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Cultural Pragmatics Blurred Boundaries: Rethinking 'Culture' in the Context of Interdisciplinary Practices Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, December 13-14, 2003 The Cultural Pragmatics of Social Performance: Between Ritual and Rationality Jeffrey Alexander, Yale University Rituals are episodes of repeated and simplified cultural communication, in which the direct partners to a social interaction, and those observing it, share a mutual belief in the descriptive and prescriptive validity of the communication's symbolic contents and accept the authenticity of one another's intentions. It is because of this shared understanding of intention and content, and in the intrinsic validity of the interaction, that rituals have their effect and affect. Ritual effectiveness energizes the participants and attaches them to each other, increases their identification with the symbolic objects of communication, and intensifies the connection of the participants and the symbolic objects with the observing audience, the relevant "community" at large. If there is one cultural quality that marks the earliest forms of human social organization, it is the centrality of rituals. From births to conjugal relationships, from peaceful foreign relations to the preparation for war, from the healing of the sick to the celebration of collective well being, from transitions through the age structure to the assumption of new occupational and political roles, the affirmation of leadership and the celebration of anniversaries – in earlier forms of society such social processes tend to be marked by ritualized symbolic communication. If there is one cultural quality that differentiates more contemporary, large-scale, and complex social organizations from earlier forms, it is that the centrality of such ritual processes has been displaced. Contemporary societies revolve around open-ended conflicts between parties that do not necessarily share beliefs, frequently do not accept the validity of one another's intention, and often disagree even about the descriptions that people offer for acts. Social observers, whether they are more scientific or more philosophical, have found innumerable ways to conceptualize this historical transformation, starting with such thoroughly discredited evolutionary contrasts as primitive/advanced or barbarian/civilized, and moving on to more legitimate but still overly binary distinctions such as traditional/modern, oral/literate, simple/complex. One does not have to be an evolutionist or to accept the simplifying dichotomies of meta-history to see that a broad change has occurred. Max Weber pitted his contingent historical approach against every shred of evolutionary thinking, yet this decentering of ritual was precisely what he meant by the movement from charisma to routinization and from traditional to value and goal- rational society. Rather than being 1 Cultural Pragmatics organized primarily through rituals that affirm metaphysical and consensual beliefs, contemporary societies have opened themselves to processes of negotiations and reflexivity about means and ends, with the result that conflict, disappointment, and feelings of bad faith are at least as common as integration, affirmation, and the energizing of the collective spirit. Still, most of us who live in these more reflexive and fragmented societies are also aware that, for better and for worse, such processes of rationalization have not, in fact, completely won the day. There is a continuing symbolic intensity based on repeated and simplified cognitive and moral frames (Goffman 1967, 1974) that continues to mark all sorts of individual and private relationships. More public and collective processes, from social movements (Eyerman and Jamison 1990) to wars (Smith 1993) and revolutions (Sewell 1980, Hunt 1984, Apter and Saich 1994, Edles 1998) and even to the construction of scientific communities (Hagstrom 1965) continue to depend on the simplifying structures of symbolic communications and on cultural interactions that rely on, and to some degree can generate, intuitive and unreflective trust (Sztompka 1999, Barber 1983). It might even be said that, in a differentiated, stratified, and reflexive society, a strategy's success depends on belief in the validity of the cultural contents of the strategist's symbolic communication, on one person's acceptance of the authenticity and even the sincerity of another's strategic intentions. Virtually every kind of modern collectivity, moreover, seems to depend at one time or another on integrative processes that create some sense of shared identity (Ringmar 1996, Spillman 1997, Giesen 1998), even if these are forged, as they all too often are, in opposition to simplistic constructions of those who are putatively on the other side. At both the micro and the macro levels, both among individuals and between and within collectivities, our societies still seem to be permeated by symbolic, ritual-like activities. It is precisely this notion of "ritual-like," however, that indicates the puzzle that we face. We are aware that very central processes in complex societies are symbolic, and that sometimes they are also integrative, at the group, inter-group, and even at the societal level. But we also clearly sense that these processes are not rituals in the traditional sense (cf., Lukes 1977). Even when they affirm validity and authenticity, and produce integration, their effervescence is short lived. If they have achieved simplicity, it is unlikely they will be repeated. If they are repeated, it is unlikely that the symbolic communication can ever be so simplified in the same way again. This is the puzzle to which the present essay is addressed. Is it possible to develop a theory that can explain how the integration of particular groups and sometimes even whole collectivities can be achieved through symbolic communications, while continuing to account 2 Cultural Pragmatics for cultural complexity and contradiction, for institutional differentiation, contending social power, and segmentation? Can a theory give full credence to the continuing role of belief while acknowledging that unbelief and criticism are also the central hallmarks of our time? In order to solve this puzzle, I develop in the following pages a systematic macro- sociological model of social action as cultural performance. In so doing, I will enter not only into the historical origins of theatrical performance and dramaturgical theory (e.g., Austin 1957, Burke 1965, Goffman 1974, Geertz 1980, Carlson 1996, Auslander 1997, Schechner 2002) but into the history and theories of social performance as well. This means looking at how, and why, symbolic action moved from ritual to theatre (Turner 1982), and why it so often moves back to ritual-like processes again (Schechner 1976). The gist of my argument can be simply stated. The more simple collective organization, the less its social and cultural parts are segmented and differentiated, the more that the elements of social performances are fused. The more complex, segmented, and differentiated the collectivity, the more these elements of social performance become de-fused. To be effective in a society of increasing complexity, social performances must engage in a project of "re-fusion." To the degree they achieve refusion, social performances become convincing and effective – ritual-like. To the degree that social performances remain defused and therefore less ineffective, they seem artificial and contrived, less like rituals than like contrived performances. Failed performances are those in which the actor, whether individual or collective, has been unable to sew back together the elements of performance to make them seem seamlessly connected. This failure makes it much more difficult for the actor to realize her intentions. This argument points immediately to the question of just what the elements of social performance are. I will elucidate these in the section immediately following. Then, with the analytical model of social performance safely in hand, I will turn back to the historical questions of what allowed earlier societies more frequently to make their performances into rituals, and how later social developments created the ambiguous and slippery contexts for performative action in which we find ourselves today. Once this historical argument is established, I will come back to the model of performative success and failure and elaborate its interdependent elements in much more detail. Part I The Elements of Cultural Performance Cultural performance is the social process by which actors, individually or in concert, display for others the meaning of their social situation. This meaning may or may not be one to which they themselves subjectively adhere; it is the meaning which they, as social actors, consciously or unconsciously, wish to have others believe. In order for their display to be 3 Cultural Pragmatics effective, actors must offer a plausible performance, one that leads those to whom their actions and gestures are directed to accept their own motives and explanations as a reasonable account (Garfinkel 1967, Scott and Lyman 1968). As Gerth and Mills (1964: 55) once put it, "our gestures do not necessarily 'express' our prior feelings," but, rather, "they make available to others a sign." Successful performance depends on the ability to convince others that one's performance is true, with all the ambiguities that the notion of aesthetic truth implies. Once we understand cultural performance in this way, we easily can make out the basic elements that compose it. 1. Systems of collective representations: 1a. background symbols and 1b. foreground scripts Marx (1962 [1852]: 247) warned that "just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed," social actors "anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time honoured disguise and this borrowed language." 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. 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. These latter can be understood as constituting the performance's immediate referential text. As constructed by the performative imagination, background and foreground symbols are structured by codes that provide analogies and antipathies and by narratives that provide chronologies. In symbolizing actors' and audiences' worlds, these narratives and codes simultaneously condense and elaborate, and they employ a wide range of rhetorical devices, from metaphor to synecdoche, to configure social and emotional life in compelling and coherent ways. Systems of collective representations 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. Like any other text, these collective representations, whether background or foreground, can be evaluated for their dramatic effectiveness. I will say more about this below, but what is important at this point is to see that, no matter how intrinsically effective, collective representations do not speak themselves. Marjorie Boulton (1960: 3) once described theatre as "literature that walks and talks before our eyes." It is this need for walking and talking – and seeing and listening to the walking and talking -- that makes the practical pragmatics of performance different from the cultural logic of texts. 2. Actors These patterned representations are put into practice, or encoded (Hall 1980), by flesh and blood people. As Reiss (1971: 138)) once suggested in his study of the relation between theatrical technique and meaning in seventeenth century French theatre, "the actor is as real as the spectator; he is in fact present in their midst." Whether or not they are consciously aware of the distinction between collective representations and their walking and talking, actors aim is to make this distinction disappear. As Reiss (1971: 142) puts it, the actor's desire is "to cause the spectator to confuse his emotions with those of the stage character." While performers must be oriented to background and foreground representations, their motivation vis-à-vis these patterns are contingent. In psychological terms, the relation between actor and text depends on cathexis. The relation between actor and audience, in turn, depends on the ability to project these emotions and textual patterns as moral evaluations. If those who perform cultural scripts do not possess the requisite skills (Bauman 1989), then they may fail miserably in the effort to effectively project their meanings. 3. Observers/audience. Cultural texts are performed so that meanings can be displayed to others. These other constitutes the audience of observers for cultural performance. They decode what actors have encoded (Hall 1980), but they do so in variable ways. If cultural texts are to be convincingly communicated, there needs to be a process of cultural extension that expands from script and actor to audience. Cultural extension must be accompanied by a process of psychological identification, such that the members of the 4 Cultural Pragmatics audience project themselves into the characters they see onstage. There is empirical variation in the extent to which cultural extension and psychological identification actually occurs. Audiences may be focused or distracted, attentive or uninterested. Even if actors cathect to cultural texts, and even if they themselves possess high levels of cultural proficiency, their projections still may still not be persuasive to the audience/observers. Observation can be merely cognitive. An audience can see and understand without experiencing emotional or moral signification. As we will see below, there are often social explanations of this variability. Audiences may represent social statuses orthogonal to the status of performers. Audience attendance may not be required, or it may be compelled. Critics can intervene between performance and audience. There might not be an audience in the contemporary sense at all, but only participants observing themselves and their fellow performers. This latter condition facilitates cultural identification and psychological extension, though it is a condition much less frequently encountered in the complex societies of the present day. 4. Means of Symbolic Production In order to perform a cultural text before an audience, actors need access to the mundane material things which allow symbolic projections to be made. They need objects that can serve as iconic representations, to help them dramatize and make vivid the invisible motives and morals they are trying to represent. This material ranges from clothing to every other sort of "standardized expressive equipment" (Goffman 1956: 34-51). Actors also require a physical place to perform and the means to assure the transmission of their performance to an audience. 5. Mis-en-scene With texts and means in hand, and audience(s) before them, social actors engage in dramatic social action, entering into and projecting the ensemble of physical and verbal gestures that constitute performance. This ensemble of gestures involves more than the symbolic devices that structure a non- performed symbolic text. If a text is to walk and talk, it must be sequenced temporally and choreographed spatially. The exigencies of time and space create specific aesthetic demands; at some historical juncture point new social roles like director and producer emerge that specialize in this task of this task of putting text "into the scene." 6. Social power. The distribution of power in society, the nature of its political, economic, and status hierarchies, and the relations among its elites profoundly affects the performance process. Power establishes an external boundary for cultural pragmatics that parallels the internal boundary established by a performance's background representations. Not all texts are equally legitimate in the eyes of the powers that be, whether they be possessors of material or interpretive power. Not all performances, and not all parts of a particular performance, are allowed to proceed. Will social power seek to eliminate certain parts of a cultural text? Who will be allowed to act in a performance, and with what means? Who will be allowed to attend? What kinds of responses will be permitted from audience/observer? Are there powers that have the authority to interpret performances independently of those with the authority to produce them? Are these powers also independent of the actors and the audience itself, or are power and symbolic knowledge much more closely linked? Every social performance, whether individual or collective, is fundamentally affected by each of the elements I have presented here. In the language of hermeneutics, this sketch of interdependent elements provides a framework for the interpretive reconstruction of the meanings of performative action. In the language of explanation, it provides a model of causality. One can say that every social performance is partly determined by each of the elements I have laid out, that each is a necessary but not sufficient cause of every performative act. While empirically interrelated, each element has some autonomy, not only analytically but empirically vis-à-vis the others. Taken together, they determine, and measure, whether and how a performance occurs, and the degree to which it succeeds or fails in its effect. At this point in our discussion, there are two different ways to proceed. The analytic model can be developed further, elaborating the nature of each factor and its interrelations 5 Cultural Pragmatics with the others. This is the task I will take up in Part III. Before doing so, however, I wish to explore how the analytical model I have just laid out, despite the fact it is so far only very simply presented, already provides significant insight into the central puzzle of ritual and rationalization which I introduced above. Part II The Historical Transformation of Performance The model of performance I am developing here provides a new way of looking at cultural and organizational change over broad spans of historical time. We can see differently how and why rituals were once so central to band and tribal societies, and why the nature of symbolic action changed so remarkably with the rise of states, empires, and churches. We can understand why both the theatre and the democratic polis arose for the first time in ancient Greece, and why theatre emerged once again during the early modern period, at a time when open-ended social dramas became central to determining the nature of social and political authority. We can understand why Romanticism, secularization, and industrial society made the authenticity of symbolic action such a central question for modern times. Old Fashioned Rituals: Symbolic Performances in Early Societies Colonial and modernist thinkers were deeply impressed by the ritualistic processes that explorers and anthropologists observed when they encountered societies that had not experienced "civilization" or "modernity." Some associated the frequency of rituals with the putative purity of early societies (Huizinga 1950 [1938]), others with some sort of distinctively primitive, non-rational mentality, on the other (Levy-Bruhl 1923). Huizinga (1950 [1938]: 14), for example, stressed that rituals create not a "sham reality" but "a mystical one," in which "something invisible and inactual takes beautiful, actual, holy form." Less romantic observers still emphasized the automatic, predictable, engulfing, and spontaneous qualities of ritual life. Weber provides a sociological exemplar of this attitude, which also marked the modern anthropological definitions of ritual that became paradigmatic. Turner defined rituals as "stereotyped" and as "sequestered" (1977: 183); Goody calls them "homeostatic" (1986: 21); and Leach, insisting also on "repetition" (1972: 334) expresses his wonderment at how in the rituals he observed "everything in fact happened just as predicted" (ibid., p.199). Against these arguments for the essential and fundamental difference of symbolic interactions in earlier societies, critical and postmodern anthropologists have argued for their more "conjunctural" (Clifford 1988: 11) quality. Those mysterious rituals that aroused such intense admiration and curiosity among earlier observers, it is argued, should be seen, not as expressions of some distinctive essence, but simply as a different kind of practice 6 Cultural Pragmatics (Conquergood 1992). The model I am developing here allows us to frame this important insight in a more nuanced, less polemical, and more empirically-oriented way. Rituals in early societies, I wish to suggest, were not so much practices as performances, and in this they are, indeed, made of the same stuff as social actions in more complex societies. In an introduction to his edition of Turner's posthumous essays, Schechner (1987: 7) once suggested that "all performance has at its core a ritual action." It is much better, I think, to reverse this statement, and to say that all ritual has at its core a performative act. This is not to deny the differences between rituals and performances of other kinds. What it does suggest, however, is that rituals and performances exist on the same continuum, and that the difference between them is a matter of variation, not fundamental type. Ritual performances reflect the social structures and cultures of their historically-situated societies. They are distinctive in that they are fused. Fusion is much more likely to be achieved in the conditions of less complex societies, but it occurs in complex societies as well. To see why performances in simpler societies more frequently became rituals, we must examine how early social structure and culture defined the elements of performance and related them to one another in a distinctive way. The explanation can be found in their much smaller size and scale, in the more mythical and metaphysical nature of their beliefs, and in the more integrated and overlapping nature of their institutions, culture, and social structures. Membership in the earliest human societies (Service 1962, 1979) was organized around the axes of kinship, age, and gender, inside collectivities that numbered sixty to eighty persons. They supported themselves by hunting and gathering, and participated in a small set of social roles with which every person was thoroughly familiar. By all accounts, the subjectivity that corresponded with this kind social organization resembled what Stanner (1972), when speaking of the Australian Aboriginals, called "dream time." Such consciousness merged mundane and practical dimensions with the sacred and metaphysical to the extent that religion did not exist as a separate form. In such societies, as Service (1962: 109) once remarked, "there is no religious organization" that is "separated from family and band". The structural and cultural organization of early forms of societies suggests differences in the kinds of social performance that they can produce. The collective representations to which these social performances refer are not texts composed by specialists for segmented subgroups in complex and contentious social orders. Nor do these collective representations form a critical "metacommentary" (Geertz 1973) on social life, for there does not yet exist deep tension between mundane and transcendental spheres (Bellah 1970, Eisenstadt 1982, Habermas 1982-3, Goody 1986). The early anthropologists Spencer and Gillen (1927) were 7 Cultural Pragmatics right at least in this, when they suggested that the Engwura ritual cycle of the Australian Arunta recapitulated the actual life style of the Arunta males. A century later, when Schechner (1976: 197) observed the Tsembaga dance of the Kaiko, he confirmed that "all the basic moves and sounds – even the charge into the central space – are adaptations and direct lifts from battle." The tight intertwining of cultural text and social structure that marks social performances in early societies provides a contextual frame for Durkheim's theoretical argument about religion as simply society writ large. While claiming to propose a paradigm for studying every religion at all times, one might better understand Durkheim as describing the context for social performances in early societies. Durkheim insists that culture is identical with religion, that any "proper" religious belief is shared by every member of the group, and that these shared beliefs are always translated into the practices that Durkheim calls rituals, or rites. Not only are they individually accepted by all members of that group, but they also belong to the group and unify it … A society whose members are united because they imagine the sacred world and its relation with the profane world in the same way, and because they translate this common representation into identical practices, is called a Church (Durkheim 1995 [1912]: 41, italics added) In such ritualized performances, the belief dimension is experienced as personal, immediate, and iconographic. Through the painting, masking, and reconfiguring of the physical body, the actors in these performances seek not only metaphorically but literally to become the text, their goal being to project the fusion of human and totem, "man and God," sacred and mundane. The symbolic roles that define participation in such ritualized performances emerge directly, and without mediation, from the other social roles actors play. In the Engwura ritual (Spencer and Gillen 1927), the Arunta males performed the parts that they actually held in everyday Arunta life. When social actors perform such roles, they do not have a sense of separation from them; they have little self-consciousness about themselves as actors. For participants and observers, rituals are not considered to be a performance in the contemporary sense at all, but rather a natural and necessary dimension of ongoing social life. As for the means of symbolic production, while not always immediately available, they are generally near at hand -- a ditch dug with the sharp bones of animals, a line drawn from the red coloring of wild flowers, a head-dress made from bird feathers, an amulet fashioned from a parrot's beaks (Turner 1969: 23-37). In this type of social organization, participation in ritual performance is not contingent, either for the actors or the observers. Participation is determined by the established and accepted hierarchies of gender and age, not by individual choices that respond to the sanctions and rewards of social powers or segmented social groups. Every relevant party in the band or 8 Cultural Pragmatics tribe must attend to ritual performances. Many ceremonies involve the entire community, for they "regard their collective well-being to be dependent upon a common body of ritual performances" (Rappaport 1968 in Schechner 1976: 211). Turner (1982: 31, original italics) attests that "the whole community goes through the entire ritual round." Durkheim also emphasizes obligation, connecting it with the internal coherence of the audience. In the ritual phase of Aboriginal society, he writes (1995 [1912]: 217), "the population comes together, concentrating itself at specific places… The concentration takes place when a clan or a portion of the tribe is summoned to come together." Nor are attendees only observers. At various points in the ritual, those merely watching the ritual performance are called upon to participate, sometimes as principals, at other times as members of an attentive chorus providing remonstrations of approval through such demonstrative acts as shouting, crying, and applause. At key phases in male initiation ceremonies, for example, women closely attend, and at particular moments play significant ritual roles (Schechner 2002). They express indifference and rejection early in the performance, and display physical signs of welcome and admiration in order to mark its end. Even when they do not participate, ritual audiences are hardly strangers. They are linked to performers by direct or indirect family ties. In terms of the elementary model I have laid out above, it seems clear that such ritualized social actions fuse the various components of performance -- actors, audiences, representations, means of symbolic production, social power, and mis-en-scene. It is the actor/audience part of this fusion to which Service (1962: 109) refers when he writes that "the congregation is the camp itself." Levi-Strauss (1963: 179) means to emphasize the same fusing when he speaks of the "fabulation" of ritual as a "threefold experience." It consists "first of the shaman himself, who, if his calling is a true one ... undergoes specific states of a psychosomatic nature; second, that of the sick person, who may or may not experience an improvement of his condition; and, finally, that of the public, who also participates in the cure, experiencing an enthusiasm and an intellectual and emotional satisfaction which produce collective support." In the studies of shamanistic rituals offered by postmodern performance theorists, we can read their ethnographic accounts as suggesting fusion in much the same way. They derive their power from listening to the others and absorbing daily realities. While they cure, they take into them their patients' possessions and obsessions and let the latter's illnesses become theirs … The very close relationship these healers maintain with their patients remains the determining factor of the cure. (Trinh Minh-ha 1989 in Conquergood 1992: 44]) With sacred texts tied to mundane society, actors' roles tied to social roles, performance directly expressing symbolic text and social life, obligatory participation, and homogeneous and attentive audiences it is hardly surprising that the effects of ritual 9 Cultural Pragmatics performances tend to be immediate and only infrequently depart from the expectations of actors and scripts (cf., Schechner 1981: 92-94, 1976: 205). As Levi-Strauss attests (1963: 168, italics added), "there is … no reason to doubt the efficacy of certain magical practices" precisely because "the efficacy of magic implies a belief in magic." Rites not only mark transitions but create them, such that the participants become something or somebody else as a result. Ritual performance not only symbolizes a social relationship or change, it actualizes it. There is a direct effect, without mediation. Anthropologists who have studied rituals in earlier forms of society reported that the tricks of ritual specialists rarely were scrutinized. Levi-Strauss (1963: 179) emphasized the role of "group consensus" when he began his famous retelling of Boas' ethnography of Quesalid. The Kwakiutl Indian was so unusually curious as to insist (at first) that the sorcerer's rituals indeed were tricks. Yet, after persuading ritual specialists to teach him the tricks of their trade, Queslid himself went on to become a great shaman. "Quesalid did not become a great shaman because he cured his patients," Levi-Strauss (1963: 180) assures us; rather, "he cured his patients because he had become a great shaman." Shamans effect cures, individual and social, because participants and observers of their performances believe they have the force to which they lay claim. Shamans, in other words, are institutionalized masters of ritual performance. The success of this performance depends, in the first place, on their dramatic skills, but these skills are intertwined with the other dimensions that allow performances to be fused in simple social organizations. Social Complexity and Post-Ritual Performances Fused performances creating ritual-like effects remain important in more complex societies. There are two senses in which this is true. First, and less importantly for the argument I am developing here, in such primary groups as families, gangs, and inter- generationally stable ethnic communities, role performances often seem to reproduce the macrocosm in the microcosm (Slater 1966). Even inside of complex societies, audiences in such primary groups are relatively homogeneous, actors are familiar, situations are repeated, and texts and traditions, while once invented, eventually take on a time immemorial quality. The second sense in which ritual-like effects remain central, more importantly for my argument here, is that fusion still remains the goal of performances in complex societies. It is the context for performative success that has greatly changed. As I noted earlier, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists have analyzed the sporadic and uneven processes that created larger-scale societies in innumerably different ways. There is sharply contrasting theorizing about the causes and pathways of the movement 10 Cultural Pragmatics away from simpler social organization, in which ritual played a central role, to more complex social forms, which feature more strategic, reflexive, and managed forms of symbolic communication. But there is wide consensus that such a transformation did occur, that the processes of "complexification," "rationalization," or "differentiation" (Eisenstadt 1963, Habermas 1982-83, Alexander and Colomy 1990, Champagne 1992, Luhmann 1995, Thrift 1999) produce different kinds of symbolic communications today. Thus, Jack Goody (1986: 22), not only one of the most theoretically sophisticated contemporary anthropologists but an outspoken critic of neo-evolutionary theory, still speaks confidently of the transition "from worldview to ideology." This emphasis on ideology is telling, and it leads directly to the argument about changes in the conditions for performativity that I am making here. Earlier sociological and anthropological investigations into the social causes of the transition from simple forms of social organization emphasized the determining role of economic change. Technological shifts created more productivity, which led to surplus and the class system, and finally to the first distinctive political institutions, whose task was to organize the newly stratified society and administer material and organizational needs. By the end of the 1950s, however, anthropologists had already begun to speak less of technological changes than shifts in economic orientations and regimes. When Fried (1971: 103) explains "the move from egalitarian to rank society," he describes a shift "from an economy dominated by reciprocity to one having redistribution as a major device." In the same kind of anti-determinist vein, when Service (1962: 171) explains movement beyond the monolithic structures of early societies to the "twin forms of authority" that sustained distinctive economic and political elites, he describes it as "made possible by greater productivity" (1962: 143, italics added). Sahlins (1972) built on such arguments to suggest that it was not the economic inability to create surplus that prevented growth but the ideological desire to maintain a less productivity-driven, more leisurely style of life. Nolan and Lenski (1995: 157, italics added) make the point of this conceptual-cum-empirical development impossible to overlook: "Technological advance created the possibility of a surplus, but to transform that possibility into a reality required an ideology that motivated farmers to produce more than they needed to stay alive and productive, and persuaded them to turn that surplus over to someone else." As this last comment makes clear, this whole historiographic transition in the anthropology of early transitions points to the critical role of ideological projects. The creation of surplus depended on new motivations, which could only come about through the creation of symbolic performances to persuade others, not through their material coercion. 11 Cultural Pragmatics The most striking social innovation that crystallized such a cultural shift to ideology was the emergence of written texts. According to Goody (1986: 12), the emergence of text- based culture allowed and demanded "the decontextualization or generalization" of collective representations, which in oral societies were more tightly intertwined with local social structures and meanings. With writing, the "communicative context has changed dramatically both as regards the emitter and as regards the receivers" (ibid., 13): "In their very nature written statements of the law, of norms, of rules, have had to be abstracted from particular situations in order to be addressed to a universal audience out there, rather than delivered face-to-face to a specific group of people at a particular time and place" (ibid.). Only projection beyond the local would allow groups to use economic surplus to create more segmented, unequal, and differentiated societies. Without the capacity for ideological projection, how else would these kinds of more fragmented social orders ever be coordinated, much less integrated in an asymmetrical way? These structural and ideological processes suggest a decisive shift in actors' relation to the means of symbolic production. In text-based societies, literacy is essential if the symbolic processes that legitimate social structure are to be successfully carried out. Because literacy is difficult and expensive, priests "have privileged access to the sacred texts." This allows "the effective control of the means of literate communication," concentrating interpretative authority in elite hands (Goody 1986: 16-17). Alongside this new emergence of monopoly power, indeed because of it, there emerges the necessity for exercising tight control over performance – to project this ideological control over distantiated and subordinate groups. Evans-Pritchard (1940: 172, italics added) once wrote that, in order to "allow him to play the part he plays in feuds and quarrels," the Nuer chief needs only "ritual qualifications." Because the Nuer "have no law or government," or any significant social stratification, obeying their chief follows from the perception that "they are sacred persons" (ibid., 173). In his study of the origins of political empires, Eisenstadt (1963: 65) demonstrates much the same thing: With the "relative autonomy of the religious sphere and its 'disembeddedness' from the total community and from the other institutional spheres," he writes, everything about political legitimation has changed. The sacredness of the economic, political and ideological elites now has to be achieved, not assigned. As Eisenstadt puts it, these elites now "tried to maintain dominance" (ibid., italics added); it was not given automatically to them. In all societies studied here, the rulers attempted to portray themselves and the political systems they established as the bearers of special cultural symbols and missions. They tried to depict themselves as transmitting distinct civilizations … The rulers of these societies invariably tried to be perceived as the propagators and upholders of [their] traditions [and they] desire[d] to minimize any group's pretensions to having the right to judge and evaluate the rulers or to sanction their legitimation. (Eisenstadt 1963: 141, italics added.) 12 Cultural Pragmatics In terms of the model I am developing here, this suggests defusion among the elements of performance: (1) The separation of written foreground texts from background collective representations, (2) The estrangement of the means of symbolic production from the mass of social actors, and (3) The separation of the elites who carried out central symbolic actions from their mass audiences. The appearance of seamlessness that made symbolic action seem ritualistic gives way to the appearance of greater artifice and planning. Performative action becomes more achieved, less automatic. The Emergence of Theatrical from Ritual Performance To this point in our historical discussion, the reference to performance has been generated analytically, by the theoretical concerns presented in Part I. While it seems clear that the emergence of more segmented, complex, and stratified societies created the conditions, and even the necessity, for transforming rituals into performances, the latter, more contingent processes of symbolic communication were not understood by their creators or their audiences as contrived or theatrical in the contemporary sense. There was social and cultural differentiation, and the compulsion to project and not merely to assume the effects of symbolic action, but the elements of performance were still not defused enough to create self- consciousness about the artificiality of that process. Thus, when Henri Frankfort (1948:135-36) insisted on the "absence of drama" in ancient Egypt, he emphasized both the continuing fusion of sacred texts and actors and the relative inflexibility, or resistance to change, of ancient societies (cf., Kemp 1989: 1-16, Assmann 2003). "It is true," Frankfort concedes, "that within the Egyptian ritual the gods were sometimes represented by actors." For example, an embalming priest might be "wearing a jackal mask" to impersonate the god, Anubis. In fact, one of the best preserved Egyptian texts, the Mystery Play of the Succession, "was performed when a new king came to the throne." Nonetheless, Frankfort insists, such performances "do not represent a new art form." He calls them "simply the 'books' of rituals." They may be "dramatic," but "they certainly are not drama." In drama, the meaning and consequences of action unfold, and in this sense are caused by, the theatrical challenge of mis-en-scene: "In drama, language is integrated with action and a change is shown to be a consequence of that action." By contrast, in Egyptian rites, as in Durkheim's Aboriginal ones, the "purpose is to translate actuality in the unchanging form of myth… The gods appear and speak once more the words they spoke 'the first time'" (ibid., italics added). It is the actuality of myth that marks ritual. Only in the Greek city-states did drama in the contemporary sense emerge. The social organizational and cultural background for these developments was crucial, of course, even as 13 Cultural Pragmatics the emergence of dramatic performance fed back into social and cultural organization in turn. As compared to the fused and ascriptive hierarchies that ruled urban societies in the Asian empires, in Greece there emerged urban structures of a new, more republican kind. They were organized and ruled by elites, to be sure, but these elites were internally democratic. As Schachermeyr (1971[1953]: 201) emphasizes in his widely cited essay, the historically unprecedented "autonomy of the citizen body" in the Greek cities was accompanied by the equally distinctive "emancipation of intellectual life from Greek mythology." These new forms of organizational and culture differentiation fostered, according to Schachermeyr, a "revolutionary spirit" that engaged in "a constant fight against the monarchical, dictatorial, or oligarchic forms of government." This marked opening up of social and cultural space focused attention on the projective, performative dimension of social action, subjecting the ritualized performances of more traditional life to increased scrutiny and strain (e.g., Plato 1980). In Greek society, we can observe the transition from ritual to performance literally, not only metaphorically. We actually see the defusion of the elements of performance in concrete terms. They became more than analytically identifiable: their empirical separation became institutionalized in specialized forms of social structure and available to common sense reflection in cultural life. Greek theatre emerged from within religious rituals organized around Dionysus, the god of wine (Hartnoll 1968: 7-31). In the ritual's traditional form, a dithyramb, or unison hymn, was performed around the altar of Dionysus by a chorus of fifty men drawn from the entire ethnos. In terms of the present discussion, this meant continuing fusion: actors, collective representations, audiences, and society were united in a putatively homogeneous, still mythical way. In expressing his nostalgia for those earlier, pre-Socratic days, Nietzsche (1956 [1872]: 51-55, 78-79) put it this way: "In the dithyramb we see a community of unconscious actors all of whom see one another as enchanted … Audience and chorus were never fundamentally set over against each other … An audience of spectators, such as we know it, was unknown … Each spectator could quite literally imagine himself, in the fullness of seeing, as a chorist [sic]." As Greek society entered its period of intense and unprecedented social and cultural differentiation, the content of the dithyramb gradually widened to include tales of the demi- gods and fully secular heroes whom contemporary Greeks considered their ancestors. The background representational system, in other words, began to symbolize, to code and narrate human and not only sacred life. This interjection of the mundane into the sacred introduced symbolic dynamics directly into everyday life, and vice-versa. During communal festivals 14 Cultural Pragmatics dedicated to performing these new cultural texts, the good and bad deeds of secular heroes were recounted along with their feuds, marriages and adulteries, the wars they started, the ethnic and religious ties they betrayed, and the sufferings they brought on their parents and successors. Such social conflicts now provided sources of dramatic tension that religious performers could link to sacred conflicts and perform on ritual occasions. As the background representations became reconfigured in a more socially-oriented and dramaturgical way -- as everyday life became subject to such symbolic and reconstruction – the other elements of performance were affected as well. The most extraordinary development was that the social role of actor emerged. Thespius, for whom the very art of theatrical performance came eventually to be named, stepped out of the dithyramb chorus to become its leader. During ritual performance, he would assume the role of protagonist, either god or hero, and would carry on a dialogue with the chorus. Thespius formed a traveling troupe of professional actors. Collecting the means of symbolic production in a cart whose floor and tailboard could serve also as a stage, Thespius traveled from his birthplace, Icaria, to one communal festival after another, eventually landing in Athens where, in 492 BC, he won the acting prize just then established by the City Dionysus festival. During this same critical period of social development, systems of collective representations began for the first time not only to be written down, to become actual texts, but to concretely separate themselves from religious life. In fifth century Athens, theatre writing became a specialty, prestigious writing contests were held, and prizes awarded to such figures as Aeschylus and Sophocles. Such secular imagists soon became more renowned than temple priests. At first, playwrights chose and trained their own actors, but eventually officials of the Athenian festival assigned actors to playwrights by lot. In our terms, this can be seen as having the effect of emphasizing and highlighting the autonomy of the dramatic script vis-a-vis the intentions or charisma of its creators. As such an innovation suggests, the independent institution of performance criticism had by now also emerged, mediating and pluralizing social power in a new way. Rather than being absorbed by the performance, as on ritual occasions, interpretation now confronted actors and writers in the guise of judges, who represented aesthetic criteria separated from religious and even moral considerations. At the same time, judges also represented the city which sponsored the performance, and members of the polis attended performances as a detached audience of potentially critical observers. Huizinga (1950 [1938]: 145) emphasizes that, because the state did not organize theatrical competitions, "audience criticism was extremely pointed." He also suggests that the public audience shared "the tension of the 15 Cultural Pragmatics contest like a crowd at a football match," but it seems clear that they were not there simply to be entertained. The masked performers of Greek tragedies remained larger than life, and their texts talked and walked with compelling emotional and aesthetic force, linking performance to the most serious and morally weighted civic issues of the day. From Aeschylus to Sophocles to Euripedes, Greek tragic drama (Jaeger 1945: 232-381) addressed civic virtue and corruption, exploring whether there existed a natural moral order more powerful than the fatally flawed order of human social life. These questions were critical for sustaining the rule of law and an independent and democratic civil life. Nietzsche (1956 [1872]: 78-79) complained that, with the birth of tragedy, "the poet who writes dramatized narrative can no more become one with his images" and that he "transfigures the most horrible deeds before our eyes by the charm of illusion." In fact, however, the defusion of performative elements that instigated the emergence of theatre did not necessarily eliminate performative power. It just made this power more difficult to achieve. This increased difficulty might well have provided the social stimulus for Aristotle's aesthetic philosophy. In terms of the theoretical framework I am developing here, Aristotle's poetics can be understood in a new way. It aimed to crystallize, in abstract theoretical terms, the empirical differentiation among the elements of performance that pushed ritual to theatre. What ritual performers had once known in their guts, without having to be told, much less having to read, Aristotle now felt compelled to write down. His Poetics (1987) makes the natural artificial. It provides a kind of philosophical cookbook, instructions for meaning-making and effective performance for a society that had moved from fusion to consciousness artifice. Aristotle explained that performances consisted of plots and that effective plotting demanded narratives with a beginning, middle, and end. In his theory of catharsis, he explained, not teleologically but empirically, how dramas could affect an audience: tragedies would have to evoke sensations of "terror and pity" if emotional effect were to be achieved. This sketch of how theatre emerged from ritual is not teleological or evolutionary. What I have proposed, rather, is a universally shared form of social development, one that responds to growing complexity in social and cultural structure. Ritual moved toward theatre throughout the world's civilizations, in response to similar social and cultural developments -- the emergence of cities and states, of religious specialists, of intellectuals, and needs for political legitimation. "There were religious and ritual origins of the Jewish drama, the Chinese drama, all European Christian drama and probably the Indian drama," Boulton (1960: 194) informs us, and "in South American the conquering Spaniards brought Miracle Plays to Indians who already had a dramatic tradition that had development out of their primitive 16 Cultural Pragmatics cults." Social complexity waxes and wanes, and with it the development of theatre from ritual. Rome continued Greek theatricality, but with the decline of the empire and the rise of European feudalism the ritual forms of religious performance dominated once again. What happened in ancient Greece was reiterated later in medieval Europe, when secular drama developed from the Easter passion plays. In twelfth century Autun, a center of Burgundian religious activity, an astute observer named Honorius actually made an analogy between the effects of the Easter Mass and the efforts of the ancient tragedians (Hardison 1965: 40, Schechner 1976: 210). "It is known," Honorius wrote, "that those who recited tragedies in theatres presented the actions of opponents by gestures before the people." He went on to suggest that, "in the theatre of the Church before the Christian people," the struggle of Christ against his persecutors is presented by a similar set of "gestures" that "teaches to them the victory of his redemption." Honorius compared each movement of the Mass to an equivalent movement in tragic drama, and described what he believed were similar -- tightly bound and fused, in our terms -- audience effects. "When the sacrifice has been completed, peace and communion are given by the celebrant to the people," he wrote, and "then, by the Ite, missa est, they are ordered to return to their homes [and] they shout Deo gratias and return home rejoicing." It is no wonder that Boulton (1960: 195) equates such early religious pageants with acting. Suggesting that "the earliest acting was done by priests and their assistants," she notes that "one of the causes of the increasing secularization of the drama was that laymen had soon to be called in to fill in parts in the expanding 'cast'." By the early seventeenth century, after the rise of city states, absolutist regimes, the scientific revolution, and internal religious reforms, the institution of criticism was already fully formed: "Nearly every play had a prologue asking for the goodwill of the critics" (Boulton 1960: 195). Long before the rise of the novel and the newspaper, theatrical performances became arenas for articulating powerful social criticisms. Playwrights wove texts from the fabric of contemporary social life, but they employed their imagination to do so in a sharply accented, highly stimulating and provocative manner. The performance of these scripted representations were furnaces that forged metaphors which circulated back to society, marking a kind of figure eight movement (Schechner 1977, Turner 1982: 73-74) from society to theatre and back to society again. Secular criticism did not emerge only from rationalist philosophy or from the idealized arguments in urban cafes (Habermas 1989 [1962]), but from theatrical performances that projected moral valuation even while they entertained. While providing sophisticated amusement, Moliere pilloried not only the rising bourgeois but the Catholic 17 Cultural Pragmatics church, both of which returned his vituperation in kind. Shakespeare wrote such amusing plays that he was patronized as low brow by the more intellectual playwrights and critics of his day. Yet Shakespeare satirized every sort of conventional authority and dramatized the immorality of every sort of social power. Reviled by the Puritan divines, such Elizabethan drama was subject to strenuous efforts at censorship. The Restoration comedies that followed were no less caustic in their social ambitions or stinging in their effects. In his study of seventeenth century drama, Reiss observes that "the loss of illusion follows when the mis-en-scene is designed with no attempt at vraisemblance" (1971: 122), and he concludes that "the theater relied … on the unreality of the theatrical situation itself … to maintain a distance" (1971: 144). Taking advantage of performative defusion, these playwrights used stagecraft to emphasize artificiality rather than to make it invisible, producing a critical and ironic space between the audience and the mores of their day. The Emergence of Social Drama The historical story I am telling here addresses the puzzle at the core of this essay: Why do ritually organized societies give way, not to social orders regulated simply by instrumentally rational action but to those in which ritual-like processes remain vital in some central way? It is vital for this story to see that the emergence of theatre was more or less simultaneous with the emergence of the public sphere as a compelling social stage. For it was, in fact, roughly during the same period as theatrical drama emerged that social drama became a major form of social organization, and for reasons that are much the same. When society becomes more complex, culture more critical, and authority less ascriptive, social spaces open up that organizations must negotiate if they are to succeed in getting their way. Rather than responding to authoritative commands and prescriptions, social processes become more contingent, more subject to conflict and argumentation. Rationalist philosophers (Habermas 1989 [1962]) speak of the rise of the public sphere as a forum for deliberative and considered debate. A more sociological formulation would point to the rise of a public stage, a symbolic forum in which actors have increasing freedom to create and project performances of their reasons, dramas tailored to audiences whose voices have become more legitimate references in political and social conflicts. Responding to the same historical changes that de-naturalized ritual performance, collective action in the wider society comes increasingly to take on an overtly performative cast. In earlier, more archaic forms of complex societies, such as the imperial orders of Egypt or Yucatan, social hierarchies could simply issue commands, and ritualized ideological 18 Cultural Pragmatics performances would provide symbolic mystification. In more loosely knit forms of complex social organization, authority becomes more open to challenge, the distribution of ideal and material resources more subject to contention, and contests for social power more open-ended and contingent. Often, these dramatic contests unfold without any settled script. Through their success at prosecuting such dramas, individual and collective actors gain legitimacy as authoritative interpreters of social texts. It is a commonplace not only of philosophical but of political history (e.g., Bendix 1964) that during the early modern period the masses of powerless persons gradually became transformed into citizens. With the model of social performance more firmly in hand, it seems more accurate to say that non-elites became transformed from passive receptacles to more active, interpreting audiences. With the constitution of audience publics, even such strategic actors as organizations and class fractions were compelled to develop effective forms of expressive communication. In order to preserve their social power, and their ability to exercise social control, elites had to transform their interest conflicts into widely available performances that could project persuasive symbolic forms. As peripheries gradually became incorporated into centers, pretenders to social power strived to frame their conflicts as dramas. They portrayed themselves as protagonists in simplified narratives, projecting their positions, arguments, and actions as exemplifications of sacred religious and secular texts. In turn, they "cast" their opponents as narrative antagonists, as insincere and artificial actors who were only role playing to advance their interests. These are, of course, broad historical generalizations. My aim here is not to provide empirical explanations but to sketch out theoretical alternatives, to show how a performative dimension should be added to more traditional political and sociological perspectives. But while my ambition here is mainly theoretical, it can certainly be amplified with illustrations that are empirical in a straightforward way. What follows are examples of how social processes that are well known both to historical and lay students of this period can be reconstructed with the model of performance in mind. 1. When Thomas Becket opposed the effort of Henry the II to exercise political control over the English church, he felt compelled to create a grand social drama that personalized and amplified his plight (Turner 1974: 60-97). He employed as background representation the dramatic paradigm of Christ's martyrdom to legitimate his contemporary script of antagonism to the king. While Henry defeated Sir Thomas in instrumental political terms, the drama Becket enacted captured the English imagination and provided a new background text of moral strictures for centuries after. 2. In the Renaissance city states (Brucker 1969), conflicts between church and state were graphically played out in the great public squares, not only figuratively but often literally before the eyes of the increasingly enfranchised populo. Heteronomy of social power was neither merely doctrine nor institutional structure. It was also public performance. Savanorola began his mass popular movement to cleanse the Florentine Republic with a dramatic announcement in the Piazza della Signoria, where open meetings had already taken place. Savanorola's public hanging, and the burning of his corpse that followed, were staged in the same civil space. Observed by an overflowing audience of citizens 19 Cultural Pragmatics and semi-citizens, some horrified, others grimly satisfied (Brucker 1969: 271), the performance instigated by Savanorola's arrest, confession, and execution graphically drew the curtain on the reformer's spiritual renewal campaign. It is hardly coincidental that Machiavelli's advice to Italian princes, offered during this same period, concerned not only how to muster dispersed administrative power but instructions about how to display power of a more symbolic kind. He wished to instruct the prince about how to perform like one, so that he could appear, no matter what the actual circumstances, to exercise power in a ruthlessly efficient and supremely confident way. 3. In 1776, a small band of anti-British American colonialists boarded a merchant ship in the Boston harbor and threw tons of Indian tea into the sea. The instrumental effects of what immediately became represented in the popular imagination as "the Boston tea party" were negligible, but its expressive power was great (Labaree 1979: 217-255). The collective performance dramatized colonial opposition to the British crown, clarified a key issue in the antagonism, and mobilized fervent public support. Later, the inaugural military battle of the American Revolution, in Lexington, Massachusetts, was represented in terms of theatrical metaphor, as "the shot heard round the world." In contemporary memorializations of the event, social dramatic exigencies continued to exercise powerful sway. American and British soldiers were portrayed in the brightly colored uniforms of opposed performers. Paul Revere was said to have performed the prologue, riding through the streets and shouting "the Redcoats are coming, the Redcoats are coming," though he probably did not. The long lines of soldiers on both sides were often depicted as accompanied by fifes and drums. Bloody and often confusing battles of the War for Independence were retrospectively narrated as fateful and dramatic contests, their victors transformed into icons by stamps and etchings. 4. Such staging of radical collective action as social drama also deeply affected to the revolution in France. During its early days, sans coulottes women sought to enlist a promise of regular bread from King Louis. They staged the "momentous march of women to Versailles," an extravagantly theatrical pilgrimage that one leading feminist historian described as "the recasting of traditional female behavior within a republican mode" (Landes 1988: 109-111). As the revolution unfolded, heroes and villains switched places according to the agonistic logic of dramatic discourse (Furet 1981) and theatrical configuring (Hunt 1984), not only in response to political calculation. No matter how violent or bloodthirsty in reality, the victors and martyrs were painted, retrospectively, in classical Republican poses and togas, as in David's celebrated portrait of Marat Sade (Nochlin 1993). It was Victor Turner (1974, 1982) who introduced the concept of social drama into the vocabulary of social science more than thirty years ago. For a time, this idea promised to open macro-sociology to the symbolic dynamics of public life (e.g., Moore and Myerhoff 1975, 1977), but with a few noteworthy important exceptions (e.g., Wagner-Pacific 1986, Alexander 1988, Edles 1998) the concept has largely faded from view, even in the field of performance studies. Part of the reason has to do with the triumph of instrumental reason in rational-choice and critical theories of postmodern life. There were also, however, basic weaknesses in the original conceptualization itself, which the present discussion can illuminate. Turner simplified and moralized social performance in a manner that obscured the autonomy of the elements that composed it. Searching for a kind of natural history of social drama, on the one hand, and a gateway to ideological communitas on the other, Turner spoke (1982: 75) of the "full formal development" of social dramas, their "full phase structure." While acknowledging that social complexity created the conditions for social drama, he insisted that it "remains to the last simple and ineradicable," locating it in "the developmental cycle of all groups" (ibid., p. 78). He believed that the "values and ends" of performances were "distributed over a range of actors" and projected "into a system … of shared or consensual meaning" (ibid., p. 75). Social dramas can only take place, Turner insisted, "among those members of a given group … who 20 Cultural Pragmatics feel strongly about their membership [and] are impelled to enter into relationships with others which become fully 'meaningful', in the sense that the beliefs, values, norms, and symbolism 'carried' in the group's culture become … a major part of what s/he might regard as his/her identity" (Turner 1987: 46; for a similar emphasis, see Meyerhoff 1978: 32 and Schechner 1987). However, from the perspective on social dramas I am developing here, this is exactly what does not take place. The elements of social-dramatic performances are defused, not automatically hung together, which is precisely why the organizational form of social drama first emerged. Social drama is a successor to ritual, not its continuation in another form. We are now in a position to elaborate the propositions about performative success and failure that were set out in Part I. Part III Refusion and Authenticity: The Criteria for Performative Success and Failure The goal of secular performances, whether on stage or in society, remains the same as the ambition of sacred ritual. They stand or fall on their ability to produce psychological identification and cultural extension. The aim is to create, via skillful and affecting performance, the emotional connection of audience with actor and text and thereby to create the conditions for projecting cultural meaning from performance to audience. To the extent these two conditions have been achieved, one can say that the elements of performance have become fused. Nietzsche (1956 [1872]: 126, 125) elegized the "bringing to life [of] the plastic world of myth" as one of those "moments of paroxysm that lift man beyond the confines of space, time, and individuation." He was right to be mournful. As society becomes more complex, such moments of fusion become much more difficult to achieve. The elements of performance become separated and independently variable, and it becomes ever more challenging to bring texts into life. The challenge confronting individual and collective symbolic action in complex contemporary societies, whether on stage or in society at large, is to infuse meaning by re- fusing performance. Since Romanticism, this modern challenge has been articulated existentially and philosophically as the problem of authenticity (Taylor 1989). While the discourse about authenticity is parochial, in that it is specifically European, it provides a familiar nomenclature for communicating the sense of what performative success and failure mean. On the level of everyday life, authenticity is thematized by such questions as whether a person is "real," whether he or she is straightforward, truthful, and sincere. Action will be viewed as real if it appears sui generis, the product of a self-generating actor who is not pulled like a puppet by the strings of society. An authentic person seems to act without artifice, 21 Cultural Pragmatics without self-consciousness, without reference to some laboriously thought out plan or text, without concern for manipulating the context of her actions, and without worries about that action's audience or its effects. The attribution of authenticity, in other words, depends on an actor's ability to sew the disparate elements of performance back into a seamless and convincing whole. If authenticity marks success, then failure suggests that a performance seems insincere and faked: The actor seems out of role; she appears merely to be reading from an impersonal script; she is pushed and pulled by the forces of society; she is acting not from sincere motives but to manipulate the audience. Such an understanding allows us to move beyond the simplistic polarities of ritual versus rationality or, more broadly, culture versus practical action. We can say, instead, that refusion allows ritual-like behavior, a kind of temporary recovery of the ritual process. It allows contemporaries to experience ritual because it stitches seamlessly together the disconnected elements of cultural performance. In her performative approach to gender, Butler (1999: 179, italics added) insists that gender identity is merely "the stylized repetition of acts through time" and "not a seemingly seamless identity." Yet seamless is exactly what the successful performance of gender in everyday life makes it seem. "In what sense," Butler then asks, "is gender an act?" In the same sense, she answers, "as in other ritual social dramas." The action of gender requires a performance that is repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; and it is the mundane and ritualized form of their legitimation. (1990: 178) In psychological terms, it is this seamless refusion that Csikszentmihali (1975) described as "flow" (cf., Schechner 1976) in his innovative research on virtuoso performance in art, sport, and games. In the terms I am developing here, what Csikszentmihali discovered in these widely varying activities was the merging of text, context, and actor, a merging that resulted in the loss of self-consciousness and a lack of concern for, even awareness of, the scrutiny of observers outside the action itself. Because of "the merging of action and awareness," Csikszentmihali (1975: 38) wrote, "a person in flow has no dualistic perspective." The fusion of the elements of performance allows not only actors but audiences to experience flow, which means that they focus their attention on the performed text to the exclusion of any other possible interpretive reference: "The steps for experiencing flow … involve the … process of delimiting reality, controlling some aspect of it, and responding to the feedback with a concentration that excludes anything else as irrelevant" (1975: 53-54). Performances in complex societies seek to overcome fragmentation by creating flow and achieving authenticity. They try to recover a momentary experience of ritual, to eliminate or negate the effects of social and cultural de-fusion. Speaking epigrammatically, one might say that successful performances re-fuse history. They break down the barriers that history has 22 Cultural Pragmatics erected – the divisions between background culture and scripted text, between scripted text and actors, between audience and mis-en-scene. Successful performances overcome the deferral of meaning that Derrida (1991) recognized as difference. In a successful performance, the signifiers seem actually to become what they signify. Symbols and referents are one. Script, direction, actor, background culture, mis-en-scene, audience, means of symbolic production – all these separate elements of performance become indivisible and invisible. The mere action of performing accomplishes the performance's intended effect (cf., Austin 1957). The actor seems to be Hamlet, the man who takes the oath of office seems to be the President. While refusion is made possible only by the deposition of social power, the very success of a performance masks its existence. When performance is successful, social powers manifest themselves, not as external or hegemonic forces that facilitate or oppose the unfolding performance, but merely as sign-vehicles, as means of representation, as conveyors of the intended meaning. This is very much what Bourdieu (1990 [1968]: 211) had in mind when he spoke of the exercise of graceful artistic taste as culture "becoming natural." The connoisseur's poised display of aesthetic judgment might be thought of as a successful performance, in the sense that it thoroughly conceals the manner in which this gracefulness is "artificial and artificially acquired," the result of a lengthy socialization resting upon class privilege. "The virtuosi of the judgment of taste," Bourdieu writes, present their knowledge of art casually, as if it were natural. Their aim is to present "an experience of aesthetic grace" that appears "completely freed from the constraints of culture," a performance "little marked by the long, patient training of which it is the product." Attacking the hegemonic exercise of sexual rather than class power, Butler makes a similar argument. The successful performance of gender, she claims, makes invisible the patriarchal power behind it. The difference is that, by drawing upon the theories of Austin and Turner, Butler can explicitly employ the language of performance. Gender is … a construction that regularly conceals its genesis; the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions … The appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief. (Butler 1999: 179, original italics) When post-ritual drama emerged in ancient Greece, Aristotle (1987) explained that a play is "an imitation of action, not the action itself." When refusion occurs, this cautionary note goes unheeded. The performance achieves verisimilitude – the appearance of reality. It seems to be action, not it's imitation. This achievement of the appearance of reality via skillful performance and flow is what Barthes (1972: 15) describes in his celebrated essay on "true wrestling." He insists that the "public spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of 23 Cultural Pragmatics the contest, like the audience at a suburban cinema." The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the context is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees. Now that I have elaborated the criteria of performative failure and success, I will turn to a more detailed discussion of the elements and relations that sustain it. I will draw upon the insights of drama theory to decompose the basic elements of performance into their more complex component parts, and I will link these insights to the social dramas that compose the public sphere. To be able to move back and forth between theatrical and social drama enriches both sides of the argument; it also helps document my core empirical claim. Social action in complex societies so often is ritual-like because it remains performative. The social conditions that gave rise to theatre also gave rise to post-ritual forms of symbolic act. The Challenge of the Script: Re-fusing Background Representations with Contingent Performance Behind every actor's social and theatrical performance there lies the already established skein of collective representations that compose culture, the universe of basic narratives and codes and the cookbook of rhetorical configurations from which every performance draws. In a theatrical performance, the actor strives to realize "individual character," as Turner (1982: 94, italics added) puts it, but she can do so only by taking "partly for granted the culturally defined roles supposedly played by that character: father, businessman, friend, lover, fiancé, trade union leader, farmer, poet." For Turner, "these roles are made up of collective representations shared by actors and audience, who are usually members of the same culture," but we do not have to accept his consensual assumptions to get his point. The ability to understand the most elementary contours of a performance depends on an audience knowing already, without thinking about it, the categories within which actors behave. In a complex social order, this knowledge is always a matter of degree. In contrast with Turner, we do not presume that social performance is ritualistic; we wish to explain whether and how, and to what degree. It is precisely at this joint of contingency or possible friction between background representations and the categorical assumptions of actors and audience that scripts enter into the scene. The emergence of the script as an independent element reflects the relative freedom of performance from background representations. From within a broader universe of meanings, performers make conscious and unconscious choices about the paths they wish to take, the specific set of meanings they wish to project. These choices are the scripts, the action-oriented subset of background understandings. If script is meaning primed to performance, in theatrical drama this priming is usually, though not always, sketched out 24 Cultural Pragmatics beforehand. In social drama, by contrast, scripts more often are inferred by actors. In a meaning-searching process that stretches from the more intuitive to the more witting, actors and audiences reflect on performance in the process of its unfolding, gleaning a script upon which the performance "must have" been based. In such social-dramatic scripting, actors and the audiences actively engage in drawing the hermeneutical circle (Dilthey 1976). Performances become the foregrounded parts upon which wholes are constructed, the latter being understood as the scripts that allow the sense of an action to be ascertained. These scripts become, in turn, the parts of a future wholes. It would seem sensible to say that an authentic script is one that rings true to the background culture. Thus, as one critic of rock music suggests, "authenticity is often located in current music's relationship to an earlier, 'purer' moment in a mythic history of the music" (Auslander 1999: 71). Yet, while this seems sensible, it would be misleading, since it suggests the naturalistic fallacy. It is actually the illusory circularity of hermeneutic interpretation that creates the sense of authenticity, not the other way around. A good script seems to ring true to the background culture precisely because it is a good script. What distinguishes a script from background culture is not the fact of its symbolic relation to background culture, but the manner in it articulates the relationship between culture, situation, and audience. As another recent music critic (Margolick 2000: 56, italics added) argues, for example, Billy Holiday's recording of "Strange Fruit" – the now almost mythical, hypnotic ballad about black lynching -- did not succeed because lynching was "already a conspicuous theme in black fiction, theater, and art," but because "it was really the first time that anyone had so … poetically transmitted the message." The existence of the background theme is a given; what is contingent is the dramatic technique, which is designed to elicit an effective audience response. In our terms, this is a matter of fusing the script in two directions, with background culture, on the one side, and with audience, on the other. If the script creates such fusion, it seems truthful to background representations and real to the audience. The former allows cultural extension, the latter psychological identification. The craft of script writing addresses these possibilities. The writer aims to "achieve concentration" (Boulton 1960: 12-13) of background meaning. Effective scripts compress the background meanings of culture by changing proportion and by increasing intensity. They provide such condensation (cf., Freud 1950 [1900]) through dramatic techniques. (1) Cognitive Simplification. "In a play," Boulton (1960: 12-13) writes, "there are often repetitions even of quite simple facts, careful explanations, addressing of people by their names more frequently than in real conversation and various over-simplifications which to the 25 Cultural Pragmatics reader of a play in a study may seem almost infantile." The same sort of simplifying condensation affects the less consciously formed scripts of successful social dramas. As they strive to become protagonists in their chosen narrative, such social performers as politicians, activists, teachers, therapists, or ministers go over time and time again the basic story line they wish to project. They provide not complex but stereotyped accounts of their positive qualities as heroes or victims, and they melodramatically exaggerate (Brooks 1976) the malevolent motives of the actors they wish to identify as their antagonists, depicting them as evildoers or fools. Professional speechwriters whose aim is to plot social dramas are as sensitive to this technical exigency as screenwriters and playwrights plotting theatrical ones. In Peggy Noonan's manual On Speaking Well, the much-heralded speechwriter for Presidents Reagan and Bush emphasizes time and time again that simplification is the key to achieving the fusion between speaker, audience, and background culture (cf., Flesch 1946). "You should treat the members of the audience as if they're friends," Noonan (1998: 23) instructs, which means "that you're going to talk to them the way you talk to your friends, with the same candor and trust and respect." Noting the "often and unadorned quality to sections of great speeches, a directness and simplicity of expression," Noonan (ibid., p. 48) attributes this to the fact that "the speaker is so committed to making his point, to being understood and capturing the truth." Sentences "must be short and sayable," she warns, because "your listens [are] trying to absorb what you say" (ibid., p. 35). This two-way fusion provides the standard she employs to praise the 1988 speech of George Bush accepting the Republican party presidential nomination (ibid., pp. 28-29). On the one hand, the script allowed Bush to connect his own life to the background representations of American society. . Bush "was not only telling about his life in a way that was truthful and specific [but] was also connecting his life to history – the history of those who'd fought World War II and then come home to the cities, and married, and gone on to invent the suburbs of American, the Levittowns and Hempsteads and Midlands." On the other hand, Noonan's script allowed Bush to fuse the script also provided fusion of speaker with audience: "He was also connecting his life to yours, to everyone who's had a child and lived the life that children bring with them … You were part of the a saga." (2) Time space compression. Responding to the emergence of theatre from ritual, Aristotle (1987) theorized that every successful drama contains the temporal sequence of beginning, middle, and end. In early modern Europe, when ritual was secularized and de-fused once again, the demand for narrative coherence became a stricture that dramatists must stress "three unities" -- of action, place, and time (Boulton 1960: 13ff). Given the material and 26 Cultural Pragmatics behavioral constraints on performance, the classic dramatists argued, theatrical action must be clearly of one piece. If the background culture is to be clearly articulated and the audience to absorb it, then performance must take place in the confines of one dramatic scene, in one narrative place, and unfold in continuous time. Such social dramas as congressional hearings or televised investigations strive strenuously to compress time and space in the same way. With large visual charts, lead investigators display time lines for critical events, retrospective plottings whose aim is to suggest continuous action punctuated by clearly interlinked causes and effects. Daytime television is interrupted so that the representations of these investigations can themselves unfold in continuous and real, and thus forcefully, dramatic time. Ordinary parliamentary business is suspended so that such political-cultural performances, whether grandiose or grandiloquent, can achieve the unity of action, place, and time. (3) Moral Agonism. The fusion achieved by successful scripting does not suggest harmonious plots. To be effective, in fact, scripts must structure meaning in an agonistic way (Arendt 1958, Benhabib 1996). Agonism implies a dynamic movement that hinges on a conflict pitting good against evil (Bataille 1985), creating a wave-like dialectic that highlights the existential and metaphysical contrast between sacred and profane. "Performing the binaries" creates the basic codes and propels narratives to pass through them. The drama's protagonists are forcefully aligned with the sacred themes and figures of cultural myth, and through this embodiment become new icons, and create new texts, themselves. Signaling their antipathy to the profane, to the evil themes and figures that threaten to pollute and overwhelm the good, one group of actors casts doubt on the sincerity and verisimilitude of another. If a protagonist successfully performs the binaries, audiences will pronounce the performer to be an "honest man," the movement to be "truly democratic," an action to be the "very epitome of the Christian spirit." If the performance is energetically and skillfully implanted in moral binaries, in other words, psychological identification can be achieved and elements from the background culture can be dramatically extended. Agonistic scripting is most clearly exhibited in grandiloquent performance. Geertz (1973: 420-21) shows the Balinese cockfight as "a blood sacrifice offered … to the demons," in which "man and beast, good and evil, ego and id, the creative power of aroused masculinity and the destructive power of loosened animality fuse in a bloody drama." Barthes (1972 [1957]: 17) recounts how the wrestler's "treacheries, cruelties and acts of cowardice" are based in an "image of ignobility" portrayed by "an obese and sagging body" whose "asexual hideousness always inspires … a particularly repulsive quality." But performing the binaries is 27 Cultural Pragmatics also fundamental to the emergent scripts of everyday political life. In 1980, in the debate among Republican and Democratic candidates for Vice-President of the United States, the Republican contender from Indiana, Senator Dan Quayle, sought to gain credibility by citing the martyred former President, John F. Kennedy. Quayle's opponent, Texas Senator Lloyd Benton, responded with a remark that not merely scored major debating points but achieved folkloric status in the following years: "Senator, I had the honor of knowing Jack Kennedy, and you're no Jack Kennedy." Speaking directly to his political opponent, but implicitly to the television adjudicating the authenticity of the candidates, Senator Benton wished to separate his opponent's script from sacred background representations of the nation. To prove they were not aligned would block Senator Quayle from assuming an iconic role. As it turned out, of course, while Senator Quayle's debate performance failed, he was elected anyway. (4) Twisting and Turning. Explicating "the general artistic laws of plot development," Boulton (1960: 41ff) observes that "a play must have twists and turns to keep interest until the end." To keep the audience attentive and engaged, staged dramas "must develop from one crisis to another." After an initial clarification, in which "we learn who the chief characters are, what they are there for and what are the problems with which they start," there must be "some startling development giving rise to new problems." This first crisis will be followed by others, which "succeed one another as causes and effects." Turner (1974) found almost exactly the same plot structure at work in social drama. He conceptualized it as involving successive phase movements, from breach to crisis, redress, and re-integration or schism. The initial breech that triggers a drama "may be deliberately, even calculatedly, contrived by a person or party disposed to demonstrate or challenge entrenched authority." But a breech also "may emerge [simply] from a scene of heated feelings" (Turner 1982: 70), in which case the initiation of a social drama is imputed, or scripted, by the audience, even when it is not intended by the actors themselves. The naturalism underlying Turner's dramaturgical theory prevented him from seeing twisting and turning as a contingent effort to refuse background culture and audience with performative text. In her revision of Turner's scheme, Wagner-Pacifici (1986, 1994, 2000) has demonstrated just how difficult it is for even the most powerful social actors to plot the kind of dramatic sequencing that an effective script demands. Her study of the 1978 kidnapping and assassination of the Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro (Wagner-Pacifici 1986) can be read, in this sense, as a case study of failed performance. Despite Moro's status as the most influential Italian political figure of his day, the popular Prime Minister could not convince other influential collective actors to interpret his kidnapping in terms of his own projected script. He 28 Cultural Pragmatics wished to portray himself as still a hero, as the risk-taking and powerful protagonist in a performance that would continue to demonstrate the need for an historic "opening to the Left" and, thus, the necessity to negotiate with his terrorist kidnappers to save his life. Against this projected script, other social interpreters, who turned out to be more influential, insisted that Moro's kidnapping illuminated the script, not of romantic heroism but of a tragic martyrdom, which pointed to a narrative, not of reconciliation, but of revenge against the terrorist Left. Wagner-Pacifici herself attributes the failure of Moro's performance primarily to unequal social power and the control that anti-Moro forces exercised over the means of symbolic production. The more multidimensional model I am elaborating here would suggest that other causes of the failed performance were critically important as well. The Challenge of Mis-en-Scene: Refusing Script, Action, and Performative Space Even after a script has been constructed that allows background culture to walk and talk, the "action" of the performance must begin, in real time and at a particular place. This can be conceptualized as the challenge of instantiating a scripted text, in theatrical terms as mis-en-scene, which translates literally as "putting into the scene." Defining mis-en-scene as the "confrontation of text and performance," Pavis (1988: 87) speaks of it as "bringing together or confrontation, in a given space and time, of different signifying systems, for an audience." This potential confrontation has developed because of the segmentation that social complexity rends among the elements of performance. It is a challenge to put them back together in a particular scene. Rouse (1992: 146, italics added) sees the "relationship between dramatic text and theatrical performance" as "a central element in the Occidental theatre." Acknowledging that "most productions here continue to be productions 'of' a preexisting play text," he insists that "exactly what the word of means in terms of [actual] practices is, however, far from clear," and he suggests that "the 'of' of theatrical activity is subject to a fair degree of oscillation." In our terms, it seems clear that the specialized dramatic role of director has emerged to control this potential oscillation. In Western societies, theatrical performances had long been financially sponsored by producers and organized in their dramatic specifics by playwrights and actors. As society became more complex, and the elements of performance more differentiated, the coordinating tasks became demanding. By the late nineteenth-century, according to Chinoy (1963: 3 in McConachie 1992: 176), there was "so pressing a need" that the new role of director "quickly pre-empted the hegemony that had rested for centuries with playwrights and actors." Chinoy believes that "the appearance of the director ushered in a new theatrical epoch," such that "his experiments, his failures, and his triumphs set and sustained 29 Cultural Pragmatics the stage" (ibid.). When Boulton (1960: 182-3) warns that "over-directed scripts leave the producer no discretion," she means to suggest that, because writers cannot know the particular challenges of mis-en-scene, they should not write specific stage directions into their script. Writers must leave directors "plenty of scope for inventions." Given the contingency of performance, those who stage it will need a large space within which to exercise their theatrical imagination. They will need to coach actors on the right tone of voice, to choreograph the space and timing among actors, to design costumes, construct props, and arrange lights. When Barthes (1972 [1957]: 15) argues that "what makes the circus or the arena what they are is not the sky [but] the drenching and vertical quality of the flood of light," he points to such directorial effect. If the script demands grandiloquence, Barthes (ibid.,) observes, it must contrast darkness with light, for "a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve." For social dramas, in which scripts are attributed in a more contemporaneous and often retrospective way, mis-en-scene is more likely initiated within the act of performance itself. This coordination is triggered by the witting or unwitting sensibilities of collective actors, by the observing ego of the individual – in Mead's terms, her "I" as compared with her "me" -- or by suggestions from an actor's agents, advisors, advance men, or event planners. This task of instantiating scripts and representations in an actual scene underscores, once again, the relative autonomy of symbolic action from its so-called social base. The underlying strains or interest conflicts in a social situation do not simply express themselves. Social problems must not only be symbolically plotted, or framed (Snow et al. 1986, Eyerman and Jamison 1990), but performed on the scene. In analyzing "how social movements move," Eyerman (2003) highlights "the physical, geographical aspects of staging and managing collective actions." In theorizing the stand-off, Wagner-Pacifici (2000: 192-93) distinguishes between "ur-texts" and "texts-in-action," explaining how the often deadly stand-offs between armed legal authorities and their quarries are triggered by "rules of engagement" (ibid., 157) that establish "set points" (ibid., 47) in a physical scene, e.g. barricades. Temporal deadlines are also established, for example, so that the "rhythm of siege" becomes structured by the "clock ticking" (ibid., 64). Stand-offs are ended by violent assault only when dramatic violations occur vis-à-vis these specific spatial and temporal markers in a particular scene. The Challenge of the Material Base: Social Power and the Means of Symbolic Production While mis-en-scene has its own independent requirements, it remains interdependent with the other performative elements. One thing on which its success clearly depends is access to the appropriate means of symbolic production. Goffman's early admonishment (1956: 22- 30 Cultural Pragmatics 23) has not been sufficiently taken to heart: "We have given insufficient attention to the assemblages of sign-equipment which large numbers of performers can call their own." Of course, in the more typically fused performances of small-scale societies, access to such means was not usually problematic. Yet even for such naturalistic and fused performances, the varied elements of symbolic production did not appear from nowhere. In his study of the Tsembaga, for example, Schechner found that peace could be established among the warring tribes when they performed the konj kaiko ritual. While the ritual centered on an extended feast of wild pig, it took "years to allow the raising of sufficient pigs to stage a konj kaiko" Schechner (1976: 198). War and peace depended on a ritual process that was "tied to the fortunes of the pig population." One can easily imagine just how much more difficult and consequential access to the means of symbolic production becomes in large-scale complex societies. Most basic of all is the acquisition of a venue. Without a theatre or simply some makeshift stage, there can be no performance, much less an audience. Likewise, without some functional equivalent of the venerable soapbox, there can be no social drama. The American presidency is called "the bully pulpit" because the office provides its occupant with extraordinary access to the means for projecting dramatic messages to citizens of the United States. Once a performative space is attained, moreover, it must be materially shaped. Aston and Savona (1991: 114) remark that "the shape of a playing space can be altered by means of set construction." There is a material base for every symbolic production. The latter are not simply shaky superstructures in the vulgar Marxist sense, but neither can cultural performances stand up all by themselves. At the same time, even the "base" of performance must be given symbolic shape. Every theatre is marked by "the style in which it is designed and built," Aston and Savona (ibid., p. 112) write, and social dramas are equally affected by the design of their place. During the Clinton impeachment, it was widely noted that the hearings were being held in the Old Senate Office building, an ornate setting whose symbolic gravitas had been reinforced by the civil theatrics of Watergate decades before. The design of theatrical space depends on technological means. In the pre-industrial age, according to Aston and Savona, the "confines" of the "large and inflexible venue" (ibid., 114) of open-air theatres placed dramatic limits on the intimacy that performers could communicate, whatever the director's theatrical powers or the artistry of the script. Later, the introduction of lighting "established the convention of the darkened auditorium" and "limited the spectator's spatial awareness to the stage area." Once attention is focused in this manner, as Barthes suggested in his observations on spectacle (see above), a "space can be created 31 Cultural Pragmatics within a space" (Aston and Savona 1991: 114), and greater communicative intimacy is possible. Equally significant dramatic effects have followed from other technical innovations in the means of symbolic production. The small size of the television as compared with the movie screen limited the use of long distance and ensemble shots, demanded more close-up camera work, and required more editing cuts to create a scene. Greater possibilities for dramatic intimacy and agonistic dialogue entered into televised performance as a result. The availability of amplification pushed the symbolic content of performance in the opposite way. With the new technological means for electronically recording and projecting the human voice, recordings proliferated and large-scale commercial musicals became electronically amplified through microphones. Such developments changed the criteria of authenticity. Soon, not only operas and concerts but even most nonmusical plays needed to be amplified as well, "because the results sound more 'natural' to an audience whose ears have been conditioned by stereo television, high fidelity LP's, and compact disks" (Copeland 1990 in Auslander 1999: 34). It is here that social power enters into performance in the most subtle ways. Certainly, censorship and intimidation have always been employed to prevent the production and distribution of symbolic communication, and thus to prevent or control political dissent. What is more interesting theoretically and empirically, however, and perhaps more normatively relevant in complex semi-democratic and even democratic societies, is the manner in which social power affects performance by mediating access to the means of symbolic production. The use of powerful arc lights, for example, was essential to Leni Riefenstahl's mis-en-scene in her infamous propaganda film, Triumph of the Will, which reconstructed Adolph Hitler's triumphant evening arrival at the Nuremberg rally in 1933. Whether Riefenstahl had the opportunity to put her imagination into place, however, was determined by the distribution of German political and economic power. Because Hitler's party had triumphed at the level of the state, Nazis controlled the means of symbolic production. As an artist, Reifenstahl was herself infatuated by the Nazi cause, and she wrote a script that cast Hitler in a heroic light. But the tools for making her drama were controlled by others. It was Goebbels who could hire the brilliant young filmmaker and provide her with the means for staging her widely influential work. In most social-dramatic performances, the effect of social power is even less direct. To continue with our lachrymose example, when the Nazi concentration camps remained under control of the Third Reich, their genocidal purpose could not be dramatized. Performative access to the camps – the critical "props" for any story -- was denied to all but the most 32 Cultural Pragmatics sympathetic, pro-Nazi journalists, still photographers, and producers of newsreels and films. On the few occasions when independent and potentially critical observers were brought to the camps, moreover, they were presented with falsified displays and props which presented the treatment of Jewish prisoners in a fundamentally misleading way. This control over the means of symbolic production shifted through force of arms (Alexander 2002). Only after allied troops liberated the Western camps did it become possible to produce the horrifying newsreels of dead and emaciated Jewish prisoners and to distribute them worldwide (Zelizer 1998). It would be hard to think of a better example of performance having a material base, and of this base depending on power in turn. As this last example suggests, in complex societies social power not only provides the means of symbolic production but of symbolic distribution as well. The more dependent a dramatic form is on technology, the more these two performative phases become temporally distinct. It is one thing to perform a drama, and even to film it, and quite another to make it available to audiences throughout the land. In the movie industry, distribution deals develop only after films are made, for those who represent theatre syndicates insist on first examining the performances under which they intend to draw their bottom line. Similarly, for social dramas video technology has separated distribution of events from live action transmission. Media events (Boorstin 1961, Dayan and Katz 1992) are social performances oriented to writers and photographers rather than to direct audiences, such that the former mediate distribution. Whether these "reporters" are employed by institutions whose interests are separated from, and possibly even opposed to, those of the performers is a critical issue for whether or not social power affects performance in a democratic way. Because control over media is so vital for connecting performances with audience publics, it is hardly surprising that newspapers for so long remained financially and organizationally fused with particular ideological, economic, and political powers (Schudson 1981). This fusion allowed those who held hegemonic structural positions to decide which of their performances should be distributed and how they would be framed. As social power has become more pluralized, the means of recording and distributing social dramas have been more widely distributed, media interpretation has become more subject to disputation, and performative success more contingent. Even in the "iron cage" of nineteenth century capitalism, British parliamentary investigations into factory conditions were able to project their often highly critical performances on the public stage. Their hearings were widely reported in the press (Osborne 1970: 88-90) and their findings were distributed in 33 Cultural Pragmatics highly influential "white papers" throughout the class system (Smelser 1959: 291-92). Even after Bismarck outlawed the socialist party in late nineteenth century Germany, powerful performances by militant labor leaders and working class movements challenged him in "rhetorical duels" that were recorded and distributed by radical and conservative newspapers alike (Roth 1963: 119-135). In mid-twentieth century America, the civil rights movement would have failed if Southern white media had monopolized coverage of African-American protest activities. It was critical that reporters from independent Northern-owned media were empowered to record and distribute sympathetic interpretations, which allowed psychological identification and cultural extension with the Black movement's cause (Halberstam 1999). Differentiating the elements of performance is not just a social and cultural process but a political one. It has significant repercussions for the pluralization of power and the democratization of society. As the elements of performance become separated and relatively autonomous, there emerge new sources of professional authority. Each of the defused elements of performance eventually becomes subject to institutions of independent criticism, which judge it in relation to criteria that not only establish aesthetic form but the legitimacy of the exercise of this particular kind of performative power. Such judgments issue from "critics," whether they are specialized journalists employed by the media of popular or high culture or intellectuals who work in academic milieux. These critical judgments do not enter performance only from the outside. They are also generated from within. Around each of the defused elements of drama there have developed specialized performative communities which maintain and deploy their own critical, sometimes quite unforgiving standards of judgment. The distance from the first drama prizes awarded by the City Dionysius festival in ancient Greece to the Academy Awards in postmodern Hollywood may be great in geographic, historical, and aesthetic terms, but the socio-logic has remained the same. The aim is to employ autonomous criteria in the evaluation of social performance. In complex societies, continuous critical evaluations are generated from within every performative medium and emergent genre – whether theatre or feature film, documentary or cartoon, country and western song or rap, classical recording, sit-com, soap opera, news story, news photo, feature, or nightly newscast. Such self-policing devices aim to "improve" the possibilities for projecting performance in effective ways. These judgments and awards are determined by peer evaluations. Despite the power of the studios and megamedia corporations, it is the actors, cinematographers, editors, directors, writers, reporters, and costume designers themselves who create the aesthetic standards and prestige hierarchies in their performative communities. 34 Cultural Pragmatics In less formal ways, critical interpretive judgments circulate freely and endlessly throughout dramatic life, in both its theatrical and social forms. The public relations industry, new in the twentieth century, tries to condition and structure the interpretations such critics apply. Their judgments are also the concern of agents and handlers, of experts in focus groups, of privately hired pollsters. The more complex and pluralized the society, the tighter this circle of criticism and self-evaluation is wound. The Challenge of Being Natural: Refusing Actor and Role Even if the means of symbolic production are sufficient, the power over them concentrated in sympathetic hands, the script powerfully written, and the mis-en-scene skillfully set in place, there is no guarantee that the performance will succeed. There remains the extraordinary challenge of acting it out. Actors must perform their roles effectively, and they often are not up to the task. Thus, while Veltrusky (1964:84) acknowledges that signifying power resides in "various objects, from parts of the costume to the set," he insists that "the important thing is … that the actor centers their meanings upon himself." In smaller scale societies, ritual performers act out roles they have played in actual social life or sacred myths with which they are intimately familiar. In post-ritual societies, the situation is much more complex. In theatrical performances, actors are professionals who have no off-screen relation to their scripted role. In a neglected essay, Simmel (1968: 92) put the problem very clearly: "The role of the actor, as it is expressed in written drama, is not a total person … not a man, but a complex of things which can be said about a person through literary devices." In social dramas, actors perform a role they often do occupy, but their continuing ability to do so is always in doubt; their legitimacy is subject to continuous scrutiny; and their feeling for the role itself is often marked by unfamiliarity and even estrangement. As the actor in theatrical drama became increasingly separated from the role, the challenge of refusing actor and text, on the one side, and actor with audience, on the other, became a topic of increasing intellectual attention. When social texts were more authoritative, less contested, and less separated from familiar social roles, professional actors could achieve refusion in a more indexical than iconographic way. In what later came to be seen as histrionic, "picture acting," performers would point to a text rather than seeking actually to embody it. This approach exhibited the duality of actor and role rather than trying to make it seamless (Aston and Savona 1991: 118). By the late eighteenth century, when sacred and traditional social structures were being reconstructed by secular revolutions (Brooks 1976), this "anti- emotionalist" method came under criticism. In The Paradox of Acting, Diderot (1957 [1830]) 35 Cultural Pragmatics attacked acting that communicated feelings by gesture rather than embodiment. But it was not until the so-called new drama of the late nineteenth century – when social and culture defusion were considerably more elaborate -- that the intensely psychological and introspective theatre initiated by Strindberg and Ibsen demanded an acting method that placed a premium on subjective embodiment, or facsimile. Just as Aristotle wrote the Poetics as a cookbook for script-writing once myth had lost its sway, the Russian inventor of modern dramatic technique, Constantin Stanislavski, invented "the system" to teach professional actors how to make their artificial performances seem natural and unassuming. He begins by emphasizing the isolation of the actor from scripted text. "What do you think?" he admonishes the novice actor (Stanislavski 1989 [1934]: 55). Does the dramatist supply everything that the actors need to know about the play? Can you, [even] in a hundred pages, give a full account of the life of the dramatis personae? For example, does the author give sufficient details of what has happened before the play begins? Does he let you know what will happen when it is ended, or what goes on behind the scenes? (ibid.) It is this very separation that gives such importance and potential integrity to the actor's refusing task. We bring to life what is hidden under the words; we put our thoughts into the author's lines, and we establish our own relationships to other characters in the play, and the conditions of their lives; we filter through ourselves all the materials that we receive from the author and the director; we work over them, supplementing them out of our own imagination. (ibid., p. 52, italics added) The art of acting aims at eliminating the appearance of autonomy. The ambition is to make it seem that the actor has not exercised his imagination, that he has no self except the one that is scripted on stage. "Let me see what you would do," Stanislavski advises the neophyte, "if my supposed facts were true" (ibid., p. 46). He suggests that the actor should adopt an "as if" attitude, pretending that the scripted situation is the actor's in real life. In this way, "the feelings aroused" in the actor "will express themselves in the acts of this imaginary person" -- as if he had actually "been placed in the circumstances made by the play" (ibid., p. 49; cf., Goffman 1956: 48). If the actor believes he is actually in the circumstances that the script describes, he will act in a natural way. As a person, he will assume the inner motivation of the scripted character. Only by possessing this subjectivity can his artfully contrived performance seem honest and real (Auslander 1997: 29). "Such an artist is not speaking in the person of an imaginary Hamlet," Stanislavski concludes, "but he speaks in his own right as one placed in the circumstances created by the play" (ibid., p. 248). All action in the theatre must have an inner justification, be logical, coherent and real … With this special quality of if … everything is clear, honest and above board … The secret of the effect of if lies in the fact that it does not … make the artist do anything. On the contrary, it reassures him through its honesty and encourages him to have confidence in a supposed situation … It arouses an inner and real activity, and does this by natural means. (ibid., 46-47, italics altered) If social and cultural defusion has shifted the focus of theatrical acting, we should not 36 Cultural Pragmatics be surprised that the acting requirements for effective social drama have changed in a parallel way. When social and political roles were ascribed, whether through inheritance or through social sponsorship, individuals could be clumsy in their portrayal of their public roles, for they would continue to possess them even if their performances failed. With increasing social differentiation, those who assume social roles, whether ascriptive or achieved, can continue to inhabit them only if they learn to enact them in an apparently natural manner (e.g., Von Hoffman 1978, Bumiller 2003). This is all the more true in social dramas that instantiate meanings without the benefit of a script, and sometimes without any prior clarification of an actor's roles. It is not at all uncommon, for example, for the putative actors in an emergent political drama to refuse to play their parts. During the televised Watergate hearings in the summer of 1973, even Republican Senators who privately supported President Nixon felt compelled to join their fellow Democrats in their expressions of outrage and indignation at the Republican President's behavior (McCarthy 1974). By contrast, during the televised Clinton impeachment hearings in 1998, the Democrats on the House panel distanced themselves from the script, refusing to participate seriously in what Republicans leaders tried to perform as a tragic public event (Mast 2003). Their refusal destroyed the verisimilitude of the social drama. Actors on both sides of the aisle seemed "political," offering what appeared to be contrived and artificial performances. Despite the tried and true authenticity of the political script, the political drama failed because the actors could not, or would not, fuse with their parts. The causal import of acting to performative success is so large that even bad plays can be a great theatrical success. "We know where a bad play has achieved world fame," Stanislavski writes (ibid., 52), "because of having been re-created by a great actor." Simmel (1968: 93) has also emphasized that the "impression of falsehood is generated only by a poor actor." If an actor experiences flow, then he has succeeded in fusing with the scripted role. The idea, according to Stanislavski, is "to have the actor completely carried away by the play" so that "it all moves of its own accord, subconsciously and intuitively" (ibid., p. 13). Only when flow is achieved can the actor fuse with audience as well. To seem real to an audience, "it is necessary that the spectators feel his inner relationship to what he is saying" (ibid., p. 249, original italics; cf., Roach 1993: 16-17, 218). Even the best acting, however, cannot ensure that the audience gets it right. The Challenge of Reception: Refusing Audience with Performative Text One-sided culturalist and pragmatic theories eliminate the contingent relationship between performative projection and audience reception. Viewing performance purely in 37 Cultural Pragmatics textual terms, semioticians tie audience interpretation directly to the dramatic intentions of the actors and the culture structure that performance implies. The role of the spectator, according to Pavis (1988: 87), is to simply decipher the mis-en-scene, to "receive and interpret … the system elaborated by those responsible for the production." If such a theoretical position makes psychological identification and cultural extension seem easy to achieve, then the purely pragmatic position makes it seem virtually impossible. The founder of audience response theory, Wolfgang Iser (1980: 109-110), speaks about "the fundamental asymmetry between text and reader," asserting that the "lack of common situation and a common frame of reference" is so large as to create an "indeterminate, constitutive blank." Speaking in a more historical vein, his French counterpart, Jacques Leenhardt (1980: 207-08), observes that, "with the formation of a new reading public," the "organic relationship to the producer has nearly disappeared." The "codes of production of literary works" have now become utterly "alien" to the "spontaneous codes of readers." It is a mark of social and cultural complexity that the audience has become differentiated from the act of performance. Reception is dictated neither by background nor foreground representations, nor by social power, effective direction, or thespian skill. Yet neither is reception necessarily segmented from these latter in turn. Every dramatic effort faces uncertainty, but refusion is possible. Boulton (1960: 196-7) articulates this contingent possibility when she describes the audience as the third side of "the great triangle of responses which is drama." Will the audience remain apart from the performative experience, or will it be "cooperative," proving itself capable of "submitting itself to a new experience"? Boulton points here to the psychological identification of audience with enacted text. By "accepting a sample of life and tasting it," she writes, an audience is "sharing in the lives of imaginary people not altogether unlike known live persons." It is revealing that the psychoanalyst who created psychodrama, J.L. Moreno, focuses also on the contingent relation between audience and stage, and the manner in which this gap is bridged by identification. "The more the spectator is able to accept the emotions, the role, and the developments on the stage as corresponding to his own private feelings, private roles, and private developments," Mareno (1975: 48) observes, "the more thoroughly will his attentions and his fantasy be carried away by the performance." The paradox that defines the patient-performance is "that he is identifying himself with something with which he is not identical." Overcoming this paradox is the key to therapeutic success: "The degree to which the spectator can enter into the life upon the stage, adjusting his own feelings to what is portrayed there, is the measure of the catharsis he is able to obtain on this 38 Cultural Pragmatics occasion." The audience-performance split has also preoccupied the theatrical avant-guard. Some radical dramatists (e.g., Brecht 1964), just like the Birmingham school of cultural studies (e.g., Hall and Jefferson 1976), have sought to accentuate defusion in order to block the cultural extension of bourgeois ideology. By far the greater tendency among radical dramatists, however, is to reject the defusion that makes theatrical performance artificial and makes audience participation vicarious and attenuated. They have tried to create flow experiences, to transform mere theatre into rituals where script, actors, and audience become one. In his 1923 Geneva address, Jacques Copeau (1955 [1923] in Auslander 1997: 16) observed that "there are nights when the house is full, yet there is no audience before us." The true audience is marked by fusion, when its members "gather [and] wait together in a common urgency, and their tears or laughter incorporate them almost physically into the drama or comedy that we perform." Exactly the same language of refusion is deployed fifty years later by Peter Brook when he describes the aim of his "Holy Theatre." Only when the process of "representation," Brook (1969: 127) writes, "no longer separates actor and audience, show and public" can it "envelop them" them in such a manner that "what is present for one is present for the other." On a "good night," he comments, the audience "assists" in the performance rather than maintaining "its watching role." Postmodern theatrical analysts themselves are acutely aware of the fact that "theatre is attended by the 'non-innocent' spectator whose world view, cultural understanding or placement, class and gender condition and shape her/his response" (Aston and Savona 1991: 120). Film and television producers and distributors try to protect their investments by targeting specific audience demographics and by staging test-runs that can trigger textual readjustments in response. Politicians may be vocationally rather than aesthetically and financially committed to generating an audience, but they display an equally fervent interest in defusing the audience-performance gap. They "keep their ear to the ground" and try to gauge "feedback" from the grassroots in front of whom their social performances are staged. That this testing of the demographics and responses of potential audiences is now conducted by candidate sponsored scientific polling (Mayhew 1997) does not change the performative principle involved. The goal remains to achieve performative success by overcoming social- dramatic defusion. If large-scale societies were homogeneous, this segmentation of performance from an audience would be a matter of layering. Performances are projected first to an immediate audience of lay and professional interpreters and only subsequently to the impersonal audience 39 Cultural Pragmatics that constitutes the vast beyond (cf., Lang and Lang 1968: 36-77). In real life, however, the problem is much more difficult than this. Audiences are not only separated from immediate contact with performers but internally divided among themselves. Even after the intensely observed ritual ceremonies that televised the political consensus that developed around Richard Nixon's impeachment, poll data revealed that some twenty percent of Americans did not agree that the President was guilty even of a legal violation, much less of moral turpitude (Lang and Lang 1983). In opposition to the vast majority of Americans, this highly conservative group interpreted the impeachment as political vengeance by Nixon's enemies (O'Keefe and Mendelsohn 1974). Copeau rightly linked the fusion of audience and performance to the internal unity of the audience itself. What I describe as an audience is a gathering in the same place of those brought together by the same need, the same desire, the same aspirations … for experiencing together human emotions – the ravishment of laughter and that of poetry – by means of a spectacle more fully realized than that of life itself. (1955 [1923] in Auslander 1997: 16). In complex societies, the main structural barrier to re-fusing social drama and audience is the fragmentation of the citizenry. Social segmentation creates not only different interests but orthogonal subcultures, "multiple public spheres" (Eley 1992, Fraser 1992) that produce distinctive pathways for cultural extension and distinctive objects of psychological identification. More and less divided by ideology, race, ethnicity, class, religion, and region, citizen-audiences can respond to social performances in diametrically opposed ways (Liebes and Katz 1990). For this reason, group affirming social dramas are much easier to carry off than universalizing ones. This particularistic strategy informs recent identity politics, but it has always been the default position of social drama in complex societies. When these structured divisions are exacerbated by political and cultural polarization, the seamless refusion of audience and performance becomes more difficult still (Hunt 1997). Whether or not some shared culture framework "really exists" is not, however, simply a reflection of social structure and demographics. It is also a matter of interpretation. Audience interpretation is a process, not an automatic result. For example, Bauman (1989) has suggested that a consciousness of doubleness is inherent in the interpretation of performance, that every performance is compared to an idealized or "remembered" model available from earlier experience. In other words, audience interpretation does not respond to the quality of the performative elements per se. Rather, audiences of social and theatrical dramas judge quality comparatively. Scripts, whether written or attributed, are compared to the great and convincing plots of earlier times. Did the fervor over President Reagan's trading of arms for hostages constitute "another Watergate," or did it pale by comparison (Schudson 1992b)? In 40 Cultural Pragmatics his role as chairman of the House Impeachment Committee, how did Representative Henry Hyde's efforts stack up against Sam Ervin's bravura performance as chairman of the Senate Select Committee during the Watergate hearings? How do the participants in today's presidential debates compare to the towering model of the Lincoln-Douglas debates that, according to American mythology (Schudson 1992a), made civil-dramatic history more than a century ago? When audiences interpret the meaning and importance of social dramas, it is such comparative questions that they keep firmly in mind. If their answers are negative, even those who are within easy demographic reach will be less likely to invest their affect in the performance. For those separated further, neither psychological identification nor cultural extension will likely occur. Fragmented performance interpretations feed back into the construction of subcultures, providing memories that segment perceptions of later performances in turn (Jacobs 2000). If there are some shared memories, by contrast, audiences will experience social drama in a deeper and broadened way. As audiences become more involved, performance can draw them out of demographic and subcultural niches into a more widely shared and possibly more universalistic liminal space. Cultural Pragmatics: Between Ritual and Rationality In this essay, I have tried to solve a puzzle. Why are even the most rationalized societies still enchanted and mystified in various ways? The old fashioned rituals that marked simpler organizational forms have largely disappeared, but ritual-like processes most decidedly remain. Individuals and collectivities strategically direct their actions and mobilize all their available resources, but their instrumental power usually depends on success of a cultural kind. This does not mean that the explanation of their success should be purely symbolic. It means that pragmatic and symbolic dimensions are intertwined (cf., Morris 1938, Emirbayer and Mische 1998). It is such a cultural-pragmatic perspective that has informed this work. I have developed a macro model of social performance. In Part I, I proposed that performances are composed of a small number of elements which have remained constant throughout the history of social life, although their relationship to one another has markedly changed. In Part II, I demonstrated that, as social structure and culture have become more complex and segmented, so the elements that compose performance have become differentiated and defused. In Part III, I showed that whether social and theatrical performances succeed or fail depends on whether actors can refuse the elements of which they are made. In simpler societies, Durkheim believed (1995 [1912]), rituals are made at one time 41 Cultural Pragmatics and place, after which the participants scatter to engage in activities of a more instrumental and individualistic kind. In complex societies, things are rarely so cut and dried. All actions are symbolic to some degree. In social science, it is best to convert either/or questions into matters of variation. The aim is to discover the invariant structures that vary, and to suggest the forces that propel this change over time. In complex societies, the relative autonomy and concrete interdependence (Kane 1991) of performative elements ensures variation both within and between groups. Even for members of relatively homogeneous communities, performances will range from those that seem utterly authentic to those that seem utterly false, with "somewhat convincing," "plausible," and "unlikely but not impossible" coming somewhere in between. For performances that project across groups the range is the same but attributions of authenticity less frequently made. Wariness about authenticity is intrinsic to the pluralism and openness of modern and postmodern social life. Nietzsche (1956 [1872]: 136) claimed that "every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural and healthy creativity," but the reverse is certainly also the case. It is healthy to be skeptical of myths, to see through the efforts of actors seamlessly to refuse the elements of performance (e.g., Plato 1980). At the same time, critical efforts to question a performance are almost always accompanied by creative efforts to mount counter-performances in turn. Refusion remains critically important to complex societies. One must insist that social power be justified and that authority be accountable, but one must also acknowledge that even the most democratic and individuated societies depend on the ability to sustain collective belief. 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