate between different nominees

for the presidency, then they are not free in that they function under either the rules or structures of

the either the back or foreground; if not real technical rules denying them the ability to fully bring to

light their uniqueness. Secondly, in this regard, the audience is not of equals, they cannot take the

stage nor be motivated to act in the same sphere the preforming is going on.

Thirdly and most importantly this type of performance, though fleeting and contingent on the actor /

audience relationship for the existence of its space, are not done for the sake of the uniqueness and

of the performers but rather as an attempt to serve the social order. Even in their most rebellious

they reiterate the codes and realty in such an extant that, though they are fleeting, they are useful.

They serve a purpose distinct from that of its performers and audience, and whether they try to

entertain or motivate, they are done for an end-result that is not political. This end result and the

teleological thinking behind social performances are, if anything, social, and not political, and

therefore not deserving to be considered “action”. Rather they fall interestingly on the border

between acting and making, for on the one hand they are in a space of men and do attempt to call

them into something, however and on the other hand they are useful, and are in most cases

commodified and regulated so as to be as such. Wether this is good or bad news for Arendt's theory

is up for debate, one could easily claim that her categories are irrelevant or even “romantic” as

Alexander claims69, but it still informs us about the not so obvious functions and drawbacks of both

the Alexander's claim, and his and the performances attempt to influence life in a “political” way.

Narratives-

Narratives are different in that they function almost solely located at the “civil sphere” level of

reality. For example in his treatment of the Rodney King beating, Jacobs is attempting to “examine

how the event of the beating was constructed into a crisis, analyze the attempts to resolve the crisis

by political elites, and compare how these attempts were interpreted by two newspapers, the Los

Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Sentinel.”70. There is no act here, accept maybe the beating

itself. Rather there is an attempt to understand the metaphysical event of the beating, as constructed

by newspaper and their use of “multiple and overlapping narratives in their coverage of the Rodney

King crisis [... and show] that there was an interaction between the narration of the crisis and the

69 Alexander, 2006; 45-4670 Jacobs, 1996a; 1239

sequence of events”71. The event of the beating itself is unique as it was videotaped, and this

facilitated its durability as a “crisis”, through what cannot be understood as anything but a perfect

example of the political and social implications of Walter Benjamin's claim about the mechanical

reproduction.

Through its mechanical reproduction via the communicative institutions it was able to undergo a

process of narration. In general the role of narratives are twofold, firstly they allow “individuals,

groups, and communities to "understand their progress through time in terms of stories, plots which

have beginnings, middles, and ends, heroes and antiheroes, epiphanies and denouements, dramatic,

comic, and tragic forms"72. Secondly, “by connecting their self-narratives to collective narratives,

individuals can identify with such "imagined communities" as class, gender, race, ethnicity, and

nation”73; so narratives allow groups both to understand themselves as such and to give meaning

and significance to reality as a group.

Today in the age of media certain events require narration. Certain events require meaning through

or mostly through such narration. Here “a crisis becomes a "media event," announced through an

interruption of normal broadcast schedules, repeated analysis by "experts," and opinion polling

about the central characters involved in the crisis”74. The outcome of such events “depends [...] on

the interaction between narrative construction and event sequence." Events such as the Dreyfus

affair, Watergate, and the Rodney King beating become important plot elements for the different

narratives of civil society and nation, and for this reason they can be extremely consequential for

social outcomes”75. The point here is that though metaphysical they become real through there

narrative construction. The same argument, though through different content is made in regards to

the Second Gulf War by Smith (2005) argues that only through narrative construction of Saddam in

an apocalyptic light based on a genre of the same type, can the Bush administration properly frame

the rational required for war in the civil sphere of democratic discourse who's consent it requires.

In both cases the main entities that do this framing are “communicative institutions”, mainly, but

not solely, mass media. The mass media and its products mediate and create the realty vis-a-vis this

narration. If we return to Arendt we can clearly see that though these can actually call for an action,

through this group understanding via the narratives, it is clearly not an action. Firstly mass media

create worldly things in the most physical (newspapers) and metaphysical (media event vis-a-vis a

crisis) sense. Secondly this is done as a result of work by craftsman and not free men acting out of

their desire to be unique. Thirdly, even if these objects are fleeting, they are aimed themselves at

creating value and meaning as an end. more than they are preoccupied with calling or putting

71 Jacobs, 1996a; 1239 (bold added)72 Jacobs, 1996a; 1240- quoting Alexander and Smith, 1993; 15673 Jacobs, 1996a; 124074 Jacobs, 1996a; 1241-1242- quoting Scannell, 1995 and Dayan & Katz, 199275 Jacobs, 1996a; 1241-1242

people into motion. They may facilitate such an action, say by helping African Americans

understand and frame their consciousness in regards to the Rodney King beating, and therefore lay

the basis for community organizers to take to the street or act. But they themselves (as creating and

working entities) are not focused on such an endeavor.

Therefore, unlike performance, narratives are solely in the realm of, and a result of, work. They aim

to create the social and not political world in the most basic sense. So while slightly referencing

action, most of the SP's topic subjects are work, or at least somewhere closer to work then to action.

If we were to set up a spectrum between the two with the pure political action on one end and pure

object-creating oriented work at the other then we could place performance closer to action then

narrative, however they would still both closer to work than say a flash mob.

Chapter Six-

Summary: Plurality vs Solidarity

We have discussed many differences between these two different types and schools of thought. We

have seen how the SP focuses mostly on the social and civil sphere while Arendt is preoccupied

with the political and the space of appearance. We have given this distinction more breadth by

comparing the two and examining the different topic subjects of the SP through Arendt's categories

of work and action and have seen how the SP does not just theoretically deal with making and

action but is also empirically bound to these realms.

I think that it is this empirical “worldliness” that is both the strong and soft spot of the SP.

Academically it is attempting at bridging the polarized relationship of “meaning” and “theory”,

whilst losing neither. This forces them to leave at times their more realist approach for a slightly

more positivistic one, or at-least attempting to quantify in a reductionist fashion some of the units

and agents in their attempt to untangle the cultural web of meaning and action. However even the

realist position leaves them open to critique from an Arendtian perspective, but as has been stated,

this is not by default a bad thing. This stems from the more basic fact that the SP is dealing with

society of men and not with the truly free Greek polis that Arendt has and mind. Through their

dealing with society they indirectly and involuntarily presuppose the distinctions which Arendt

understands as the death of politics, uniqueness and to many extents freedom itself.

The main point I wish to finish with is a return to the two most basic concepts of the two actors of

this paper; Arendt's plurality and the SP's solidarity. Arendt wishes to see us as a multitude of men

amongst men, each one unique, and therefore comprising a plurality of individuals free from

interventions that meet of their own free will to act and be unique for the sake of these qualities and

no other. While the SP, presuposing society and the need to facilitate it, both technically (vis-a-vis

democracy) and cultural (vis-a-vis narratives and genres), wishes to see us as a fractioned society

that must strive for solidarity so as to be able to use the (specific) codes of democracy to advance

both our (fractional) interest and our (societal) greater good, through and with one an other. They

see this solidarity as the main prerequisite for a vital and democratic civil sphere as democracy, and

its specific codes, demand76.

76 Smith & Jacobs; 1997, 60

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