Abstract
In this chapter, I examine the “value added” recent cultural sociology brings to our understanding of political process. I show how the contributions in this volume draw our attention to a variety of neglected discourses, underestimated institutional changes, and complexities of symbolic interaction and performance that help account for the unexpected political changes in 2016. I argue that advances in synthesizing different sorts of knowledge generated in cultural sociology constitute an important new frontier for cultural sociologists, and sketch some initial directions. Normatively, they could also provide a stronger foundation for assessing whether and how the anti-civil forces emerging in the 2016 presidential campaign are likely to recede.
In real life, in society, facts of one kind are so fatally linked with those of another, that hardly anything can be safely ignored.
Balzac
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Spillman (2016) and Strand and Spillman (forthcoming) for discussion of these three irreducible but compatible perspectives in cultural sociology.
- 2.
Despite the quality and interest of all the contributions in this volume, I am not able to fully engage each of them in detail. Rather, I am selectively discussing findings which illustrate the different sorts of cultural knowledge surveyed here, in order to argue for new possibilities of synthesis.
- 3.
Robert Jansen argues that populism cannot be defined by particular ideologies, whether left or right, but as “any sustained, large-scale political project that mobilizes ordinarily marginalized social actors into publicly visible and contentious political action, while articulating an anti-elite, nationalist rhetoric that valorizes ordinary people” (2011, 82). The 2016 election probably does not fulfill his first criterion of “mobilizing ordinarily marginalized social actors” because it is questionable whether the 70,000 voters in four states who tipped the election were marginalized in this sense. It could do so if a subjective sense of stigma equates to marginalization (see Lamont et al. 2016 on stigma vs. discrimination). But arguably, the result of the election was ultimately more reliant on demobilization than mobilization of the marginalized. However, it was indeed a “political project,” and it fulfills the second, rhetorical criterion of Jansen’s definition.
- 4.
However, a number of scholars recognize and assess the “anti-civil possibilities of civil associations” (Alexander 2006, 101 [97–105]). Indeed, Kaufman (2002) argues that voluntary organizations in the United States have supported self-segregation and sectarianism. The same would apply to other institutions with the potential to sustain a civil sphere, like journalism and parties.
- 5.
For Williams, residual cultural forms involve “certain experiences, meanings, and values which cannot be expressed or substantially verified in terms of the dominant culture, [but] are nevertheless lived and practised on the basis of the residue– cultural as well as social– of some previous social and cultural institution or formation…” (1977, 122).
- 6.
This is not to say that civil sphere claims-making will look the same in 2019 or 2021 as it did in 2014. Given the recent power of populism, it seems likely that class-based civil repair claims will re-emerge in new ways. It is strange to recall that mention of class was more or less taboo in the United States until quite recently.
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Spillman, L. (2019). Landscapes, Fields, and Stages. In: Mast, J.L., Alexander, J.C. (eds) Politics of Meaning/Meaning of Politics. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95945-0_15
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