Culture and social order: Three critical remarks on Jeffrey Alexander's cultural sociology

Abstract

Jeffrey Alexander's revaluation of the role of culture in the study of society is grounded on the Durkheimian theory that a society can only be built on the shared acceptance of a symbolic system that guarantees social order. To explain how this shared acceptance is produced, Alexander proposes the concept of the civil sphere, defined as an “analytically independent” and “empirically differentiated” sphere of society devoted to the production and elaboration of shared symbolic patterns. In this text I put forward three main critiques of this theory: first, Alexander does not succeed in analytically separating the civil sphere from other spheres of society; second, he postulates and does not demonstrate the unitary nature of the civil sphere; third, he does not clearly explain how consensus is formed in the context of the civil sphere and, more importantly, how an established consensus may be observed as such.

Keywords

Civil repair civil sphere cybernetics performance theory symbolic system

Introduction

“The mass media produce symbolic patterns that create the invisible tissues of society on the cultural level just as the legal system creates the boundaries of the community on a more concrete and ‘real’ one” (Alexander, 1988a: 108). In this quote from a contribution originally published in 1981, Jeffrey Alexander expresses his interest in exploring the symbolic/cultural dimensions of social order as a continuing dynamic production of meaning. According to my reading of his work, such an interest represents the juncture between his study of culture and his theory of the civil sphere, as the study of the dynamics of the civil sphere is fundamental in order to understand the evolution of a shared symbolic system. To better understand the connection between these two aspects of his approach, I will also dwell on Alexander's theory of performance, as performances in the context of the civil sphere are essential in guiding changes in the symbolic/cultural system.

Alexander's approach to the study of modern societies has the ambition to be not only a contribution to social theory but also an important instrument of political and cultural analysis. Taking seriously such an ambition, I intend to assess not only the soundness of Alexander's framework but also the performance of his theory in the analysis of current and past matters. So, even though my aim remains strictly theoretical, I will often rely on references to some of the author's empirical contributions in order to better illustrate some strengths and weaknesses of his approach. As my aim is to specifically point out some aspects of Alexander's theory that I think require further theoretical elaboration, I will only focus on his work and I will not explore the wider range of contributions to what is now called “civil sphere theory.”¹ In the same spirit, I will not discuss in depth the foundations of what he calls “cultural sociology,” as this would exceed the limits of this contribution, but I will mainly emphasize the aspects of his work that concern a general theory of society and his contributions to the analysis of politics.

The article is thus structured: first of all, I provide a brief synthesis of Alexander's theoretical evolution and background. I then focus specifically on the theoretical foundations that he developed in order to describe modern democracies, and I dwell on his analysis of the Watergate scandal as an exemplar application of his theory. Finally, I identify and formulate three main problems that limit the application of his theoretical framework to other cases: the first two related to the possibility of observing the autonomy and the unity of what Alexander calls the “civil sphere”; the latter concerning the conceptualization and observation of what I call “symbolic transformations” in civil discourse.

From Parsons to Durkheim through Geertz

Going as far back as his doctoral dissertation, Alexander (1982) has often described his work as an attempt to create a synthesis in a Hegelian sense. In this first work, the final objective was to further develop Weber's and Parsons’ attempts to build a synthesis between materialism and idealism, while later on the main objective became a synthesis between the micro and the macro approaches, between functionalism and post-functionalist theories, and between the attention to social structures and the material dimension of action on one side and the hermeneutic focus on meaning and its role in orienting social action on the other (see Alexander, 1988d; Alexander and Taylor, 2024).

Thus, to a certain extent, Alexander characterizes the development of his own thought as a reaction to a general evolution of sociological discourse that he tries to incorporate in his own theory, but this should not distract the reader from seeing the continuity of themes and problems throughout his scientific production. As argued in the Introduction, the theme of social order, the so-called “Hobbesian problem” (Parsons, 1949), remains the focus of his reflection throughout.

From Parsons, Alexander adopts the idea that social actors cannot just “create social order by a process of purely individual negotiation” (Alexander, 1988a: 15), and yet he remains fairly critical of his work: following authors such as Dahrendorf, Gouldner, and Randall Collins, he accuses Parsons of overemphasizing the importance of social equilibrium (Alexander, 1982.4, 2013: ch. 4) and of exaggerating the central integration of society as a whole to the detriment of the autonomous self organization of certain social spheres, a critique already put forward by Pope et al. (1975) with specific reference to market dynamics.

However, the critique that inspired Alexander the most is the one that Geertz addressed to the Parsonian distinction between social and cultural system. It should be noted that both Geertz (1973: 249–250) and Alexander (1982.4: 54) see the analytical separation of the two systems as an accomplishment and both authors further built their theories on such a distinction (see Alexander and Smith, 1993: 158; 2003), but they both rejected the Parsonian conception of culture as too abstract and static.

In the first formulation of the concept of cultural system, Parsons and Shils (1951: 7) stated that, contrary to the biological, the social and the personality systems, the cultural system was “not in itself organized as a system of action.” Despite its embodiment in artifacts and in the internalization of values at the level of the system of personalities, the cultural system was to be conceived as “on a different plane from personalities and social system.” In the same book, Sheldon (1951: 39–40) criticized such a formulation, insisting on the many ways in which culture played a role in everyday action and attacking the distinction as needless abstraction.

To the contrary, Parsons saw the separation and the interaction of cultural and social systems as an essential explanatory element of sociocultural evolution. According to his model of cybernetic hierarchy (Parsons, 1966: 11–14), culture was to be conceived as the more stable element in the general process of evolution that involved all levels of the general system of action. Yet, even when he started describing culture as the DNA of society (see Parsons, 1972, 1973), he did not mean it to describe it as an untouchable monolith, but rather the most conservative element involved in an evolving process.² Given its role in being the ultimate guarantor of consensus and social order, culture was to be the furthest removed from change, yet not completely untouched by it.³

In the eyes of Geertz, who was used to studying societies going through rapid transitions, especially in post-colonial contexts, the hierarchy of the systems and the relative rigidity of culture was untenable. Paidipaty (2020) has given an excellent and detailed account of the way Geertz set out to innovate the Parsonian perspective, the thrust of her argument being that Geertz (1973) ultimately found it impossible for a cultural system to be both complex and tightly integrated. This is the conceptual step that led Geertz (1983: 69–70) to emphasize discontinuity in culture, so much so that even when he talked about hermeneutics as the ability to penetrate one's “symbol system” he was not talking of a coherent, society-wide shared system. This is ultimately the reason for his emphasis on “local knowledge” and why, when opposing hermeneutics to the abandoned functionalism, he defines the former as dealing with “meaning, in short, not machinery” (Geertz, 1983: 232).

Alexander is of course mainly interested in the hermeneutical approach developed by Geertz and in his emphasis on cultural content, rather than in his study of the social formation of culture (Alexander, 2011a; Alexander and Smith, 2003; Alexander and Taylor, 2024), and is thus less willing to mark this step away from a macrosociological perspective (whether functionalist or not), as for him this would represent an obstacle in addressing the problem of social order. That is probably why he ends up characterizing Geertz's lack of interest in “cultural order” as just a limit rather than a systematic component of his approach (see Alexander and Taylor, 2024: 16–17).

This limit in the analysis of the macrodynamics of culture and order is ultimately why Alexander found the inspiration for his performance theory not in Geertz but rather in the Durkheimian tradition of cultural anthropology (Turner, Schechner, Douglas) and in Durkheim himself. At first, it may seem that going from Parsons to Durkheim would be nothing but a step back. After all, Parsons’ “symbolic order” is heavily inspired by Durkheim's ([1912] 2013: 22) emphasis on the importance of “moral” and “logical conformism” in maintaining social order, but he also strived to overcome Durkheim's alleged “idealism” (see Alexander, 1982.2, 1982.4).

The main divergence between the two authors is marked by the fact that Parsons mostly treated culture as a form of orientation of action, often mediated by the internalization of values and cultural contents (see Alexander, 1982.4: 245–246)—and so as a presupposition of concrete action—but he did not focus on the retroactive effect of action on culture; to the contrary, Durkheim ([1912] 2013) provided a description of such a dynamics in his study of collective rituals and of “collective effervescence” as the process of formation, reaffirmation and renewal of a symbolic system shared across a society.

In what is usually seen as the inaugural text of his new cultural approach, Alexander (1988c: 8–15) explores a wide range of Durkheim-inspired theoretical contributions that put ritual action at the center of the constant dialogue between social life and the symbolic/cultural dimension. Following Turner (1977), Alexander sees in rituals an anti-structural potential, capable of innovating a symbolic system from within, renewing it without completely subverting it.

This was the last piece of the puzzle that finally allowed him move beyond Parsons’ emphasis on cultural stability. Starting from this idea of ritual action, Alexander later developed his concept of “social performance,” by which he indicates the ability of public action to mediate between a shared symbolic system and an audience that has the power to accept or reject the renovation and redefinition of the symbolic system operated by the social performance. The role of acceptance is fundamental for the definition of social performance, as the condition of success of the performance is precisely the acceptance by the audience, whether a small group of bystanders or an entire society (see the contributions in Alexander et al., 2006). The concept of social performance has become one of the fundamental components of Alexander's theoretical arsenal, but its potential and flaws are impossible to understand without considering the other main component of the author's framework—that is, the concept of “civil sphere,” used to define the space in which social performance takes place and in which it is evaluated.

Observing modern democracies and The Civil Sphere

Alexander's interest in the definition of a civil sphere should not be intended as a mere theoretical development, as it was in fact significantly influenced by the political context of the 1990s. In the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disbanding of the USSR, Alexander (1991: 157) lamented the inability of sociology to provide an adequate understanding of the rapid formation of new democracies in the former Eastern Bloc and, more in general, to produce a sociological theory of democracy. His intention was not to elaborate a normative foundation of democracy, as Habermas (1996) did in the same years, but rather a theory capable of describing the ongoing changes in modern countries, just as Geertz (1973) had faced the problem of describing the radical developments brought about by postcolonialism.

To Alexander (1991: 158–162), the first steps were avoiding “realism”—intended as the reduction of the study of politics to the study of political and economic power—and delimiting the social space in which the formation of consensus takes place: such a space is what he would later name the “civil sphere.” Alexander does not take the civil sphere to be a given or a constant in any society, but rather a space that can have varying degrees of autonomy (Alexander, 2015b: 173–174) and that needs to be defended from the influence of other social spheres in order to preserve democracy (Alexander, 1991: 170–171; 2006: 37–38). As I will later argue, defining and observing the autonomy of the civil sphere is one of the major challenges that Alexander's theory needs to overcome and this is at the core of the first critique that I will present in the following sections.

A second problem, however—an ever-returning challenge of Western social and political theory—stands in the way of the theoretical foundation of the study of civil society: the problem of moving from the description of social performance in a limited social milieu to the context of a large and complex society such as modern Western societies. The examples provided by Turner (1977) and Schechner (1988) are often taken from smaller societies or from spatially and temporally limited performances that do not directly translate to the context of a much larger social environment. This is also true for Hubert and Maus' (1902–1903: 17–79) description of the magicians’ performances in archaic societies and, to a certain extent, for Weber's ([1920] 2019.4: 460–472) account of the action of charismatic leaders.

Alexander's (Alexander et al., 2006: 40–46) description of modern social performance is based on the idea that through the progressive enlargement and complexification of society, the aspects of the performance (script, actor, and audience) have become more distinct and less tightly interlinked, so that not only have the social actors gained more freedom in reshaping the symbolic system (or script) they draw upon but, at the same time, their performance needs no more to be directed to the entirety of their audience. In this, Alexander is once again a follower of Durkheim ([1912] 2013: 289), who found in the crowd actions of the French Revolution examples of “collective effervescence”: these isolated episodes of effervescence could not be conceived as directly involving the entirety of French society, but their operation of symbolic innovation had a clear impact on the larger symbolic system.⁴

In Alexander's terms, better understanding the emergence of these new symbolic contributions means explaining the impact of social performances on the overall civil discourse. This is the process he tried to better articulate in his theory of the “societalization of social problems” by describing not only the crucial role of organizations and other collective configurations that act in and on the civil sphere, but also by highlighting the importance of dissent in the process of civil discourse (Alexander, 2019: ch. 1). In Alexander's view, the formation of tensions is part of the normal process of the civil sphere, but these tensions must ultimately be integrated through an act of civil repair that is able to recompose the different perspectives that emerged inside the civic sphere (see Alexander, 2013, 2019).

My second and third critical remarks concern the theory of civil repair as the renewal of the civil sphere's unity. More specifically, I will first argue that Alexander presupposes and does not demonstrate the unitary nature of the civic sphere and then that he does not satisfactorily explain how one can observe or conceptualize an innovation in the shared symbolic system.

These two remarks, together with the first one formulated above, are not to be understood as fatal flaws of Alexander's theory but rather as unresolved problems that the author does not fully account for on a theoretical level. To better present my argument, I will first briefly go through a classical example of the application of Alexander's method, which is his famous analysis of the Watergate scandal, and then I will explain why in my view his method has not been as successful when addressing other, more contemporary matters.

The Watergate scandal and the unity of culture

Alexander has returned to the topic of Watergate on several occasions and further enriched his analysis with every contribution, but what matters to my argument is to explain the general dynamics that he identified as the core process underlying the unfolding of the Watergate scandal and the ultimate downfall of then President Nixon. Alexander's (1988a) first analysis presents a rather simple temporal progression: at first (T₁), the Watergate scandal does not quite spark public indignation (especially in more Republican-leaning contexts); then, over the months (T₂), the scandal is brought to the forefront of public attention thanks to the intervention of journalists from the Washington Post, which gives rise to a negative and “anti-democratic” assessment of the events that took place; and finally (T₃), this assessment is consolidated into a collective condemnation that leads to public outcry against Nixon, who ultimately finds himself forced to resign.

What is interesting about this account is that the civil sphere does indeed seem to function as a “general will” in the Rousseauian sense. In other texts, Alexander (2006: 330) briefly mentions how even a public office such as the presidency derives its legitimacy from public opinion, but nowhere like in his analysis of Watergate does he manage to show the political efficacy of this “collective consciousness.” However, at the heart of this interpretation is the idea that journalism and the media can manage to appeal to the civil sphere as a whole, and that this sphere, although fragmented into movements, groups and individual actors, can sometimes come together in a clearly identifiable common action.

This basic conception, once again rooted in the Durkheimian and Parsonian tradition, is clearly expressed in Alexander's article analyzing what he identifies as three “ideal-typical models” of culture (Alexander, 1988a: 154), which he later uses as the theoretical framework for the Watergate analysis. The author (Alexander, 1988a: 155) calls these three models “cultural specification,” “cultural refraction,” and “cultural columnisation.” “Specification” indicates a model of culture in which the various differentiated social groups are strongly integrated into a common cultural system; “refraction” indicates a point at which, despite sharing common values, the interests and opinions of the social groups become strongly polarized; finally, “columnisation” graphically indicates the idea that the social groups are sharply separated, both in terms of values and in terms of their own interests, and that there is therefore nothing left to unite them: Alexander represents this configuration as quite distinct columns that do not overlap culturally (at the level of values) and can only clash socially (at the level of interests) (Alexander, 1988a: 161).

According to Alexander, social dynamics generally sees an oscillation between the first two cultural configurations, while the third constitutes a degeneration quite difficult to recompose. In his view, Watergate—and in particular, the public discourse that led to Nixon's resignation—is interpreted as a ritual of “repair,” capable of overcoming the polarization that characterized the US political context of the time and bringing the US civil sphere back from a state of refraction to one of specification (Alexander, 1988a: 162–172). However, the author stresses that this was only possible because, beyond polarization, US public discourse remained anchored in “strong common themes” (Alexander, 1988a: 160) shared by the opposing camps. Once again, beyond the differences that cut across it, the civil sphere remained ultimately unified and the political unity of society itself was founded on the underlying symbolic/cultural unity.

Such an optimistic interpretation of Watergate as a success for democracy is in stark contrast to the overwhelmingly negative takes that some famous sociologists authored only few years after the event (see Bellah, 1975; Parsons and Sciortino, 2007)⁵ and Alexander's interpretation surely benefitted from the decade-long interval that separated the scandal from his analysis. To the contrary, Alexander's theory has shown some of his limits when applied to more current events and these are examples I will use going forward to better illustrate my criticism.

Problem 1: Observing the autonomy of the civil sphere

Alexander (2006: 31) describes the civil sphere as “analytically independent, empirically differentiated, and morally more universalistic vis-à-vis the state and the market and from other social spheres as well.” The relative autonomy of such a sphere is a necessary condition for the persistence of a democratic form of government (Alexander 2006: 37–38).

The role of the civil sphere is to receive the inputs from the other spheres of society, to translate them into its own logic (Alexander 2006: 54), centered around the inclusive concept of solidarity, and to then act on the entirety of society through what Alexander calls “civil power.” Civil power indicates the specific ability of the civil sphere to have an impact on society at large and a democracy can be recognized by the role that civil power holds in shaping policies and in legitimizing (or delegitimizing) leaders (Alexander 2006: 109–110). Alongside the example of Watergate, the case of John F. Kennedy being pressured by the civil rights movements into addressing racial inequalities in the United States is another rather uncontroversial example of the efficacy of civil power (Alexander 2006: 330–331).

A more complicated example is the one concerning the refusal of the Egyptian army to intervene in the dynamics of the Egyptian uprising that deposed Hosni Mubarak in 2011 (Alexander, 2011b: 77–80). Here we find what could be seen as arbitrariness and also as a certain narrowness of Alexander's method; indeed, he does not show that the army per se was involved in the dynamics of symbolic transformation within Egyptian society, but simply notes how some of the highest-ranking army officers were ideologically aligned with the content brought about by the Egyptian revolution. Such an argument becomes even weaker if we consider the final outcome of the Egyptian revolution, but this is something I will address in my third criticism. For the moment, I must insist on another point: that of the indeterminacy of the means of civil power.

In another text, Alexander (2013: 118–120) explains that it is precisely because the sacred–profane and good–evil distinctions inscribed in a symbolic system are relatively fluid—and must be so in accordance with his theory of social performance—that social punishment becomes the primary means of acknowledging the public's negative evaluation of a given event. This punishment can take the form of an actual punishment, as in the case of a legal sanction, but it can also take a “more ephemeral” form, such as that of public condemnation and, for example, scandal (here again, Alexander refers directly to Watergate).

This explanation unfortunately does not clarify to what extent the means of the civil sphere are… civil, which means it does not show how one may confirm that the process of the civil sphere was in fact the primary factor (or even a relevant one) in shaping a certain outcome. Admittedly, the Watergate scandal remains a relatively unproblematic example of how public opinion as a whole was oriented towards a certain assessment of an event and how this public representation had a political effect. However, it is more complicated to say that the same applies to the case of the Egyptian army. The fact that some officers also had non-material interests in mind when they made their choice in favor of the revolutionary movement does not necessarily mean that symbolic factors were decisive in shaping their choice. This would be even truer if their statements were regarded as possibly ideological, a criticism against which Alexander did not guard himself.

Indeed, the problem of ideology is doubly linked to that of the real independence of the civil sphere. This independence is often asserted by Alexander (2006, 2013: 123) and is also at the root of his repeated criticism of Bourdieu (Alexander, 1995: 186–194), but one cannot say that Alexander's own position is always satisfactory. The limitation of Alexander's theory as opposed to Bourdieu's is that whereas Bourdieu argues for the impossibility of analytically separating the symbolic and ideological components of a given cultural dynamic (see for example Bourdieu, 1975), Alexander claims to be able to isolate a non-ideological component of culture, but fails to draw a clear divide between the two dimensions. When, for example, he responds to the problem of economic interference in journalism by appealing to journalistic ethics as a counterweight to economic power (Alexander, 2015a), he does not rule out that economy may, or does in fact, affect the work of journalists and thus he does not explore the comparative role of these two components in the resulting media production. Although his theory has the advantage of not being one-dimensional, it fails to separate the different levels it aims to analyze, and instead sometimes (and in this specific case) simply states their difference.

The fundamental problem is that, in doing so, Alexander is unable to completely discard theories that see the civil sphere as deeply influenced by economic power (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002; Habermas, 1989: ch. 6) or other manifold forms of social power (Bourdieu, 1979: ch. 8). Therefore, in order to defend his position, he is forced to use descriptions that see the civil sphere as endowed with a certain degree of independence (Alexander, 2013: 137–138) without, however, fully clarifying how this independence is to be determined or observed.⁶

Problem 2: Observing the unity of the civil sphere

The second problem that I want to address is the question of the unitary nature of the civil sphere, something that Alexander often seems to assume rather than explain. Since he accepts the idea that social order is guaranteed by a shared logical and moral conformism (like Durkheim) or rather by a symbolic system (like Parsons), Alexander needs both the symbolic system and the social discourse that perpetuates and renews such a system to be at least relatively unitary.

This does not mean that the civil sphere has clear and stable boundaries, as would be the case for a more traditional concept of a symbolic system linked to a specific society (often identified with a state). Alexander (2015b: 178–180) highlights the drive towards universalization and globalization of the civil discourse and he sometimes talks of a “global civil sphere” (see Alexander, 2011b: 71–76) as something that already has an effect on current societies. At the same time, however, he seems to underestimate the problem of demonstrating the unity of the civil sphere on a smaller scale.

As I said before, such a unity presupposes the unity of the symbolic system and of the discourse that perpetuates such a system. The unity of the discourse has been the object of much debate recently, especially with the advancement of communication technology that has made the connection across the globe easier and easier but has also multiplied and diversified media consumption across and within societies. In his now classic book, Castells (2000: 365–371, 401–403) has argued first that the multiplication of television broadcasts and then the diversification of mass media have widely divided what was traditionally conceived as a “mass audience” and, more recently, the fragmentation of the media discourse has been addressed by the numerous studies related to the so-called “echo chambers.” This term remains to this day rather vague and is often used in different ways across the literature (see Nguyen, 2020). The core idea behind it is that the circulation of information on the Internet, linked to the targeting mechanism thanks to which people tend to receive information according to their digital profile, favors the consolidation of relatively isolated communities within which social actors tend to share information and narratives; this tends to confirm the actor's own worldview, so that these communities become relatively impervious to other perspectives. This phenomenon, often linked to information overload (see Auxier and Vitak, 2019), has been amply studied with regard to political behavior (see Ackermann and Stadelmann-Steffen, 2022; Boutyline and Willer, 2017; Wollebæk et al., 2019), but certainly has more general effects with regard to the construction of a shared symbolic system.

Overall, we lack a major perspective on the effect of the Internet on the dynamics of social solidarity that could approximate what Zuboff (2019) has tried to do for the economic domain. Alexander's (1990) own take on computer technology as something that could not really affect the symbolic structure of society is now too old to be considered an attempt to address these phenomena and it would be unfair to evaluate it as such. Thus, even though the present state of mass media does not completely contradict the concept of the civil sphere, it is certainly something that should be further investigated.

So if the presupposition of the unity of civil discourse is something that may yet be addressed, the unity of the symbolic system represents a more foundational problem for civil sphere theory. In following Durkheim and Parsons, Alexander has mostly neglected the potential of the Weberian tradition of the sociology of knowledge: for example, in classical texts, Weber ([1920] 2019.2: 218–289), Lukács (1971) and Mannheim (1936) have all emphasized how widely different value orientations can coexist within the same society, so much so that Adorno (1965: 14–15) went as far as to say that Weber's thinking was incompatible with Rousseau's notion of a “general will.”

Among Weber's followers, Geertz surely stands for a position that Alexander failed to reconcile with its own. In fact, as stated above, Alexander widely underestimates the critical potential of Geertz, reducing a theoretical divergence to a matter of empirical focus, and this because he does not acknowledge the importance of Geertz's critique of the cybernetic presuppositions of Parsons’ theory. As Paidipaty (2020: 117) rightly stresses, Geertz (1973: 407–408) emphasized the importance of cultural discontinuity and in particular he argued against the conception of culture as a “seamless web” of meaning—as a neatly and stably integrated system—and instead proposed the image of culture as an octopus—that is, as an organism whose components are rather loosely integrated and have a considerable degree of autonomy. Such a metaphor indicates the conception of culture as a system that does not need an ultimate, central form of integration, and can instead rely on a dynamic balancing between its parts.⁷

In a similar fashion, Luhmann (1981: ch. 4)—another major innovator of Parsons’ theory and one also versed in cybernetics and system theory—has argued against the idea of social order as the product of a singular, central mechanism, and has instead promoted the picture of modern society as the continuous production of multiple processes without an identifiable center.

In the face of Geertz's and Luhmann's positions, Alexander's conception of order, based on the Parsonian formulation of the “Hobbesian problem,” is not as clearly tenable as Parsons’ own position was in the face of the classical liberalist theory of social order he argued against.

Problem 3: Observing symbolic transformation in the civil sphere

The third problem concerns how to study change in a society's symbolic system—a change that, for the sake of synthesis, I will call a “symbolic transformation.” In Alexander's theory, addressing the matter of a symbolic transformation means addressing three sub-problems.

First of all, it is difficult to know when and if a symbolic transformation has really succeeded. In his main text on the civil sphere, Alexander mostly talks about seemingly concluded dynamics (particularly with regard to the issue of women's rights and civil rights), which in itself has already been largely called into question by phenomena that Alexander himself has dealt with, as in the case of the #MeToo movement (see Alexander, 2019: ch. 7). This ephemeral nature of symbolic transformations is even more emblematic in the case of Egypt, where the political revolution did not ultimately lead to a genuine cultural overturn, but where, on the contrary, after ups and downs, the political and civil situations ended up being much closer to the starting point than Alexander's (2011b) perhaps too hasty and certainly too optimistic analysis would have suggested.

This constant reappraisal of the symbolic system would perhaps be less problematic if Alexander did not argue that a successful symbolic performance should be capable of imposing a new symbolic content for all participants and not just of producing a state of compromise. In fact, the supposed establishment of a new shared symbolic system makes it more difficult to clarify the origin of cultural backlashes. The very fact that a backlash may occur after the resolution of a cultural tension while still being rooted in a previous state of affairs seems to be in contradiction with the idea of the full acceptance of a symbolic transformation. Once again, this may open the question of when and how a symbolic transformation can be considered concluded, or it may lead to a redefinition of the success of a social performance as the achievement of a certain degree of consensus.

The second option brings the argument straight to the second sub-problem: how exactly can we observe consensus within the civil sphere? If consensus can only be observed thanks to the fact that a certain content is imposed as the reason for the final choice that sanctions civil repair, how can we be sure that this consensus has been formed on a democratic basis and not through forms of manipulation of public opinion? And in general, even if we could equip ourselves with the tools to clearly discriminate between a manipulated situation and an unmanipulated one, on what basis should we define a consensus as effective? In this case, Alexander's theory would get entangled with the same issues that have occupied the theory of democracy for more than a century, and the whole thing would be compounded by the fact that the civil sphere has no single mode of expressing itself that is as clear-cut as voting is for registering a political will.

Thirdly and finally, Alexander's theory has a weakness linked to his desire to make the notion of culture more dynamic, which in fact leads him to reject the idea that culture is founded on a substantially stable deep core, as was the case in Parsons' theory. This is more often than not an advantage for his theory, but it also leads him not to completely define a hierarchy of importance for the symbolic content conveyed by a social performance. Thus, whereas in his analysis of Watergate, Alexander (1988b: 197, 206) still clearly distinguished the value principles and the objects that were evaluated according to these values, in his analysis of the Egyptian revolution (Alexander, 2011b: 16, 18, 24) he tends to conflate these two levels much more, which makes it way more difficult to clarify what is (and a fortiori what might be) at stake in the redefinition brought about by social performance. As a result of this confusion of levels, it is no longer clear on what basis social actors interpret a symbolic content, or rather what symbolic content they can claim to interpret if they are also capable of modifying it so radically.

Perhaps the main flaw in Alexander's theory of performance lies in the choice to aggregate all prior symbolic content under the idea of a “text” or “script” (Alexander et al., 2006: ch. 1), which is then interpreted by the social performance. The disadvantage of this theoretical step is that it makes the performance itself too indeterminate and, moreover, prevents a clear explanation of how the performance can “become” a text for a new social performance and thus link up with other performances. In fact, in his description, interpretations do not seem to stack, but instead the new “text” (i.e., the product of the successful performance) seems to “overwrite” the previous content, thus blurring the distinction between text and interpretation to the point that they are almost indistinguishable. This could also be interpreted as Alexander lacking a theory of social memory⁸ and, consequently, a clear notion of how past cultural content can still be effective in the present.⁹

This erasure of the past is the theoretical knot that, in my opinion, holds Alexander back when studying the articulation and complexity of cultural change, and it is also what prevents him from fully evaluating the plurality of discourses that form around contemporary events. The clearest example is to be found in his optimistic analysis of the civil discourse surrounding the January 6 United States Capitol attack (see Alexander, 2023), in which he pointed to a coming civil repair that does not seem to be yet on the horizon.

Conclusion

In my interpretation, the overall aim of Alexander's theory is to continue in the line of Durkheim and Parsons by exploring how modern societies maintain a form of central integration through a shared symbolic system. The study of the civil sphere is the way in which Alexander aims to study this form of integration without reference to “collective representations” or to a separate “cultural system.” In doing this, Alexander is not just “modernizing” Durkheim and Parsons but he is trying to render the process of formation of a symbolic system more dynamic and more open to dissent and to differing opinions. His solution is to link the formation and renovation of the symbolic system to the dynamics of public opinion and civic debate. This link is the key to his interpretation of events such as the Watergate scandal, but it is also the origin of all three problems that I have identified.

The first two problems both concern the question of whether this ultimate social integration can and should be studied as a form of cultural or symbolic integration. Assessing the autonomy of the civil sphere is necessary in order to evaluate whether this form of integration is actually achieved through symbolic means; assessing the unity of the civil sphere is necessary in order to understand whether such a form of integration exists in the first place. These two problems should be taken as a constant preoccupation when using civil sphere theory and they should not be taken as solved once and for all, even when empirical evidence were to show an undoubted action of the civil sphere in certain limited circumstances. As Alexander (2015b: 172–173) himself pointed out, solidarity does not take the same form in all societies and thus I would insist on the fact that the civil sphere, which is articulated around the concept of solidarity, may vary as well across different societies and over time, leading to different effects in different contexts.

As for the third problem, the problem of symbolic transformation is more of a conceptual one and one that Alexander has tried to solve through the years, especially through the idea of the dynamics between “backlash” and “frontlash.” When it comes to this, the main thing missing from Alexander's theory is a model for long-term change analogous to the one that the author himself elaborated in order to observe the creation and the resolution of social problems on a smaller scale (Alexander, 2019).

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Mario Marotta

Notes

Author biography

Mario Marotta is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) and is currently working on a thesis on Niklas Luhmann's approach to the study of intimacy under the supervision of Chiara Piazzesi. His fields of research include social systems theory (with a specific focus on Luhmann's theory), sociology of intimacy and social theory in general.

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