Abstract
This article focuses of the relation of cultural sociology to Francophone sociologists, showing that this analytical orientation remains little known among them. Such gap can be bridged, however, if one brings attention to the developments of Jeffrey Alexander’s type of cultural sociology on the one side, and Louis Quéré’s and Daniel Cefaï’s works on the other, along the lines of redefining the Habermasian concept of the public sphere, either by Alexander’s civil sphere concept, or Cefaï’s and Quéré’s interests for the performative dimension of actors engaged in public arenas. Such an encounter centers on the interpretation of the roles of social movements and media in shaping sociological analysis, and emphasizes the differences that exist between pragmatism and hermeneutics as interpretive tools. While the opposition between pragmatism’particularism and hermeneutic’s universalism would seem to be irreducible, it is rather their dialectical relation which is at stake, opening up the way for a transcultural vision of things. My own interpretation locates this transcultural vision as a challenge for the bridging of those two types of approach, by providing an example and arguments in this direction.
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Notes
The journal Sociologie et sociétés, which published the first version of Alexander’s and Smith’s article in French, also exceptionally published an English version of this special issue that was released at the occasion of the World Congress of the International Sociological Association held in Montréal, July–August of 1998. While I do not of course restrict cultural sociology to the strong program advocated by Smith and Alexander, I will concentrate my attention in this article to the latter’s works in order to get a closer look at the possible comparisons I am proposing; this is an unusual stance, since Christin and Ollion (2012) do not even mention Alexander’s works in their review of cultural sociology in the United States, whereas Cefaï (2007), though mentioning the existence of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale, considers cultural sociology in broader terms, as a vast movement in sociology that includes Alexander’s works among others—just as does Spillman (2020) in her recent book.
Boltanski and Thévenot (1991), with their own brand of “pragmatic sociology,” do not get as close as Quéré and Cefaï to cultural sociology because of their lack of concern for the fuller implications of the performative dimension of action, especially in aesthetic terms, and their ignorance of pragmatism in general (in spite of their claim to a “pragmatic” approach); Alain Caillé (Caillé et al. 2018) on his side, with his MAUSS (Anti-Utilitarian Movement in Social Science) initiative, who emphasizes mostly the Maussian’s model of gift as a foundation of social relations, doesn’t either compare to the fuller implications of a participation to the civil sphere that Alexander positions as the crux of sociological analysis, even though Alexander participated in some publications related to this MAUSS initiative (Alexander 2018).
It is not useless to add that Quéré and Cefaï published a new translation of G.H. Mead’s Mind, Self & Society in 2006 (a former one had been published in 1963, but the translation was rather… questionable on certain key terms), with a very substantial introduction (Cefaï and Quéré 2006).
I develop further this argument of Alexander’s cultural sociology in my forthcoming book (Côté, tbp).
There would be a lot to say here about Habermas’s neo-Kantian approach that relies, on the one hand, on Kant’s Critique of Judgement in order to provide communication a status that would equate that of maxims, in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, if not that of concepts in his Critique of Pure Reason, leading to Habermas’s thwarthed position of reaching a “quasi-transcendental” status for his own theoretical model (Habermas 2001). But I’ll leave that for another occasion, even though the present discussion involves those philosophical issues that place the aesthetic dimension on par with the ethical and logical (or epistemological) dimensions.
My translation. Since I am going to translate all the quotes taken from their French original references, I will not need to indicate further that the next quotes of those references are all my translations. For Cefaï, publicity, or rather “publicization,” acquires a triple status that relates it to the res publica of the State, to public accessibility, and to anything that is made public, be it by mass media or other means of social communication (Cefaï 1996, p. 52); drawing on Arendt, Habermas, and others, Cefaï defines the concept of “arêne publique” (public arena) as a substitute to “public sphere,” in order to emphasize the more dynamic aspect of public debates, and also their more dispersed or diffused character, through the formation of a public (or of publics).
Using the term “members” is important here, as Quéré mentions, since it refers to Garfinkel’s own acknowledgement that he was indebted to Parsons himself, in spite of his opposition to the theory of the social system, for the definition of this important concept that signals the belonging of social actors to a specific community.
As we will see in the next section, this happens particularly through the mediation provided by social movements and media of communication, with respect to the analytical gain provided by each one, but more specifically through their integration to the civil sphere, a concept which stands as the equivalent to, or substitutes itself for, Parson’s concept of societal community; yet, and contrary to Parsons, Alexander considers that the autonomy of culture and of symbolic expressions go much beyond Parson’s integration of actions and symbols to a static cultural system providing stable values. The path that Alexander followed in the patient elaboration of his concept of civil sphere departed also early from Habermas (Alexander 1995), to take up the reflection on the “new civil society” that emerged in the 1990s (Alexander 1993, 2000b), and up to the performative dimension of meaning through rituals (Alexander et al. 2006b). The synthesis that he offered with his concept of civil sphere (which also includes in a critical manner the political philosophy of Michael Walzer’s notion of the “spheres of justice”), becomes then an entirely different model than that of Habermas’s public sphere in that, among other things, it leaves aside the problem of emancipation through an utopian way, and refers instead to the already constituted structure of civility built in cultural traditions, that are being restructured through political confrontations, in a reformist, and not “revolutionary,” way.
The structural hermeneutics required to link those symbolic expressions to their underlying codification becomes the analytical focus of cultural sociology, in what seems to me to be a possible hampering of its capacity to understand the very dynamics at work within the composition and recomposition of the codification of the civil sphere itself. In my view, a dialectical hermeneutics provides a better tool for showing the works of codification, decodification and recodification that constitute the social, historical and cultural life of the civils sphere. I developed this argument elsewhere (Côté 2019b).
This position is tied, for Quéré, to his reinterpretation of Habermas’s public sphere model that integrated the requirements of the communicative action theory (Quéré 1989); doing so, however, Quéré follows Habermas’s own integration of Luhmann’s reinterpretation of Parsons that allowed sub-systems of action to develop each their own media (such as power for the political system, money for the economic system, influence for the social system, etc.), creating more complex differenciation dynamics unable to find their common meeting point, and preventing the overall (and problematic) integration to the Parsonian static cultural system. On Cefaï’s side, this position relies more on Park’s views about the ecological differenciation of life areas within the coexistence of different social communities, making it hard to conceive, again, their integration into a common whole.
The whole idea of publicity (Öffenclichkeit) in modern bourgeois democracy stands on the idea of countering the private interest of the Prince, by letting other (private and public) interests to be expressed and opposed to it; Habermas was then right to see that publicity in its commercial sense ruined the former, but he never saw that media (and public opinion) developed concurrently another concept to take its place: information. And in that, his critique of the evolution of the commercial press is completely flawed.
As one can see, I am using postmodern here according to the categorical changes that accompanied the passage to mass democracy in the 19th century, when it gradually opened itself to universal suffrage, and let down the linkage of citizenship to property—which was the central definition of bourgeois citizenship, and consequently, of modern bourgeois democracy, as it gradually emerged from feudalism, first in the bourgeois early cities, the communes, and subsequently in parliaments. The consequence of those historical transformations are conceptually acknowledged in the difference between the modern Cartesian subject and, let’s say, Mead’s concept of the self—more on this in Côté (2015).
Alexander develops the idea of the different “modes of incorporation” to the civil sphere of different social movements, adding to the two ones cited another mode that concerned the inclusion of Jewish identity in the United States. I’ll leave this one aside for my present purpose, although it could also provide a good point of comparison.
The parallel between the situation in Canada and in the United States on the basis of their respective different ethnological compositions, with respect to French Canadians and African Americans, has been made in the early 1940s by Hughes (1943, p. ix), in very general terms, and would deserve a more comprehensive analysis in spite of their profound differences. Apart from the very peculiar case of having Royal Commissions (an atavistic trait of its English colonial past that still sticks to the present political institutions) to address specific political issues and problems, Canada reacted to the report of the said Commission by adopting bilingualism as the official policy of federal institutions, and multiculturalism (but not biculturalism) as a defining its national cultural policy—creating a national response in Québec through an interculturalist (and not multiculturalist) policies of its own.
In this huge book that presents at some point a panoramic view of cultural sociology that is inclusive of several different perspectives in this field, Cefaï does not situate explictitly his own works as a redefinition of French republicanism (although it seems to me that this is precisely what he is doing), and is more interested, nevertheless, in showing the contributions that a wide range of cultural sociologists, mostly in the U.S., bring to the analysis of what he calls collective action, and thus situating cultural sociology among other approaches such as the one derived form the Chicago School, the New social movements, and frame analysis of a Goffmanian type. Throughout the book, though, the constant reminder is that micro-sociology should remain the focus for sociological investigations, following the long-term program that we discussed earlier—and this appears to be a radical break from other French sociological traditions established by Durkheim or Bourdieu, who strongly insisted on the French republican political philosophy in their works.
The article referred to here summarizes some aspects of a much more developed study—see Cefaï (2011).
Alexander (2000b, pp. 298–299, 2006a, 2007) provides a definition of the civil sphere that matches in my view this transcultural composition, even though he does not use this terminology, by proposing that the composition of the civil sphere draws elements from Ancient Greece to European Renaissance, as well as from the American revolution to the contemporary experiences of social movements. It is this mix of particularistic and universalistic elements that comes to define the structure and autonomy of the civil sphere in Alexander’s views. My own use of the term transcultural owes much to the anthropologist Ortiz’s (1995) and to the psychoanalyst Devereux’s (1980) conceptual developments.
Of course this schematization does not do justice to the presence of cultural pragmatics in Alexander’s works, which draw from the tradition of pragmatism (and of G.H. Mead—see the two chapters devoted to Mead and symbolic interactionism in Alexander 1987, pp. 195–237), nor to the acknowledgement, by Quéré and Cefaï, of hermeneutics, mostly inspired by Ricœur, in order to explore the narrativity of experience (Cefaï 1996, 2009; Quéré 2006, 2017).
In his reconsideration of the structural composition of symbolic (and linguistic) expressions, Alexander suggests that there is a shift between signifiers and signifieds that allows transformations, but he still insists on the permanence of the composition of the civil sphere in those terms: “It is my central contention that the language of civil society, the content and the structure of its binary discourse, is relatively unchanging. The signifiers of civil society do not shift. What changes is the signifieds, the social entities conceived as embodying the pure and impure symbolic representations. To put this in a slightly enigmatic manner, what we have here is stable ‘signifiers, shifting signifieds’.” (Alexander 2007, p. 28, italics in the original).
That does not mean that they do not take into account the larger picture, but still the interest of the analysis remains focused on micro-sociological issues. Cefaï expresses this as follows: “Cultural analysis takes seriously the existence of ‘cultural rationalities’ or ‘symbolic forms,’ but does not restrict their grip and scope to utilitarian theses, and provides itself some extremely precise tools of inquiry such as oral history, ethnographic description et archivistic documentation to give an account of them. (…) Cultural sociology that is of interest to us is the one phenomenologically and pragmatically oriented. It focuses on the ‘forms’ of individual and collective experience as they are given through acting and interacting actors.” (Cefaï 2007, pp. 723–724).
That this formulation of the question of dialectics as being fundamental to symbolic expressions in linking particulars and universals can be assumed to be inherent to the definition of science itself, with the requirement of rigorous empirical testing for its theoretical propositions, stands only as the sign that science has become the symbolic regime into which we live—whereas when and how this epistemological principle translates into everyday discourses and practices is more a case of rhetorical figures that are used to portray it… and the analytical capacity to decipher them.
I mention Geertz and Mead here, since they are both explicit underlying references for Alexander and Cefaï—according to their respective interpreations of their works. In his first and precocious use of the notion of “cultural sociology,” that is, much before it became a “strong program,” Alexander (1987, pp. 281–329) places Geertz at the center of the hermeneutic challenge that he perceives to be at stake for sociological analysis; likewise, and in line with the Schützian heritage that he carries along the lines of his ethnographic sociology, Cefaï (2001, pp. 35–91) translates Geertz’s famous text “Ideology as Cultural System” into French, and places it as the first chapter of the book he edited on political cultures.
This statement by Gadamer, which is also in its context a comment on Hegel’s contribution to hermeneutics, appears to be quite close to that of George Herbert Mead’s reflection about the past: “There is a tang of novelty in each moment of experience. (…) The continuity is always of some quality, but as present passes into present there is always some break in the continuity—within the continuity, not of the continuity. The break reveals the continuity, while the continuity is the background of the novelty. (…) The conclusion is that there is no history of presents that merge into each other with their emergent novelties. The past which we construct from the standpoint of the new problem of today is based upon continuities which we discover in that which has arisen, and it serves us until the rising novelty of tomorrow necessitates a new history which interprets the new future.” (Mead 1964, pp. 350, 353). It seems to me that Mead is giving here his own vision of Gadamer’s conception of Wirkungsgeschichte (“history of effects”).
It is interesting to note that, as was the case with the French issue in the 1960s, there was a Royal Commission on Aboriginal People (1991–1996), righ after the Oka crisis of 1991. The political process is then put on the same tracks, according to the Canadina tradition and philosophy (represented by the “Peace, Order, and Good Goverment” motto) of dealing with crises and issues, and trying to avoid that they become only debated at the grass-roots level in showing a concern by the Federal government.
This being said, it is the overall Indegenous artistic expressions in music, poetry, literature, etc. that gains in importance (see the contributions in Côté and Cyr 2018).
The issue is complex and multi-layered, since Indigenous expressions not only claim full political participation to the civil sphere, but also the recognition of their full cultural autonomy, and traditional land claims, which demand an entire make-over of the status of Indigenous societies throughout a revision of the past 500 years of colonization. This is an on-going process that is only at its early stages.
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Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank Jeffrey C. Alexander for asking me the question about the presence/absence of cultural sociology in Francophone contexts that led to the writing of this article.
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Côté, JF. Bridging cultural sociology with Francophone sociologists: a transcultural challenge. Am J Cult Sociol 9, 581–599 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-020-00110-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-020-00110-1