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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 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/685074 Accessed: 17/08/2010 00:33 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=springer. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Springer is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Sociological Forum. http://www.jstor.org 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] 547 0884-8971/99/1200-0547$16.00/0 ? 1999 Plenum Publishing Corporation 548 Lee 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). 550 Lee 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. 552 Lee 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. 553 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. 554 Lee 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). Lee 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- 558 Lee 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), Lee 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. 562 Lee 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). 564 Lee 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 568 Lee 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). 570 Lee 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." Social Theory Across Disciplinary Boundaries 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). Lee 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 573 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). 574 Lee 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). 576 Lee 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. 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