Homo sapiens have thrived as a species because of their ability to identify themselves with other members of the group and participate in collective actions. The performance of the collective action is based on a common belief system. The act of getting together generates a sense of a bond and a community at large. It effectuates the emotions of the people participating, evokes a new sense of shared belongingness, and thereby a different set of meanings are created in unison to make sense of the reality. Based on this set of meanings, symbolic codes, myths, stories and narratives, the emotions of the participants are called upon to attain the larger purpose of the community. The result of this performance is complex, as this new reality is then retrospectively projected back on all the preexisting realities dyeing them all in the colour of the present.[i]  Why are humans able to do it? How do they do it? How do they make the functioning of the world possible based on the performance of a constructed reality? Do these non-material, transcendental and invisible cultural structures have it in them to change the concrete material actions of the world?

The realm of culture encompasses all that we have mentioned above and it becomes necessary to unravel the meaning of this concept to make sense of present reality. Like any other concept culture upgrades itself, its content, its tools, its symbols, how it makes one person/group of society associate with another with the coming up of the new economic systems, political revolutions, technological advancements; at the same time, it does not do away with its past elements but keep on accentuating upon it, based on the requirements of the present.[ii]

It has become a challenging task to comprehend the meaning of culture in contemporary times when the society is differentiated, segmented, hierarchized, and complex like never before. Various schools of thought and thinkers have worked with this concept over the centuries and focused on the inter-relationship between culture, economy, polity and society. How are intertwined and affect each other?[iii] What these stands lack is that they have not been able to give a firm standing to culture on its own, and somehow culture has been explained in terms of the underlying economic, political or social values.

Here, the stream of cultural sociology has taken a leap forward and without undermining the importance of other dimensions has given an independent space to the dimension of culture. It tries to fill this category of culture with content and informs the narratives, myths, codes and symbols culture consists of. The emphasis is to justify how myths, narratives, aesthetics and codes are not a part of old traditional, religious, undemocratic societies but is very much the defining feature of contemporary times too. It tries to engage with the question of why these myths and codes of culture are important for the human species to exist. Why these myths and narratives are not irrational and impractical but are very much the avenues to critical, rational and dialectic thinking? What is the mechanism which works in the background for their production?

Jeffrey C. Alexander argues

The task of cultural sociology is to bring the unconscious cultural structures that regulate society into the light of the mind. Understanding may change but dissipate, for, without such structures, society cannot survive. We need myths if we are to transcend the banality of material life. We need narratives if we are to make progress and experience tragedy. We need to divide the sacred from the profane if we are to pursue the good and protect ourselves from evil.[iv]

Jeffrey Alexander’s cultural theory of social performance tries to build a theory to understand how the cultural codes, myths, meanings and symbolism is generated through the means of a successful performance. He elaborates how these myths are manufactured as a result of a performance that forms a deeper connection among individuals in a community. To not end up focusing too much on one aspect i.e., either the culture or the role of the actor, he took into consideration that as societies became more complex, segmented, differentiated it became much more difficult to fuse all elements in performance and the meaning of these performances became defused.

He further argues that this process of constructing meanings and myths is not at a halt, even though it has surely become a difficult task to be able to re-fuse all elements to form a common meaning for the people[v]. He brings our attention to how with the society becoming complex we have moved away from the ritualistic way (Durkheim) of forming the sacred and symbolic to performative which itself forms collective myths, narratives and is capable to capture sacrality in case of a successful symbolic performance even in these times.

Jeffrey states,

…“performances are composed of a small number of analytically distinguishable elements which have remained constant throughout the history of social life even as their relationship to one another has markedly changed”.[vi]

He brings focus on how with the increasing complexity in the social structure and culture which has become more divisive and diverse, the elements which composed the performance have become separated and defused analytically and empirically. Then being influenced by the dramaturgical line of thought he highlights the ability of the actors, in our case the political actor to re-fuse the separated and defused elements. The performance becomes successful and generates a connection between the actor and audience if she/he can form a ‘cultural extension’ (relates to the already existing cultural symbols and texts of society) and ‘psychological identification’ (identify on a personal level with the performance) for the audience. The diagram below shows the different elements of social performance in modern times which work in tandem to generate myths and meaning in society.

Jeffrey Alexander has employed this theory to understand issues ranging from the movement of the Blacks in the USA to the Iraq invasion to Obama’s victory etc. How in each of these cases a successful performance on the part of the actors (political leaders/ activists etc.) was able to generate myths and meanings in the society such that it led to the formation of a connection between not just the performer and the audience but also among the individuals who formed a part of the audience.

Having understood the repertoire of cultural sociology at the broader level, there is a need to have a deeper conversation with this framework to understand the social reality. This stream of thought can illuminate the core meanings of human experience and make the individual/group take decisions which would shape their political, economic and social existence.

References:

Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2011. Performance and Power. UK: Cambridge University Press.

Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2003. “The Meanings of (Social) Life: On Origins of a Cultural Sociology.” In Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology, by Jeffrey Alexander. USA: Oxford University Press.

Vaidik, Aparna. 2020. My Son’s Inheritance: A Secret History of Lynching and Blood Justice in India. New Delhi: Aleph Book Company.

Williams, Raymond. 2017. Culture and Society. London: Vintage.

[i] Aparna Vaidik has taken the category of violence in India’s past (17th-20th century) at the core of the performance to explain the creation of this new reality (Vaidik 2020, 68).

[ii] Raymond Williams explained the concept of culture by undertaking a detailed series of studies of famous British writers and essayists for the time period ranging from 1780-1950. He highlighted the drastic changed in the understanding of the concept over this period. (Williams 2017).

[iii] Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, The Frankfurt School, Classical Social Theories  (Durkheminian, Weberian and Parsonian thoughts).

[iv] (Alexander 2003).

[v] Power and Performance (2011) explains the mechanism behind myth and meaning formation in contemporary times. The element of performance being the important aspect which explains what makes these myths so important for us. And how it is this symbolic production process which leads to the establishment of the myth in society and then produce the effects which it does (Alexander, Performance and Power 2011).

[vi] (Alexander, Performance and Power 2011).

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Shivani Choudhary is an MPhil scholar at the Centre for Political Studies (CPS), School of Social Sciences (SSS) at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her areas of interest are Cultural Sociology, Populism, Majoritarian Politics, Performative Politics and Religious Nationalism.