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Social Theory across Disciplinary Boundaries: Cultural Studies and Sociology
Author(s): Orville Lee
Source: Sociological Forum, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Dec., 1999), pp. 547-581
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Sociological Forlum, Vol. 14, No. 4, 1999
Social Theory Across Disciplinary Boundaries:
Cultural Studies and Sociology1
Orville Lee2
This essay proposes that sociology can learn from social theory developed
in the humanities. In the face of recent challenges to sociological explanations
of social outcomes (from rational choice and economic theory, cognitive
psychological theories of intelligence, and communitarian social philosophy),
social theory should specify the constitutiveforce of social signification. After
identifying a key weakness in theoretical approaches currently available in
sociology, the inadequacy of various conceptions of the social, I analyze
three significant new works in cultural studies in order to sketch out alternative
ways of defining and measuring the force of social signification. The essay
concludes with an attempt to establish the basis of a dialogue between cultural
studies and sociology.
KEY WORDS: social theory; cultural studies; history; representation; reflexivity; social signification.
The first and most basic rule is to consider social facts as things. -Durkheim
The world is the totality of facts, not of things.-Wittgenstein
INTRODUCTION
Research in the burgeoning field of cultural studies has drawn
increasing attention in American sociology (Ritzer, 1996; Lemert, 1994,
1993; Clough, 1992; Alexander and Seidman, 1990). The poststructuralist
turn in philosophy and cultural theory has led to an emphasis on
Earlier drafts of this paper were presented at the Pacific Sociological Association annual
meeting, Seattle, Washington, March 1996, and at the American Sociological Association
annual meeting, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, August 1997.
2Department of Sociology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208; e-mail:
[email protected]
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0884-8971/99/1200-0547$16.00/0 ? 1999 Plenum Publishing Corporation
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discourse, rhetoric, and texts as privileged objects of analysis in cultural
history and literary studies. Although Seidman (1994a, 1994b) found a
mixed response to cultural studies in American sociology during the
early 1990s, recent public responses have ranged from politically oriented
skepticism (Clawson, 1996) to unconditional rejection (Huber, 1995).
This hostile reception can be partially explained by factors that are
endogenous to American sociology. Cultural studies has been inserted
into the long-standing disciplinary clevage between sociologists who focus
on cultural influences on social life and those who emphasize the impact
of social structure.3 It comes as no surprise that cultural sociologists
have been more inclined than their social structuralist brethren to reflect
upon the theoretical and methodological orientations that nurture cultural
studies, and to weigh critically the merits of this scholarship.4 In contrast,
social structuralists have tended to be more resistant to these orientations.5
3A characteristic example of the culturalist epistemology can be seen in the work of Habermas
(1984:107-108), who asserts that "sociology must seek a verstehenden, or interpretive, access
to its object domain, because it already finds there processes of reaching understanding
through which and in which the object domain is antecedently constituted (that is, before
any theoretical grasp of it)." Because sociologists encounter "symbolically prestructured
objects," they must attend to the "generative rules" through which this object domain is
produced. In contrast, Durkheim's social structuralist epistemology claims that ". . . social
Suffice to say that they are the
phenomena are things and should be treated as such.
sole datum afforded the sociologist. A thing is in effect all that is given, all that is offered,
or rather forces itself upon our observations. To treat phenomena as things is to treat them
as data, and this constitutes the starting point for science. . . The determining cause of a
social fact must be solught among antecedent social facts and not among the states of the
individual consciousness" (Durkheim, 1982:69,134; emphasis in original). While the culturalist
and social structuralist perspectives both emphasize the existence of social facts, they part
company over the conceptualization of these facts. Where social structuralists treat social facts
as ubiquitous and given (sluigeneris), the culturalist conception of social facts as symbolically
prestructured leads to a skeptical attitude toward the idea of givenness. Culturalists attempt
to uncover the forms of power that both give rise to social facts and give these facts the
appearance of being ubiquitous.
4Important sources of the ferment of cultural studies can be found in symbolic anthropology
(Geertz, 1973; Turner, 1969, 1967), philosophical hermeneutics (Ricoeur, 1991; Gadamer,
1988), poststructuralist feminism (Butler, 1990; Scott, 1988), queer theory and studies in
sexuality (Butler, 1993; Warner, 1993; Sedgwick, 1990; Foucault, 1980), and social constructionism (Berger and Luckmann, 1967). For a useful overview of trends in anthropological
theory see Ortner (1984:126-160). Within sociology, critical theory and feminist theory have
long existed as islands of reflexive scholarship. The relationship between cultural studies,
critical theory, and feminist studies has been contentious, as the intellectual sparring of
Habermas and Foucault (see the works referenced in footnote 7), and Benhabib and Butler
demonstrates (see Benhabib et al., 1995).
5While cultural studies has been fully engaged by leading cultural sociologist and theorists
like Jeffrey Alexander, Steven Seidman, Charles Lemert, and Robert Wuthnow, its impact
within the subfield of cultural sociology should not be exaggerated. In my experience, many
cultural sociologists take great pains to avoid being labeled poststructuralist or postmodernist,
labels that can be used to stigmatize their work as being merely subjective or literary. A few,
like Wendy Griswold (1994, 1987), have tried to make approaches that are plied in the
humanities compatible with the methodological canons of social science.
Social Theory Across Disciplinary Boundaries
549
Research influenced by Marxist and Weberian theories of social class,
class conflict and bureaucracy, studies in political sociology, stratification,
occupational mobility, and demographic analyses of race and gender
inequality appear to be well insulated from the new trends in the humanities.6
This cleavage heightens the controversy over the incorporation of the
theory and methods of cultural studies into the sociological canon. Although
the appeal of theoretical knowledge described as poststructuralist, postmodernist, feminist, and queer has grown exponentially in the humanities during
the last two decades, this body of scholarship has largely failed to penetrate
the core curricula of most graduate programs in sociology.7 In spite of the
fact that cultural studies have a marginal presence within the discipline,
sociologists have nonetheless been of a mind-set to circle the wagons in
order to keep what is pejoratively described as "antirationalism" (Huber,
1995:204-205) well beyond the disciplinary gates.8
The continuing disciplinary closure toward these new bases of knowl6See Gorski (1993) for one exception to this tendency within political sociology. While Michel
Foucault is the most frequently cited scholar identified with cultural studies within the social
sciences, other leading figures and influences on cultural studies such as Jacques Derrida,
Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, F6lix Guattari,
Jean-Francois Lyotard, or Friedrich Nietzsche are less likely to be read and more likely to
be viewed as antisociological, or worse, antiscientific thinkers. For a philosophical restatement
of the classical definition of science that has been largely abandoned by contemporary historians of science see Searle (1993). For a positive assessment of Nietzsche's contribution to
social theory, see Antonio (1995).
7The use of the terms poststructuralism and postmodernism to categorize works in cultural
studies requires comment. Foucault, the scholar most sociologists associate with the poststructuralist turn, registered doubt about these terms in relation to his own research (Foucault,
1988a:33, 34). Postmodernism is a particularly abused term that typically carries a pejorative
connotation for social scientists. For the sake of clarity, I generally avoid the use of the
term postmodernism to describe work in cultural studies in this essay. The use of the term
poststructuralist is intended to connote a methodological and epistemological orientation
toward the analysis of cultural processes rather than a worldview that is critical of modernity.
For an intensive discussion of the meaning of modernity and postmodernity, see Habermas
(1989, 1987a, 1981), Foucault (1984), and Blumenberg (1983).
'While Joan Huber's essay is not primarily concerned with cultural studies, it offers an extremely negative view of intellectual trends in the humanities and their relationship to sociology. According to Huber, a combination of factors (including the fiscal crisis in higher
education and sociology's "weak core") render the discipline's traditional tolerance to external
bodies of knowledge a liability. Hence, she advocates a policy of intolerance against "antirationalist forays into the discipline [that] incur heavy costs . . . as sociologists, we should resist
our admirable tendency to tolerate differences when it requires tolerance of perspectives
that involve aggressive efforts to undermine everyone elses" (Huber, 1995:212). It is worth
noting that Huber neither references primary works representing the purported antirationalist
bent nor provides concrete examples of aggressive efforts by antirationalists to undermine
the discipline. Instead, she builds her argument upon secondary literatures that are hostile
to postmodernism in particular. For a more positive assessment of sociology's weak core,
see Bourdieu (1988).
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edge is lamentable.9 The efficacy of sociological explanations of the effects
of power on the structuring of individual and collective experience continues
to be challenged from a number of sources. The persistence of rational actor
theory (most notably Coleman, 1990; however, see Johnson, 1993) and models of human capital, the robust return of genetic and cognitive psychological
explanations of social inequality (Herrnstein and Murray,1994), and the renewed emphasis on individual moral commitment and responsibility (Bellah
et al., 1985; Etzioni, 1993, 1995) raise the unwelcome specter of a sociological
fallacy. This is the notion that social structural conditions do not suffice as
the determinative force shaping social outcomes. Contemporary sociological
practice shares some amount of blame for the persistent vigor of this form of
skepticism concerning the influence of social hierarchies on individual and
collective life chances. Unfortunately, this practice too often shares an affinity
with Hegel's (1952:12-13) description of the standpoint of philosophy: "As
the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is already there cut
and dried after its process of formation has been completed." Frequently
coming on the scene too late, sociology's own owl of Minerva spreads its wings
only with the falling of dusk."'By focusing exclusively on the relationships
between variables captured at the dusk of their development, sociology has
lost track of the antecedent, constitutive forces that generate variables and
structure their interactions. Only by attending to these antecedent social
forces can sociology regain the upper hand in the explanation of phenomena
within its object domain.
This essay will suggest how sociology can (re)gain this focus on constitutive processes by learning from the theoretical innovations that inform research in cultural studies. Such theoretical learning is necessitated by the
atrophy of sociological explanations of the effects of societal forces on individual and collective life chances. To rephrase the title of an old book by
Susanne Langer (1967), works in cultural studies provide evidence for social
theory in a new key. First, I identify a major weakness in theoretical approaches currently available in sociology, the inadequacy of various conceptions of the force of the social. Second, I propose a concept of social signification as a remedy to this inadequacy, and then analyze three significant new
works in cultural studies to elaborate this alternative means of defining and
measuring the force of the social. The essay concludes with an attempt to
establish the basis of a dialogue between cultural studies and sociology.
'Feminist scholars in sociology have noted the lack of impact of feminist thought within the
discipline (Alway, 1995; Stacey and Thorne, 1986). For a discussion of queer theory in
sociology, see Stein and Plummer (1994) and Epstein (1994).
"'Hegel, of course, affirms this standpoint since he wants to restrict philosophical practice to
a logical analysis of what is (the actual) rather than reflecting on the question of what olught
to be.
Social Theory Across Disciplinary Boundaries
551
OBJECTIFYING THE FORCE OF THE SOCIAL: THE
VEXATIOUS FACT OF CONSTITUTIVE FORCE
Sociology is a field of theoretical and empirical inquiry into the processes that are constitutive of the social. Much of sociological practice
involves making visible social objects that, in their ordinary occurrence,
are not visible or are taken-for-granted (norms, roles, authority, race, gender, class). This practice also should involve an explanation of the force of
the social-that is to say, the most fundamental sociological question involves asking about the conditions and processes of possibility for objects
that are construed sociologically. Social theory that attempts to articulate
these processes is a "device," as DiMaggio (1995:391) argues, of enlightenment: a device used to bring about the defamiliarization of the familiar.
The recurrent epistemological problem of this type of social theory is to
provide an account of its object." Durkheim's (1982:50-84) effort to draw
the proper boundaries around social facts (in opposition to psychology,
moral philosophy, utilitarian social theory, and the notiones vutlgares of
common sense or primary experience) and the subsequent conflicts over
the methodology appropriate to his social physics exemplify this basic problem. The fundamental oppositions of the field (subject and object, structure
and agency, material and ideal interests, norm and strategy, and most
importantly, individual and society) are predicted by explicit or implicit
epistemological assumptions underlying the theoretical construction of sociological objects of analysis.
Margaret Archer's discussion of realist social theory provides a lucid
account of this epistemological problematic. She places the relationship
between individual and society the "linkage between structure and
agency" at the center of theoretical analysis in sociology. Society is "vexatious' in her terms because it has no "immutable form or even preferred
"Jeffrey Alexander identities the contemporary epistemological dilemma of social theory as
the false dichotomy" or choice between scientistic theory and antitheoretical relativism.
"I will call the presentation of these alternatives the 'epistemological dilemma,' for it presents
the fate of general theory as dependent upon an epistemological choice alone. Either knowledge of the world is unrelated to the social position and intellectual interests of the knower,
in which case general theory and universal knowledge are viable, or knowledge is affected
by its relation to the knower, in which case relativistic and particularistic knowledge can be
the only result. This is a true dilemma because it presents a choice between two equally
unpalatable alternatives"'(Alexander, 1995:91). In my view, this account of the epistemological dilemma presents the problem in its most easily criticizable and least productive dimension-the opposition between a belief in science and universalizable norms vs empirical and
moral relativism. The dilemma I address here has to do with a more fundamental conflict
within empirically oriented social science-the conflict over how to best conceptualize the
force of the social (e.g., causal relations, structuring conditions, etc.) and skepticism concerning the materiality, the universality, and the stability of the social categories used in empirical analysis.
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state" (Archer, 1995:1). Social actors are both constrained by the social
structures that they reproduce, intentionally and unintentionally, and capable of reflection on these structures that they also endeavor to transform,
under specific constraints. A social theory adequate to the task of providing
a language for this vexatious fact must navigate a course between the Scylla
of scientism and the Charybdis of choice. On Archer's account, scientistic
theories (e.g., those of Durkheim and Comte) that insist on explaining
social facts only with reference to other such facts are guilty of a downward
conflation, in which "the solution to the problem of structure and agency
consists of rendering the latter epiphenomenal" (Archer, 1995:3). Choicecentered theories (e.g., utilitarianism and Weberian social theory) perform
an upward conflation, in which a different epiphenomenal solution is present, namely, social structure is treated as a "mere aggregate consequence of
individual activities, which is incapable of acting back to influence individual
people" (Archer, 1995:4).12
The key insight of Archer's useful reminder of the vexatious quality
of the social, namely its inherent duality, can be extended to explanations
of the force of the social and a systematic critique of existing approaches.
Most sociological theories tend toward one or the other form of conflation.
This has led to the repeated and largely noncumulative efforts to articulate
the links between micro and macro (Huber, 1991; Alexander et al., 1987),
social lifeworld and social system (Habermas, 1987b), and rules and action
(Giddens, 1984). For example, Sewell's (1992) recent promising elaboration
of a theory of structure, which proceeds from the perspective of dualism,
fails to provide an adequate argument for the connection of agency (the
individual) to structure (the social)."3The tendency toward conflationary
conceptualizations has negative implications for the elaboration of the
mechanisms of social force. In particular, the weakness of theory and research evincing a downward conflation provides fertile ground for the
skeptical responses of rational actor models, genetic and cognitive psychological explanations, and some variants of communitarian social philosophy.
In order to objectify, or make visible, the force of the social, sociologists
"Archer's (1995:5) intriguing answer to the problem of upward and downward conflation
(which I will not pursue here), involves what she calls a "morphogenetic approach": "(The
'morpho' element is an acknowledgement that society has no pre-set form or preferred state:
the 'genetic' part is a recognition that it takes its shape from, and is formed by, agents,
originating from the intended and unintended consequences of their activities.)."
'3There is conceptual slippage in Sewell's definitions of structure and agency. He conceives
of structure as dualistic, polysemic, and transposable (i.e., open to transformation), and then
attributes that capacity for change to agents without explaining what enables or constrains
this capacity (e.g., structure). Agency is substituted for structure and vice versa. Sewell jumps
from explaining structure to imputing transformative capacities to agents, without providing
warrant for this leap.
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Social Theory Across Disciplinary Boundaries
Proxy
Type of Force
Location
Solidarity
morality
bindingnorms, rules, sanctions
Economy
wealth
use andexchangevalues,gifts
Status
position
social honor, authority,prestige
Psychology
personality
self,beliefs,values,motivations
Fig. 1. Common objectifications of the social.
tend to rely on proxies to represent the effects of social structures. The use
of proxies has the unfortunate effect of producing the types of theoretical
conflation identified by Archer. Moreover, these proxies either are borrowed from other disciplines, like psychology or economics, or are phenomena, like solidarity or status position, that have the theoretical disadvantage
of being attributable to prior conditions. The common use of one or more
of these proxies (see Fig. 1) obscures rather than illuminates the internal
process that gives these social phenomena their force. The types of force
corresponding to solidarity, economy, psychology, and status (morality,
money, personality, and position), while imbricated in the construction of
social action, are not sufficient to account for their own conditions of
possibility. Existing research shows that what is describable as moral, as
economic capital, markets, or rationality (Carruthers and Babb, 1996; Babb,
1996; Fligstein, 1996; Carruthers, 1994; Zelizer, 1994; Michaels, 1987), as
status (Weber, 1978:932-938), and as personhood (Foucault, 1988b, 1980;
Rosaldo and Lamphere, 1974) is enormously variable and historically contingent. In other words, these proxies are the outcome of external sociohistorical processes. Rather than construing the effects of such proxies as the
force of the social, social theory should ascertain the logical and empirical
preconditions of these proxies. This can be achieved by focusing on the
process that gives rise to these proxy phenomena, the constitutive force that
is embedded in cultural practices. By constitutive I mean the capacity of
social signification.14
How can the constitutive process specific to the force of the social be
made visible and what precisely is meant by social signification? If, following
Sewell (1992), we treat cultural phenomena as structures and inquire into
the structuring effects of these phenomena, the constitutive process of social
signification can be brought to light. The constitutive capacity of culture
'4The concept of social signification is loosely based on Judith Butler's (1995:47) discussion
of the "resignification" of political identities in the context of feminist politics.
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Concept
Process of Social Sii-nification
Social Objects
Culture
constitutive force
social categories, perceptual and
evaluative categories, symbolic
boundaries marking social space
Solidarity
conditions of social cohesion
moral categories (norms, rules,
sanctions), collective practice
(associational life)
Economy
conditions of economic
reproduction
forms of economic capital;rules
of accumulation
Status
conditions of hierarchy
social categories, forms of
symbolic capital (social honor,
authority,prestige)
Psychology
conditions of subjectivity
identity, individualpractice
(the life course)
Fig. 2. The force of the social.
par excellence is the force of the social signification of social objects (persons,
knowledges, practices, hierarchies). Social signification is not identical with
what is understood as social construction to the extent the that social
constructionist imagination envisions the social world as the product of
phenomenologically anchored voluntaristic practices."5Rather, the concept
of social signification, construed as having constitutive force, implies a more
elementary power (understood as a capacity) of creation and authorization.
It is the cultural precondition that enables the social construction of the
categories, perceptual schemas, and symbolic boundaries that situate people, things, practices, and interactions hierarchically within bounded social
spaces (see Fig. 2). The process of social signification is vexatious insofar
as it is both a structure (a condition of possibility for solidarity, economic
exchanges, status positions, collective and individual identity) and a structuring process exercised by individuals and groups who have the capacity to
usurp, accumulate, and institutionalize this constitutive social force. As
opposed to notions of constitutive cultural force in structuralist anthropology (Levi-Strauss, 1969, 1976) and structuralist Marxism (Athusser, 1971),
"Fora critique of social constructionism in relation to a theory of power, see O'Leary (unpublished).
Social Theory Across Disciplinary Boundaries
555
the concept of social signification should be understood as the profoundly
social, historical, and processual dimensions of a discursive, nonphysical
force, which is distinct from langlue, system, or ideology. Its force derives
from its function as a boundary condition for social action."6
Based on this concept, social categories like gender, race, social class,
and occupation statuses, or conceptions of public and private and the norm
of meritocratic opportunity are not treated as given social-structural variables. Nor are these phenomena defined as the outcome of economic facts,
or as constructions derived from aggregated subjective experiences. Rather
than treating these phenomena as the ground of the social, the concept of
social signification helps to defamiliarize these familiar forms in social life
by objectifying the constitutive force, the signifying process, that creates
and reproduces them.
THREE RECENT WORKS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Principles for the objectification of the constitutive force of social
signification can be found in theoretical approaches nested within empirical
cultural studies. I have selected non randomly three major new books in
cultural studies with which to elaborate the concept of social signification
as the force of the social: George Chauncey's Gay New York (1994), Eric
Lott's Love and Theft (1995), and Walter Benn Michaels's OlurAmerica
(1995).17 Roughly fitting the description of what might be called the historical sociology of cultural categories, they are works from which sociology
6David Greenstone developed the suggestive idea of a "boundary condition" as a way to
account for the force of words without reliance on a theory of causal explanation: '. . . the
words caluseand calusalrefer only to patterns of concomitant variation, that is, to relationships
in which there are changes in the values of independent and dependent variables. In this
usage, a causal law or relationship refers to a change in the cause that is followed by (or
coincident with) a change in the effect. In ordinary discourse we also speak about the effects
produced by a stable feature of some particular context-particularly when that effect is to
preserve the status quo . . . we shall refer to the latter instance by the term bolundary
condition. . . . Our use of words is consistent-remains stable in important aspects-because
the actions that interpret them are controlled by appropriate norms. In other words, we
encounter what can be called the grammatical limits on what we can meaningfully say, think,
and perceive. Given the rules governing our concepts and practices, there are contexts in
which certain concepts simply do not go together. When we encounter such limits, causal
explanation is inappropriate because there is no cause to observe, no prior event that
produced the effect we are trying to explain. Instead, there are facts of grammar, patterns
of behavior and usage, that limit a people's feasible options" (Greenstone, 1986:3, 16;
emphasis in original). The force of the social is best understood as a boundary condition
for social action; a context of action institutionalized through discursive or symbolic forms
(practice, rituals, and habitual forms of interaction).
"The disciplinary locations of the authors are modern American history (Chauncey), American
Studies (Lott), and English literature (Michaels).
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556
as a discipline might learn to make visible this constitutive force. Although
these works take up difference topics (the social space of homosexual
identity before midcentury, the social meanings of blackface ministrelsy in
the mid-19th century, and the complex relationship between nativism and
modernism in American literature, politics, and social science between 1890
and 1940), they share in common a sensitivity to the structuring force of
language, discourse, and representation. Chauncey provides a narrative
reconstruction of the discursive field in which the social organization of
homosexual identity evolved in New York City, which is reducible neither
to biological nor psychological causation. Lott sheds light on the heterogeneous constitution of white working-class identity through a particular cultural form: blackface minstrelsy. Michaels takes aim at the heart of the
concept of culture as a non-nativist (i.e., politically progressive and nonessentialist) alternative to biological or genetic conceptions of racial and
ethnic identity. Each study helps clarify features of the social world in ways
that can help reorient sociological research toward the antecedent processes
that structure the form and content of such social facts as social class, sexual
identity, and racial identity.
Gay New York
George Chauncey's Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the
Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 is a detailed historical reconstruction of the gay male public sphere in New York prior to 1940. Among
its contributions, it sheds light on the historical specificity of the social
formation of male gender and sexual identities that stands in contrast
to Foucault's 1870 dating of disciplinary formation of the heterosexual/
homosexual binary."8Moreover, this cultural history of gay male identity
in New York calls into question Sedgwick's (1990) claim that this binary
was already discursively institutionalized in the 19th century. Finally, the
book suggests that the contemporary gay rights movement misconstrues the
symbolism of "the closet" as a permanent feature of homosexual identity.
Chauncey narrates both the social organization of gay social spaces
and the boundaries that existed between normal and abnormal men. The
confluence of commercial vice districts and working-class patterns of sociability created locales in which middle-class sexual reticence was replaced
1'"We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality
was constituted from the moment it was characterized-Westphal's famous article of 1870
on 'contrary sexual sensations' can stand as its date of birth-less by a type of sexual relations
than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and
the feminine in oneself" (Foucault, 1980:43).
Social Theory Across Disciplinary Boundaries
557
by transgressive performances, including gay performances. Working- and
middle-class men were attracted to these locales as a result of the publicity
provided by sensationalist journalism. The model of the fairy, understood
as men possessing feelings identified as feminine, was the basis of a "semiotics of inversion," an array of bodily and stylistic performances signifying
the fairy. By the 1920s, however, middle-class gay identity, the queer,
provided cover for men unable to practice the flamboyant fairy style of life
and contributed to the construction of middle-class heterosexuality.
The Bowery was one of the centers of gay life in the 1890s. Saloons
and dance halls, known as resorts, as well as clubs were the site of a
flourishing gay public sphere that developed within a working-class milieu.
However, middle-class men, who engaged in slumming, freqented the various resorts that were also opened to a broader spectrum of social classes
due to the publicity given the resorts in the pages of the New York Herald,
Joseph Pulitzer's World, and William Randolph Hearst's Journal
(Chauncey, 1994:39). In these locales, such men viewed live sexual performances on stage as well as other activities associated with the alleged
working-class degeneracy and depravity of the middle-class imagination.
But the world of Bowery resorts and clubs also "fostered and sustained a
distinctive gay culture" by facilitating the sharing of information and the
assimilation of men into a gay subculture.
Chauncey's thick description of the gay public sphere from the turn
of the century to the onset of World War IIreveals a world of visible spaces
in which gay men interacted, formed social networks, and negotiated a
variety of lexical meanings associated with a gay identity. Chauncey argues
that the binary of heterosexual and homosexual does not map easily on
the numerous signifiers of sexual identity.
. .many of the terms used in the early twentieth century were not synonymous
with homosexual or heterosexual, but represent a different conceptual mapping of
male sexual practices, predicated on assumptions about the character of men engaging in those practices that are no longer widely shared or credible. Queer, fairy,
trade, gay, and other terms each had a specific connotation and signified specific
subjectivities, and the ascendancy of gay as the preeminent term (for gay men
among gay men) in the 1940s reflected a major reconceptualization of homosexual
behavior and of 'homosexuals' and 'heterosexuals.' (Chauncey, 1994:14)
The fairy stood as the dominant role model at the beginning of the 20th
century. According to Chauncey, boys and men taking on this role were
able to "reject the kind of masculinity prescribed for them by the dominant
culture, but to do so without rejecting the hegemonic tenets of their culture
concerning the gender order." The adoption of characteristics and signs
marked as feminine, the use of women's names, the donning of an unconventional article of clothing (a red tie), or the display of sartorial flamboyance
(green suits, tight-cuffed trousers, flowered bathing trunks, half-length flar-
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ing top coats), transvestism, physical gestures, etc., were components in
the performative repertoire of the fairy (Chauncey, 1994:50-52). These
"stereotypical deviations" placed feminine mannerisms as the central sign
of gay identity. As an intermediate or third sex, "fairies reaffirmed the
conventions of gender even as they violated them: they behaved as no man
should, but as any man might wish a woman would. Their representation
of themselves as 'intermediate types' made it easier for men to interact
with them (and even have sex with them) by making it clear who would
play the 'man's part' in the interaction" (Chauncey, 1994:57).
The centrality of gendered role playing in the construction of the fairy
perhaps explains what Chauncey finds to be the major difference between
the sexual culture of this earlier period and our era.19As long as men
exhibited masculine demeanors and played the male role in sexual encounters, "neither they, the fairies, nor the working-class public considered them
to be queer" (Chauncey, 1994:66). Hence, a contemporary observer of the
sailors who frequented the Times Square Building in 1927 did not associate
these men with the fairy prostitutes they sought out for sexual services
(Chauncey, 1994:66). Known as trade in the vernacular of fairy prostitutes,
the straight men "who responded to a gay man's advances," retained their
status as "normal men." Another group of men who conformed to masculine conventions while preferring male sexual partners were known as
husbands, wolves or jockers. However, despite being more exclusively "homosexual" than trade, "neither they nor their peers regarded them as queer
men . . ." (Chauncey, 1994:87).
The transformation of this differentiated field of signifiers into the
fixed oppositions characterized by the heterosexual/homosexual binary corresponded to a shift from the identification of sexual identity as gendered
actions (performative) to defining sexual identity as sexual practice (disciplinary). According the Chauncey's account, this shift, which erased the
earlier distinctions and negatively described any sexual act between men
as homosexual, occurred after 1930. However, the imposition of this binary
was enabled to a significant extent by the disciplining of public sociability
in the wake of the repeal of Prohibition. By proscribing disorderliness in
public places and associating lesbians, gay men, prostitutes, and gamblers
as signs of disorder, the New York State Liquor Authority established an
antigay policy without explicit reference to homosexuality. This policy had
the degree to which the earlier culture permitted men to engage in sexual relations
with other men, often on a regular basis, without requiring them to regard themselves-or
to be regarded by others-as gay. . .. The centrality of the fairy to the popular representation
of sexual abnormality allowed other men to engage in casual sexual relations with other
men, with boys, and above all, with the fairies themselves without imaging that they themselves were abnormal" (Chauncey, 1994:65).
9". . .
Social Theory Across Disciplinary Boundaries
559
a severe impact on gay clubs and the working-class saloon culture that
had provided the space for visibility and social networks. In spite of the
development of neighborhood enclaves in Greenwich Village and Harlem,
police intervention tended to make gay bars more exclusively gay in terms
of clientele and gay life became more invisible and segregated from the
rest of urban life (Chauncey, 1994:335-348).
White Skin, Black Masks: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Northern
Working Class
Eric Lott's magisterial Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the
American Working Class is a study of what is arguably the prototypical
form of popular culture in America, blackface performance. The book lies
at the crossroads of literary analysis, theater studies, and the history of
mentalites. And, although Love and Theft is partially grounded in film
theory and psychoanalysis, it exemplifies a robust account of the force of
social signification. This eclecticism in form pays off in analytical content.
Taking minstrelsy as an emergent cultural form, Lott demonstrates the
simultaneous production and contestation of race, class, and gender identities in the mid- 19th century.
One advantage of studying minstrelsy as an emergent phenomenon is
that the mechanism of the construction of racial and class difference stands
out more clearly in its initial stage of development than in later periods
when this practice became routinized. Lott emphasizes the dual moments
of the performance art/entertainment of the white northern working class:
at once theft, the expropriation and commodification of the culture of
southern blacks, and love, an empathetic identification with blacks.
The standard minstrel show of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s featured
the following repertoire:
. . a semicircle of four or five or sometimes more white male performers
made up with facial blacking of greasepaint or burnt cork and adorned in outrageously oversized and/or ragged 'Negro' costumes. Armed with an array of instruments, usually banjo, fiddle, bone castanets, and tambourine, the performers would
stage a tripartite show. The first part offered up a random selection of songs
interspersed with what passed for black wit and japery; the second part (or 'olio')
featured a group of novelty performances (comic dialogues, malapropistic 'stump
speeches,' cross-dressed 'wench' performances, and the like; and the third part was
a narrative skit, usually set in the South, containing dancing, music, and burlesque.
(Lott, 1995:5-6).
Performances of such songs as "Zip Coon," "Jump Jim Crow," and "Long
Blue Tail," made popular by a generation of minstrel masters (T. D. Rice,
Dan Emmett, E. P. Christy, Ralph Keeler, and songwriter Stephen Foster),
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560
were valorized by contemporaries. Writing in 1842, Margaret Fuller bemoaned the "Caucasian" race's contribution to music and dance while
finding "Jump Jim Crow" (a dance "native to this country") superior to
"Yankee Doodle" (suspected of British roots): "Such of the African melodies as we have heard are beautiful. But the Caucasian race have yet their
rail-roads to make."20Minstrel performers were often perceived as Africans
rather than as whites in blackface.21
Rather than accepting this view of minstrelsy as something like authentic African-American art or as a form of racist domination, Lott explores
the intersection of white and black, of culture and commodification, of art
and property. This approach problematizes representation from the start:
"Where representation once unproblematically seemed to image forth its
referent, we must now think of, say, the blackface mask as less a repetition
of power relations than as a signifier for them-a distorted mirror, reflecting
displacements and condensations and discontinuities between which and
the social field there exist lags, unevennesses, multiple determinations"
(Lott, 1995:8). As a conflictual site of the politics of "race, class, and nation,"
Lott argues for the ambivalence of the form itself:
Underwritten by envy as well as repulsion, sympathetic identification as well as
fear, the minstrel show continually transgressed the color line even as it made
possible the formation of a self-consciously white working class. There was a good
fit, for example between the conflicted nature of the shows and the racial tendencies
of their audiences, such that the artisan abolitionist constituency could rather benignly enjoy the same form of leisure that supported racist, antiabolitionist ridicule.
(Lott, 1995:8-9)
Thus, rather than operating with simple oppositions, Lott demonstrates how
performers like Rice undertook what amounted to ethnographic research
among black male laborers, learning songs, imitating intonations and physical gestures at the same time as they profited from such symbolic thefts.
"Margaret Fuller, "Entertainments of the past winter," Dial (1842), quoted in Lott (1995:16).
""White people believed the counterfeit, often sympathetically, as I have begun to suggest;
the blackface hieroglyph so fully unpacked in the Atlantic Monthly account [of T. D. Rice's
blackface performance in Pittsburgh in 1830] went largely unread. There were, it is true,
nudges and winks folded into claims like that of the Apollo Minstrels to be the 'only original
Negroes traveling,' or in the New York Heralds's coy references to Christy's Minstrels as
'the very pinks of negro singers.' But often, in the minds of many, blackface singers and
dancers became, simply, 'negroes.' How else explain the tireless references to 'these amusing
darkies' [New York Herald, January 21, 1848], as if the originals had somehow gotten lost?
Early audiences so often suspected that they were being entertained by actual Negroes that
minstrel sheet music began the proto-Brechtian practice of picturing blackface performers
out of costume as well as in; and there were several existing accounts of white theatergoers
mistaking blackface performers for blacks. Even Mark Twain's mother, at her first (and
presumably only) minstrel show, believed she was watching black performers. Like Margaret
Fuller (and, as we shall see, Walt Whitman), Mark Twain was himself intrigued by what he
called the 'happy and accurate' representations of the minstrel show" (Lott, 1995:20). On
the episode involving Twain's mother, see Twain (1959:62, 60; cited in Lott).
Social Theory Across Disciplinary Boundaries
561
Moreover, as a distinctly northern urban popular entertainment (New York
was the center of minstrel performance), minstrelsy figured significantly in
the working-class politics of the midcentury. The predominantly workingclass audiences came to minstrel shows not only to watch and participate
in the spectacle and sociability of the theater; they also formed amateur
minstrel groups. The rowdy crowds of men, commonly known as "B'hoys"
(a truncation of Bowery Boy), threatened the middle class's aristocratic
cultural sensibilities. More importantly, their conflicts with employers
(termed "wage slavery") were represented in minstrel songs. In this way,
blackface minstrelsy was grafted onto both working-class politics as well
as conceptions of what defined popular culture in America.
American Literature and Social Science Between Nativism
and Modernism
Walter Benn Michaels's study deals with the changing configuration of
representations of nation, citizenship, family, and race in the early decades of
this century. In Our America, the treatment of heterogeneous written genres,
literature, political legislation, social scientific works, as similarly situated
cultural objects is characteristic of cultural studies. Social scientific analyses
of race and culture (such as those of Horace Kallen, W. E. B. DuBois, Melville
Herskovits, and Zora Neale Hurston) are not privileged as more objective
than the political enactments (the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, 1924, and
the Indian Citizenship Act, 1924), racist tracts (by Lothrop Stoddard or Madison Grant), and aesthetic creations (by Thomas Dixon, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
or Ernest Hemingway) of the era. Nor are these different types of writing
considered to be distinct genres of cultural production. Instead, Michaels
objectifies an historically changing field of significations employed by a range
of cultural producers to construct (1) knowledge of ethnic and racial differences, (2) political-cultural thresholds for American citizenship and a distinctive national identity, and (3) the discursive strategies that produce hierarchical or pluralist visions of the social order.
At the center of the story is the construction of narratives of citizenship
and American identity, nation, and empire. Around the turn of the century,
in the context of imperialist incursions into Cuba and the Philippines,
writers like Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon took the Civil War
and Reconstruction and the family as the tableau on which to resolve the
latent and manifest tensions of race and nation.22In the anti-imperialist
Red Rock (Page, 1898), Page depicted an unspecified region (the South)
22ForNativist Progressivism, the Reconstruction of the South functions better as a representation of Empire-the imperialism of the North-than the Revolutionary War.
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threatened by the invasion of new Whites (northern carpetbaggers). In his
paternalist vision, Blacks were part of the family, cared for by the white
pater familias. Michaels argues that Red Rock "sought to avoid the perils
of empire by avoiding the perils of nationhood first; for Page and for the
plantation tradition more generally, the South was a 'region' rather than
a political entity . . . no government can quite be legitimate, and this refusal
of legitimacy is connected with a comparative indifference to racial identity
. .and an insistence on the importance of the family" (Michaels, 1995:17).
In contrast to Page, the "progressive" Dixon, in The Leopard's Spots
(1902) and The Clansman (1905) critiques Empire by dispensing with the
plantation tradition's multiracial family: "citizenship in the 'new nation,'
produced out of resistance to an 'African' empire, became essentially racial;
legitimacy of the state (its identity as nation rather than empire) was guaranteed by its whiteness" (Michaels, 1995:18). The family and the old affective
ties between Blacks and Whites prior to Reconstruction are thoroughly
repudiated in The Leopard's Spots. The "brutality of the new Negro exposes
as a lie the fidelity of the old one." The encounter with Northern "black
imperialism" enables a new unity among whites: "In a moment the white
race had fused into a homogeneous mass of love, sympathy, hate and
revenge" (Dixon, cited in Michaels, 1995:19). As Michaels points out, a
political paradox emerges from the nativist progressive vision of Dixon.
This vision justifies the exclusion of Blacks from full citizenship at the same
time as it affirms citizenship rights for immigrants. American citizenship
and an American identity can be achieved by non-American Europeans
rather than by non-European Americans.
Dixon's perspective was repudiated by 1924 with the passage of the
Johnson-Reed Act, which stifled immigration almost entirely until 1965,
and the Indian Citizenship Act, which bestowed citizenship on this native
(non-European) American populace. These political enactments, which
excluded European-based immigration while including indigenous peoples
of North America, appear contradictory on the surface. However, they
partake of a similar logic, encapsulated in the concept of modernism.
In contrast to nativist progressivism, certain reversals mark the relationship between literary and nativist modernism. Michaels defines the
former as the "fantasy" that the sign or representation can function "onomatopoetically, without reliance upon a system of syntactic and semantic
conventions." He links this with a concurrent nativist fantasy about the
family, and also national and social collectivities, which holds that the
family might "maintain itself incestuously, without reliance upon the legal
conventions that turn otherwise unrelated persons into husband and wife
." (Michaels, 1995:2). These homologous aesthetic and political fantasies
appear in writings as diverse as those of Kallen, Hemingway, Stoddard,
*
Social Theory Across Disciplinary Boundaries
563
Hurston, and Herskovits. Michaels construes progressive racism, typified
by Dixon (i.e., nativist progressivism), as nationalist, hierarchical, and assimilationist (i.e., the "Americanization of the immigrant"), while depicting
nativist modernism as pluralist and anti-assimilationist (Michaels, 1995:67).
The problem of family relations among heterogeneous individuals and
legal relations among heterogeneous racial and ethnic groups is resolved
in similar ways by the discursive logic of modernism. Novelists depicted
both the impossibility of the incorporation of immigrants (e.g., Jews and
Italians) into the native-born American family as well as the failure of this
family to reproduce itself, depicted as the consequence of an absence of
vigorous sexual instinct, castration, etc.23At the same time, new representations of Native Americans extolled this authentically American population,
which did not require "assimilation" since indigenous peoples were already
American: "The Indian, embodying an American identity that explicitly
antedated his own legal citizenship, could figure as an exemplary counterinstance to [immigrants]; where they had become American citizens but had
not become Americans, the Indian had been an American even before
becoming an American citizen" (Michaels, 1995:45).24
Nonfiction writers also registered the modernist-nativist skepticism toward assimilation.25Pluralism, on Michaels's account, "essentialized racism"
by asserting the determining factor of difference, hence making the distinction between racialists like Stoddard and pluralists like Kallen negligible.26
Naturalization of difference through the depoliticization (and dehierarchiza23Michaelsnotes that "the homosexual family and the incestuous family thus emerge as parallel
technologies in the effort to prevent half-breeds. . ." (49). Such strategies of unmiscegenated
family, i.e., racial reproduction, appear in Willa Cather The Professor's House (1925), Hart
Crane The Bridge (1930), and William Faulkner The Soiund and the Fuiry(1929).
24SeeF. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1924), Cather The Professor's Holuse(1925), Anzia
Yezierska Bread Givers (1925/1975), Zane Grey The VanishingAmerican (1925/1993), Ernest
Hemingway The Slun Also Rises (1926), Faulkner The Sound and the Fuiry (1929), Oliver
La Farge Lalughing Boy (1929).
25See Lothrop Stoddard The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Slupremacy(1920) and
Re-Forging America (1927), Horace Kallen Cuiltlureand Democracy in the United States
(1924,1970), Gino Speranza Race or Nation (1925), Alain Locke The New Negro (1925), Zora
Neale Hurston "The Characteristics of Negro Expession' (1934), and Melville Herskovits The
Myth of the Negro Past (1941).
26' Polemicizing against the Progressive racist E. A. Ross in 1915, Kallen [1924/1970] wrote
that what 'troubles Mr. Ross and so many other American citizens of British stock is not
really inequality; what troubles them is difference.' (115) Whether or not Kallen was accurate
in his assessment of Ross . . . [his] own sense that difference was what mattered placed him
at the cutting edge of nativism. As Stoddard would put it in 1927: 'No theoretical questions
of 'superiority' or 'inferiority' need be raised. . . . The really important point is that even
though America (abstractly considered) may not be as good as we think it is, nevertheless
it is olurs.. . That is the meat of the matter, and when we discuss immigration we had
better stop theorizing about superiors and inferiors and get down to the bedrock of difference.'
(103)" (Michaels, 1995:65; emphasis in original).
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tion) of the formation of racial/ethnic groups is apparent in Kallen, who locates the source of particular individual talents in the individual's natural or
ethnic group." Melville Herskovits similarly substituted cultural difference
for racial hierarchy. However, unlike Kallen, he asserted that the American
Negro had been so completely Americanized that no innate endowment or
racially African characteristics survived in America (Michaels, 1995:123).28
Yet, Herskovits's purpose was to explain persistent patterns of behavior
among Blacks. The myth of the Negro past was the belief in the existence of
a direct connection of contemporary American Blacks to Africa. Nonetheless, for Herskovits, what bound the Negro to her group was culture. Michaels
summarizes this cultural logic of identity succinctly: "For the fact that some
people before you did some things that you do does not in itself make what
they did part of your past. To make what they did part of your past, there
must be some prior assumption of identity between you and them, and this
assumption is as racial as it is in [Countee] Cullen and [Oliver] La Farge."
(Michaels, 1995:127) In spite of his "antiracist culturalism," Herskovits remains committed to "racial identity" (Michaels, 1995:127).
Michaels argues that the "modern concept of culture," evidenced
in Herskovits, has become the dominant form that racism takes among
intellectuals with the waning acceptance of a biological concept of race.
What he identifies as a shift from the one-drop rule to the no-drop rule
of racial identity, exemplified by the Phipps case,29 is apparent in the
redefinition of race as a "social concept" in the influential work of Omi
and Winant (1994). While Omi and Winant present racial identity as the
outcome of social construction, Michaels faults this conceptualization as
inevitably producing an essentialized vision of race as social construction
(the no-drop rule).30The problem of essentialism for contemporary antiessentialist critiques of race is bound up with the insistence that
27'"If any gift of particular fitness, begged, unearned, lies anywhere in an individual or an
association, it lies there, in the natural or ethnic group. That imparts to it its first impulsion,
its characteristic skill, and its spontaneous direction. All else is acquired" (Kallen, 1970,
cited in Michaels 1995:144, n. 14).
28As Herskovits noted, Zora Neale Hurston, his research assistant, was "'more White than
Negro in her ancestry,' but her 'motor behavior' was 'typically Negro' " (cited in Michaels, 1995:125).
291InJane Doe v. State of Loluisiana, Susie Phipp's challenge to her racial reclassification from
"white" to "colored" was rejected by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which declared
racial identity to be the product of "social and cultural perceptions" (Michaels, 1995:130).
For extended discussions of this case, see Dominguez (1986) and Davis (1992).
-' 'Omi and Winant cite two 'temptations' that they believe must be resisted in thinking about
race: the first is the temptation 'to think of race as an essence, as something fixed, concrete
and objective'; the second is 'to see it as a mere illusion' [Omi and Winant, 1994:68]. Their
point, of course, is that in seeing race as a social construction we can avoid both the
temptations. But if to see race as social construction is inevitably (even if unwillingly and
unknowingly) to essentialize it, then race really is either an essence or an illusion" (Michaels,
1995:134; emphasis in original).
Social Theory Across Disciplinary Boundaries
565
.
the problem with the biology of individual racial identity is that it's essentialist
rather than false. Transforming the question of whether or not there is such a thing
as individual racial identity into the question of whether or not race is an 'essence'
and thus deploying race as the ground of the question rather than as its object, this
debate reinvigorates and relegitimates race as a category of analysis. (Michaels,
1995:134-135; emphasis in original)
Theoretical Accounts of Constitutive Force: The Process of
Social Signification
The works of Chauncey, Lott, and Michaels are firmly rooted in contemporary cultural studies. Like much recent work in history, American
studies, and literary criticism, each author places representations, practices,
and texts at the center of broader social analyses of gay male identity,
working-class cultural performances of race, and the public discourses of
Americanness and racial difference. Embedded within each study is an
implicit theory of the constitutive force of the social. This implicit theory
articulates constitutive force as the process of social signification discussed
above, the cultural process of making and unmaking social categories (identities), social meanings (evaluative standards), and the relationships between categories and meanings (vertical hierarchies and horizontal associations).
Each of the books illuminates antecedent processes of social signification (see Fig. 3). Chauncey shows the constitutive force of a relatively open
field of sexual signifiers and the effects of the narrowing of this field on
the creation of hierarchies among social categories (working-class fairy,
middle-class queer), horizontal associations (fairy and queer; trade, wolf,
jock), and the configuration of the boundaries of public and private (gay
Process of Social Sienification
Social Objects
Chauncey
stylizeddisplayof sexual
identity
4
formsof gay sexualpractice,
classinflectedhierarchies
of sexual
identity
Lott
"minstrelization"
4
racialandclasscategoriesand
boundaries
Michaels
discursivelogic of aesthetic
creation
*
Americanness
anddifference
(racialandcultural);
hierarchization
of difference
andpluralization
Fig. 3. Constitutive force.
Lee
566
identity was enacted in public spaces, social gatherings, etc.). This approach
takes in a wide range of social practices and demonstrates how they interacted as an outcome of representational actions (what I have termed the
stylized display of sexual identity). Lott defamiliarizes the familiar interpretations of blackface as either an authentic expression of American culture
or as a simply racist depiction of Blacks. Rather than accepting these
oppositions one-sidedly, he treats blackface performance as dualistic, as a
"site of struggle in and over the culture of black people." Lott, in contrast
to Chauncey, exams a single cultural form, blackface performance, as a
constitutive process. Enabled by this epistemological stance toward the
object of analysis, Lott traces out from this emergent cultural form various
negotiations and appropriations of cultural representations of black culture
in the New World. Blackface was used to construct moral boundaries
between working- and middle-class aesthetic sensibilities, between artisanal
labor and capitalist employers, between the Northern white working-class
and enslaved Blacks; it expressed the existence of homoerotic desire between white and black men, and served as a vehicle for the airing of sectional
disputes over slavery. In the process, Lott also reveals the making of whiteness through an investment in representations of blackness.3' As a result,
blackface performance becomes an experimental setting in which the social
category of race is constituted, rehearsed, displayed, and consumed.
In comparison to Chauncey and Lott, Walter Benn Michaels offers
the most explicit theoretical reflection on the constitutive force of social signification:
Thus, although the move from racial identity to cultural identity appears to replace
essentialist criteria of identity (who we are) with performative criteria (what we
do), the commitment to pluralism requires in fact that the question of who we are
continue to be understood as prior to questions about what we do. Since, in pluralism,
what we do can be justified only by reference to who we are, we must, in pluralism,
begin by affirming who we are . . . it is only when we know which race we are
that we can tell which culture is ours. (Michaels, 1995:14-15)
The condition of possibility for the representation of Americanness and
difference in various forms of public discourse is the discursive logic deployed to define and give meaning to social identities, and to arrange these
identities in social space. Progressive nativism uses the signifier of the racial
nation to establish an American identity (which could be achieved via a
specific sociohistorical process: legal immigration), and to establish hierarchy based on racial identity. However, modernist nativism both detaches
cultural identity from sociohistorical referents in the present and ascribes
individual identity to a prior group identity. The logic of modernist nativism
3"Thegrowing literature on "whiteness" includes most prominently Roediger (1994, 1991),
Saxton (1990), and Rogin (1996, 1994, 1992).
Social Theory Across Disciplinary Boundaries
567
depoliticizes and essentializes identity; it detaches the sign from any referent
in the present and detaches social identity from politics; hence, cultural
(i.e., racial) origin remains the unavoidable goal. We can read these different
logics as showing the distinction, and conflict, between the discourse of
state and of nation. The former connects identity to practices via the political
language of citizenship (achieved identity); the latter, rooted in cultural
origins, depends on a refusal of the political language of citizenship.
ESTABLISHING A DIALOGUE BETWEEN CULTURAL STUDIES
AND SOCIOLOGY
How might sociology incorporate these insights from cultural studies
into its canonical repertoire? To be sure, such insights pose a direct challenge to much contemporary sociological research that stops short of asking
the fundamental epistemological question about the social categories it
deploys: What are the processes of possibility for objects like race, gender,
status, agency, resistance, etc.? Rather than rejecting this challenge, sociologists should embrace it: the question of conditions and processes of possibility is not the privileged domain of cultural historians and literary critics. I
want to suggest how an analytical idiom drawn from cultural studies might
find common ground within sociology. What I am describing in this idiom
is a series of emphases, questions, and rephrasings of classical problems in
the measurement of social force. Each component of this idiom avoids
the two types of conflation discussed earlier by directing our attention to
antecedent, constitutive processes. This series comprises a coherent field
of theoretical reflection; that is, each component sustains the others.
Defamiliarization: Historicizing the Process of Social Signification
Few sociologists would deny that history is an important dimension
of empirical research or theoretical innovation. The rise of comparative and
historical sociology over the last 30 years and the important contributions of
distinguished scholars working with history has been well documented
(Skocpol, 1984). Harking back to the classical texts of Marx, Durkheim, and
Weber, historical sociologists like Charles Tilly, Theda Skocpol, Reinhard
Bendix, and Barrington Moore have taken up the classical problems of
sociological explanation: modernization, social order, and revolution. However, much of the recent debate within comparative and historical sociology
has focused on the particular problems related to the merger of the subject
matter and methods of the disparate fields of history and sociology: the
role of theory in historical sociology, and the opposition between causality
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and narrative in comparative-historical analyses. Regarding theoretical explanation, Edgar Kiser and Michael Hechter have argued that much of the
work classified as comparative and historical sociology fails to "employ
rigorous methods of data collection and validation," and hence fails to
"[specify] both causal relations between variables (including models that
indicate how causal factors are interrelated) and the mechanisms responsible for producing these relations" (Kiser and Hechter, 1991:4). An opposed
assessment of the state of historical sociology is offered by Andrew Abbott,
who is largely critical of variable-centered approaches to the study of history
(Abbott, 1994). He asserts the importance of narrative explanation in his
claim that both stochastic and narrative approaches share this common
basis: ". . . both regard narration as the final form of explanation . . .
careful reading shows that the language of 'variables causing things' is
merely a shorthand; stochastic writers fall back on stories or 'plausible
mechanisms,' when they must defend or support particular assertions about
variables" (Abbott, 1990:143). Recently, Margaret Somers has staked out
a new task for historical sociology in her proposal for a "historical sociology
of concept formation" (Somers, 1995).32
A more fundamental problem is veiled by the particular focus of
these debates. The argument over the treatment of history as a variable
rather than as a process has significant implications for normal social
scientific practice. However, it does not reach another level of analysis
on which historical thinking might contribute to sociological thought, a
level that is addressed in cultural studies. I am referring to the notion
that the most basic concepts and categories of the discipline, not to
mention its inherited problematic theory of societal modernization, are
themselves the product of specific sociohistorical contexts. Categories
like social class, race, gender, sexuality, liberal and conservative, and
social problems like modernization, poverty, and inequality, gain their
meaning within specific domains of expert discourse and popular knowledge. Frequently, these social-scientific categories cannot be easily distinguished from lay knowledge of the social world. As the studies of Lott
and Michaels demonstrate, the concept of race as it is operationalized
in standard survey data fails to capture the process through which the
category of race has come to have meaning and to exert a structuring
effect. The procedure that aggregates individuals under the category of
race reproduces a social collectivity whose identity has long been the
object of political, legal, and cultural contestation (see Davis, 1992;
Dominguez, 1986).
32However,to the extent that Somers grounds her analysis in history conceived as an irreducible
foundation of knowledge, this proposal remains within the relatively well-established terms
of the traditional sociological canon. This view of history has been directly challenged by
Hayden White (1987).
Social Theory Across Disciplinary Boundaries
569
It is at this level of sociological analysis that the relevance of the
theoretical idiom of cultural studies for defamiliarizing the familiar is
most forcefully apparent. In the absence of historical thinking about
social categories, there lie the dangers of the disciplinary reproduction
of the ideological objects (notiones vulgares) that Durkheim (1982:60)
dismissed as prescientific and the problem of essentialism. Only by
initially treating the categories of sociological knowledge as historically
bounded can these two unsatisfactory outcomes be provisionally negotiated. In other words, this means sociologists must be sensitive to the
historical context within which social objects are constructed by the
processes of social signification.
Refiguring the Problem of Representation
The notion that sociological thought should be aware of the historical
specificity of its categories cuts across another component of the idiom of
cultural studies: representation. The critical interrogation of representation
in cultural studies can be traced to long-standing debates arising from
hermeneutic philosophy, semiotics, the structuralist paradigm in linguistics,
and most recently, the poststructuralist turn in literary criticism. I will only
direct attention to the set of arguments that concern representation-that
is, those words, images, symbols, etc., which are typically treated in sociology
as entities that stand for something else; either for the intentionality of a
social actor or some type of extradiscursive material condition (e.g., social
class, gender, race).
Three possible underlying assumptions motivate the conventional sociological perspective on representation: (1) social agents themselves are
the ground of representational practices that can be associated with the
intentions of the agents, (2) these representations can be explained by the
social structural situation of the social agent, or (3) representational practices are associated with the rational preferences of social agents. While
these assumptions are often taken for granted in sociology, they have been
fruitfully interrogated in structuralist and poststructuralist cultural theory.
Whereas structuralist criticism deemphasizes the author/subject, poststructuralism calls into question the objectivity of the sign (representation).33
"3JosueHarari offers a succinct statement of the general direction of structuralist and poststructuralist criticism (two of the epistemological poles of cultural studies) in the area of representation: "if structuralism has attempted, philosophically, a radical dismissal of the speaking
subject, it has, on the other hand, never put the sign, in its essential structure, into question.
The most fundamental difference between the structuralist and poststructuralist enterprises
can be seen in the shift from the problematic of the subject to the deconstruction of the
concept of representation" (Harari, 1979:29). Also, see the treatment of the problem of
representation in Foucault (1991, 1977).
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Structuralism challenges the sovereignty of the author-her subjective mastery of her own objectifications. Poststructuralism calls into question the
stability of the sign (representation).34One important consequence of the
critique of assumptions about the sign is that the instability of representations can be understood as the discursive nexus in which social categories,
identities, and forms of knowledge are constituted.35
The implications of these analytical orientations for sociology are twofold. First, structuralism suggests that representational practices, the making
of meaning through the process of social signification, are reducible neither
to the intentionality or rational preferences of social agents, nor to subjectively held interests deduced from social structural conditions. Instead,
the field of representational practices (discourses, categories, meanings)
constitutes the condition of possibility for the meaning-making activities
of social agents. Second, poststructuralism suggests that the social categories
deployed as independent variables in sociological analysis as representations of concrete phenomena-variables like race, class, or gender-are
unstable, contradictory, and yet consequential-i.e., socially effective outcomes of episodes of social signification.
It is important to remember, however, that the structured and structuring effects of the force of social signification do not lie in symbols or genres
themselves but in social usages (see Bourdieu, 1991, 1990, 1984, 1977).
Contrary to Derrida's (1976:159) view, that reading "must be intrinsic and
remain within the text," the concept of social signification implies that the
text must be read relationally and in context (but not reduced to context).
This means that symbolic forms and discursive practices can be read as
objects that are embedded within specific institutions, and material and
symbolic conflicts, as well as being the discursive means through which
institutions and conflicts acquire social meaning. This qualification is applicable, for example, to the argument that it is primarily the nontotalizing
-'Hayden White has extended the critique of representation to the most elemental method
of representation in the social sciences: narrative. He argues that the distinction between
history and fiction "presupposes a notion of reality in which 'the true' is identified with 'the
real' only insofar as it can be shown to possess the character of narrativity" (White, 1987:6).
35Forexample, Sedgwick (1990:9-10) articulates the instability of symbolic forms in the context
of the heterosexual/homosexual binary. "The analytic move [in this book] is to demonstrate
that categories presented in culture as symmetrical binary oppositions-heterosexual/homosexual in this case-actually subsist in a more unsettled and dynamic tacit relation according
to which, first, term B is not symmetrical with but subordinated to term A; but, second,
the ontologically valorized term A actually depends for its meaning on the simultaneous
subsumption and exclusion of term B; hence, third, the question of priority between the
supposed central and the supposed marginal category of each dyad is irresolvably unstable,
and instability cause by the fact that term B is constituted as at once internal and external
to term A."
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571
and contradictory nature of words or symbols themselves that enables social
agents to use representations in ideological conflicts.36
Reflexive Epistemology
Hence, neither representationsas objects of analysis nor the representational mode of analysis is taken for granted in the idiom of cultural studies.
When combined with historicizing the process of social signification, the
explicit concern with representation implies a third component of the analytical idiom of cultural studies. This component can be termed a reflexive
epistemology. Bederman (1995:24) summarizes what I consider to be two
key principles of this epistemology: (1) it does not "differentiate between
intellectual ideas and material practices, or between superstructure and
base. Discourses include both intellectual constructs and material practices"; (2) "this methodology assumes that ideas and practices comprising
any discourse will be multiple, inconsistent, and contradictory."37An analytical approach operating on the basis of these principles refuses the simple
a priori assignment of characteristics like material or ideal to social phenomena; an assignment that makes implicit assumptions about the "hardness"
and "softness" of phenomena and grants causal priority to the former. This
means that social phenomena are treated dualistically, as possessing both
material and ideal effects; it means treating culture as a structure (see
Sewell, 1992). In addition, such an approach rejects the methodological
fixing of dynamic processes as static variables. The texts discussed above
show how the universalization of categories over time and space that is
characteristic of sociology's presentist methodological canon can be quite
misleading. The meanings of homosexuality, race, and American identity
are, as Bederman suggests, multiple, inconsistent, and contradictory.
A reflexive epistemological approach to the theoretical construction
and empirical measurement of social objects is perhaps the most difficult
dimension of the idiom of cultural studies to reconcile with existing sociological thinking, which holds fast to materialist visions of the division of labor
'See, for example, Bederman's (1995:10) assertion concerning gender ideologies in the United
States during the Progressive Era: "In other words, ideologies of gender are not totalizing.
Like all ideologies, they are internally contradictory. Because of these internal contradictions,
and because ideologies come into conflict with other ideologies, men and women are able
to influence the ongoing ideological processes of gender, even though they cannot escape
them." Against this view, it is reasonable to ask whether it is this contradiction internal to
gender ideologies or, rather, the contradiction between gender ideologies and actual social
practices that makes the internal contradictions of the discourse of universal male supremacy
socially meaningful.
37Forexamples of the first principle, see Hunt (1984) and Biernacki (1995).
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572
(Durkheim) and market economy (Marx). Reflexive epistemological thinking boils down to the following proposition: the existing social and cultural
structures that are taken for granted as the real ground of social science
(social facts) are arbitrary constructions, which, nonetheless, have real effects on the life chances of individuals. Far from being premised on an
antiscientific, antisociological, or relativist standpoint, the epistemology of
cultural studies enjoins us to make explicit what would otherwise remain
hidden, the undisclosed prestructuring of the social world (its objects,
agents, and practices) that is entailed by an unreflexive use of concepts
and methods.
For example, Joan Scott has shown the importance of such an epistemological approach with respect to the theoretical attribution of agency and
resistance to dominated social groups. The appeal to the category of experience as the basis of difference and resistance ends up weakening the critical
stance of the knowledge that is derived from such an appeal. Rather than
"exploring how difference is established, how it operates, how and in what
ways it constitutes subjects who see and act in the world," these modes of
analysis "naturalize difference" by locating "resistance outside its discursive
construction and reify[ing] agency as an inherent attribute of individuals,
thus decontextualizing it" (Scott, 1991:777). She argues that "we need to
attend to the historical process that, through discourse, position subjects
and produce their experiences. It is not individuals who have experience,
but subjects who are constituted through experience" (Scott, 1991:779).
The claim that the experience of individuals is constituted through discourse
is an important critique of both social structuralist and phenomenological
explanations.38
The Poetics of Social Signification: Effects of Constitutive Force
What is the force of symbolic forms? A fourth component of the
idiom of cultural studies concerns the effects of constitutive force-namely,
in this definition then becomes not the origin of our explanation, not the
authoritative (because seen or felt) evidence that grounds what is known, but rather that
which we seek to explain, that about which knowledge is produced. To think about experience
in this way is to historicize it as well as to historicize the identities it produces" (Scott,
1991:779-780). Phenomenologists have long asserted that experience is constituted through
discourse. However, poststructuralists like Joan Scott or Pierre Bourdieu diverge from social
phenomenology over the status of discourse. Discourse is construed as a structure that exists
outside of the conscious control of speakers; it sets the boundary conditions for the generation
of social interactions and social identities. Phenomenologists tend to construe discourse (or
communication) as the vehicle for expressing meaning apart from inquiry into the structural
conditions of possibility for speech-namely, the competence or qualification of individuals
to speak and the impact of hierarchies of legitimate and illegitimate speech.
38"Experience
Social Theory Across Disciplinary Boundaries
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power. Among the classical theorists, cultural phenomena are conceptualized in different ways. For Marx, who asserted that ideas have no history,
mental constructs of the social world serve primarily as vehicles of false
consciousness, prior to the merging of theory and practice in the consciousness of a revolutionary proletariat.39Categories such as democracy, the
individual, and property reflect basic material interests built upon social
relations but are misrecognized as such by the bourgeois mind. For Durkheim, norms and beliefs are treated as having a causal efficacy that is similar
to those exerted by physical conditions. In contrast to Marx, Durkheim
does not reduce such social facts to material interests, but rather locates
their source in the evolution of the division of labor and the demarcation
of the sacred. Weber, in contradistinction to both Marx and Durkheim,
grants a quasi-independent existence and priority to "ideal interests" in
his famous switchman metaphor. Nonetheless, all three theorists locate the
effects of "culture" at the subjective level.40
The recent trend in cultural sociology toward treating cultural phenomena as external, observable entities was precipitated by poststructuralist
theory and has been put into practice in cultural studies. Symbolic power
is given a different valence in the idiom of cultural studies than is the case
in classical social theory. As evidenced in the work of Stephen Greenblatt,
such power cannot simply be conceived along the vertical axis of the subordinate and subaltern, of a dominant and a dominated public sphere. Moreover, it cannot be attributed to the economic power of class actors or
cultural producers. On the contrary, Greenblatt perceives this form of
power as being embedded inside the cultural products of Renaissance
culture, especially in the plays of Shakespeare. Power circulates via its
inscription in symbolic forms. Greenblatt terms his approach a "poetics of
culture." His specific interest in Shakespearean drama is to explain the
intensity of the works that can still be experienced today: "For me the
inquiry is bound up with a specific interest in Renaissance modes of aesthetic
empowerment: I want to know how cultural objects, expressions, and practices-here, principally, plays by Shakespeare and the stage on which they
first appeared-acquired compelling force" (Greenblatt, 1988:5).
Greenblatt notes that Shakespeare's contemporaries needed a new
word to describe this "compelling force." The word energia (Gr. energy)
39"Morality,religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of
consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history,
no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their
thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life" (Marx, 1978:154155).
'See Wuthnow (1987:23-34). On Weber and Parsons, see Swidler (1986).
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was used by George Puttenham; Greenblatt proposes a social and historical
meaning for this term rather than the one taken from physics.
But what is "social energy"? The term implies something measurable, yet I cannot
provide a convenient and reliable formula for isolating a single, stable quantum
for examination. We identify energia only indirectly, by its effects: it is manifested
in the capacity to produce, shape, and organize collective and physical mental
experiences. . . Whereas most collective expressions moved from their original
setting to a new place or time are dead on arrival, the social energy encoded in
certain works of art continues to generate the illusion of life for centuries. I want
to understand the negotiations through which works of art obtain and amplify such
powerful energy. (Greenblatt, 1988:67)
This notion of social energy is useful to elaborate the force of social signification and can be understood sociologically. The power of social signification, which operates through the use of symbolic forms, is the capacity
to shape identities, construct hierarchies, and define the boundaries of
legitimate knowledge of the social world. When construed via the concept
of social signification, this energy can be understood as having real effects
on the structuring of the social world. These effects are not limited to the
institutional dimensions of power (e.g., law, science, art, religion) that are
predicated upon them. Rather, sets of social signification congeal relationally as a discursive field (epist&me) or boundary condition. Within this
field, the conditions of possibility of semantic and experiential reproduction
and transformation are the object of symbolic struggles.
Based on these four theoretical components, history, representation,
epistemology, and the social poetics of power, it becomes clear why identity
has become one of the keywords in cultural studies. The emergence of this
key word is not entirely explained by the empirical phenomenon of identity
politics. It is better understood as being rooted in the theoretical idiom of
cultural studies. If the conventional catcgories of sociohistorical analysis
are thrown into question theoretically by thinking which is sensitive to
historical context, the logic of representation. and the symbolic conditions
of possibility, then the categories themselves become a fruitful site for the
investigation of processes and the power dynamics of social signification.
FROM DUSK TO DAWN: RECASTING THE
SOCIOLOGICAL METHOD
Reflecting on the state of post-World War II sociology, Alvin Gouldner
announced the coming crisis of sociology in 1970. The central aspect of
this crisis involved what Gouldner described as the entropy of functionalist
theory (i.e., Parsons and his followers) and Academic Sociology. The radical
sociology of the 1960s and Marxism (in his view, the structural equivalent
Social Theory Across Disciplinary Boundaries
575
of academic sociology) presented both a challenge and opportunity to
institutional sociology. He predicted that "to the degree that such interaction [between Academic Sociology and Marxism] grows, the basic structural
cleavage in world social theory between Academic Sociology and Marxism,
a cleavage that has persisted since the nineteenth century, will move to a new
historical level and, partly through the struggle between these viewpoints, it
may be that a new theoretical synthesis (not simply a compromise) is being
developed" (Gouldner, 1970:438-439).
Twenty-five years later, Jeffrey Alexander describes a different crisis
facing sociology, the "crisis of reason." This contemporary crisis has called
forth two unsatisfactory responses in social theory: (1) the rejection of
modernity, relativism, and anti foundationalism; and (2) theoretical reductionism, which treats reason as a strategy, as "tools to accumulate power,"
and as "a strategy for domination" (Alexander, 1995:3). Alexander argues
that "relativism and reductionism . . . again threaten to displace more
reason-centered forms of thought" as they did at the end of the 19th century.
"The ideas of the turn-of-the-century founders of social theory can guide
us in formulating an appropriate response, but they must be deepened,
more firmly grounded in postpositivism, and pushed beyond the moral and
empirical cul-de-sac created by thinking about contemporary history in
relation to 'modernization'" (Alexander, 1995:5).
How did we get from there to here? As Gouldner predicted,
mainstream social science and Marxist sociology have reached a comfortable level of synthesis. It is the challenge to this synthesis by postmodernists and neomodernists4" that raises the specter Alexander describes as
a crisis of reason. Without fully subscribing to Alexander's world historical
diagnosis of the state of social theory today, I would nevertheless posit
that sociology faces a crisis. However, this crisis is not based on the
war of maneuver, the frontal assault of postmodernists against sociological
reason. Rather, the current crisis is propelled by the war of position
waged by evolutionary social genetics and theories of intelligence, neo
classical economic theory, rational choice theory, and communitarianinflected social philosophy. These incursions lay siege to the privileged
terrain of the sociologist: the force of the social. Downwardly conflated
categories make easy targets for debunking by these competing approaches.
4"FollowingTiryakian (1991), Alexander (1995:32-35) notes the emergence of a neomodernist
intellectual orientation, which he relates to the revivals of market economies and civil societies
in the former communist states. Under neomodernism, he groups works in rational choice
(Nee, 1989; Pzeworski, 1991) and economic sociology (Granovetter, 1974, 1985; Granovetter
and Swedberg, 1992).
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I have argued that theoretical innovations developed in cultural studies
offer a set of useful orientations that would allow sociologists to respond
more adequately to these challenges. The rich array of strategies for handling symbolic phenomena that have been developed in cultural studies can
and should supplement sociology's strength in the analysis of institutional
structures. In return, sociology can provide an important corrective to onesided, text-centered cultural studies influenced by Derrida's assertion il n'y
a pas de hors-texte ("there is nothing outside of the text").42This beneficial
outcome can only be short-circuited by superficial readings, hasty rejections,
and defensive postures that risk cutting off sociology's intellectual engagement with a significant body of research into the constitutive processes of
social life. There is much room for sociology to learn from cultural studies.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank Catherine O'Leary, the participants in the Culture and
Society Workshop at Northwestern University, and several anonymous
reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
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