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Durkheimian Cultural Sociology and Cultural Studies

Kenneth Thompson
Thesis Eleven 2004; 79; 16
DOI: 10.1177/0725513604046952

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DURKHEIMIAN CULTURAL
SOCIOLOGY AND CULTURAL
STUDIES

Kenneth Thompson

ABSTRACT Alexander has made a major contribution to the development of

a neo-Durkheimian cultural sociology. Two central elements have been: the
semiotic analysis of sacred symbols and rituals that evoke the solidarity
attached to the idealized nation; analysis of structures and processes that con-
stitute a civil society. Some questions can be raised. The first concerns the
tensions between ethnic-nationalisms and the kind of culture of civil society
that is said to be congruent with the liberal-democratic state. Secondly, not all
groups share the binary constructions of the civil code of liberal democracy.
Thirdly, more attention needs to be given to the relationship between the
rational public sphere and the spheres of entertainment and popular culture.
Cultural studies of popular genre, such as television talk shows, reveal that,
rather than exhibiting universal characteristics of liberal-democratic society,
these public cultural performances reproduce the particularities of national
differences.
KEYWORDS civil society • culture • Durkheim • liberal democracy • talk
shows.

INTRODUCTION
It is not without significance that it was on the eve of the collapse of
the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe that Jeffrey Alexander published
the edited volume, Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies (Alexander,
1988). One of the central themes of that book was the political relevance of
Durkheim’s later ‘religious sociology’ for an understanding of fundamental
political processes, such as how political upheavals can be viewed as
attempts to revive or renew the sacredness of the nation over against the
profanations of the state (Alexander, 1988: 12). (Max Weber made the point
Thesis Eleven, Number 79, November 2004: 16–24
SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
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DOI: 10.1177/0725513604046952

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Thompson: Durkheimian Cultural Sociology 17

that the nation is a cultural phenomenon, whereas the state is an organized

structure; Weber, 1968: 922.) Although few people predicted the suddenness
of the political and economic collapse of those regimes, it was becoming
evident that they were morally bankrupt and had failed to live up to social
ideals, whether of utopian socialism or nationalism. Furthermore, they had
failed to find a balance between society and the individual. The state had
squeezed much of the life out of the civil society that should have provided
the space in which individuals could express themselves and might freely
communicate and debate their concerns.
These two thematic elements have remained central to Alexander’s
cultural sociology:
1. Semiotic analysis of the binary structuring of the sacred symbols
(and rituals) that express and evoke the solidarity attached to the ‘imagined
community’ of the idealized nation.
2. The operation of structures and processes that constitute a civil
society.
Before examining how these themes have been developed, it is worth
highlighting the significance of Alexander’s efforts to shift sociology
(especially American sociology) in a more ‘cultural’ direction. Of course, he
has not been alone in this endeavour. The ‘cultural turn’ has been proceed-
ing for some three decades at least, most notably in European sociology. But
he has attempted to propel it forward in a particularly interesting direction
and within a professional context (the ‘scientistic’ ethos of some parts of
American sociology) that is not altogether sympathetic towards such a
development.

CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY
In the heyday of sociology’s expansion during the two decades after
the Second World War, there was little sign of a return to Durkheim’s idea
that ‘essentially social life is made up of representations’ (Durkheim, 1951:
312) and that these collective representations included all ‘the ways in which
the group conceives of itself in relation to objects which affect it’ (Durkheim,
1938: xlix). At the most fundamental level, what Durkheim called the ‘collec-
tive conscience’ (or ‘consciousness’), these collective representations
expressed society’s moral values. In recent years, there has been a decided
return to ethical and moral concerns in sociology (Alexander, 2000). This
was not the case in the post-war years, when it was believed that morality
should not be allowed to feature directly in social science. As Alexander
pointed out, that position was possible to hold because the moral seemed
imminent in the progressively unfolding historical progress that was called
modernization, which often included the welfare state as part of its unfold-
ing. The first stirrings against this optimism occurred in the radical student

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18 Thesis Eleven (Number 79 2004)

movement of the 1960s, which raised questions about the adequacy and
reality of this progress. In the 1970s there was a further reaction, this time
from the economic and political Right, which took the ‘discourse of liberty’
in a different direction, portraying the welfare state in terms of excessive col-
lectivism and a brake on individual freedom and enterprise. Sociology was
accused of being inherently biased in favour of collectivism. It particularly
provoked the ire of the New Right politicians, such as the British Prime
Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who once went so far as to assert that there is
no such thing as society – only individuals and families.
Some sociologists responded by developing new ‘realisms’, in certain
cases leaving academic sociology for more ‘useful’ and approved areas such
as business studies and management consultancy. Others reacted in a ‘world
weary’ way by turning to nihilistic theories of power and violence, or theories
of postmodernity that pictured the social as a hall of mirrors, where there
were only images, playfulness and relativism. Those who remained com-
mitted to the moral project of creating an ethical society, but one not based
on an imminent unfolding process of modernization, have sought to ground
their claims for a better life in less universal, but more culturally delimited
and specific historical domains. This is the approach of the so-called ‘com-
munitarians’ (e.g. Richard Rorty, Michael Walzer and Charles Taylor). Rather
than seeking to generalize about universal moral truths and values, they have
sought to infuse the micro-spaces of delimited institutional domains, of
concrete interactions, and of particular religious, civilizational, and national
cultures, with an ethical light. Emphasizing the historical boundedness and
partiality of the lifeworlds of actually existing empirical societies, these
thinkers have pointed less to ‘justice’ in the totalizing sense than to the
importance of pluralism, tolerance and simple human recognition
(Alexander, 2000: 274).
The communitarians tend to suggest that societies are divided into
different spheres, each with its own moral criteria as to how its particular
kind of goods should be distributed – economic, political, familial,
communal. In other words, there are different spheres of justice, and one
should not try to impose one set of criteria on the others (Walzer, 1987, 1988).
French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot have a different
emphasis, suggesting that there are frequent efforts by groups to widen
support for their case by appealing to values in other spheres, e.g. workers
appeal to political values of citizenship and equality to argue against
narrower economic standards of efficiency (Boltanski and Thevenot, 1991).
Alexander believes that social movements that aim to gain widespread
attention and support tend to move beyond the boundaries of their particu-
lar sphere and appeal to values and symbols that are part of an idealized
version of their society. He calls this the idealized ‘civil society’. It entails dis-
courses and symbols that are structured in sets of binary oppositions, such
as between good and evil, us and them, democratic and counter-democratic.

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Thompson: Durkheimian Cultural Sociology 19

Because of the western world’s shared historical heritage, dating back to

Ancient Israel and Classical Greece, western societies tend to share many of
the same forms of discourse and symbols in their idealised civil society.
However, as each society also has somewhat different historical components,
there are also differences in the forms taken by the binary oppositions and
in the ways these are summoned up and articulated in public controversies.
For example, Britain and America have some historical elements in common
as well as some differences:
Every nation has a myth of origin, which anchors this discourse in an account
of the historical events involved in its early formation. Like their English com-
patriots, early Americans believed their rights to have emerged from the ancient
constitution of the 11th-century Anglo-Saxons, the same courageously inde-
pendent and heroic group who had been resurrected to legitimate the English
revolutionaries’ struggle against royal authority. The specifically American
discourse of liberty was first elaborated in accounts of the communities formed
by rational and self-disciplined Puritan saints and later in stories about the
revolutionary heroes. It was woven into the myth of the virtuous, highly indi-
vidualistic yeoman farmer who first settled America’s ‘virgin land’, then into
tales about hard-working, straight-talking, and honest shooting cowboys who
civilised the West; and still later, with urbanisation, into pulp stories about
detectives who worked tirelessly for the public good and who resembled the
cowboys and Western sheriffs in every way other than name. . . . Later in the
mid-20th century, this narrative hero became the FBI agent or ‘G-Man’, whom
Richard Gid Powers describes as that ‘startlingly intelligent hero’ who played
the central role in Hollywood movies and later American television. (Alexander,
2000: 304–5)

There is much to be admired in this depiction of the narratives and dis-

course that have enshrined the ideology of American civil society. It is
extremely useful when Alexander deconstructs such narratives into binary
sets of good and evil characteristics. For example, in his case study of the
Watergate crisis and its unfolding as a public drama of ritual cleansing, he
traced the transition from one set of binary symbolic classifications to another
in the course of the ‘purging’ process. It is particularly instructive for the
ways in which he pinpoints and analyses the dynamics of the process,
slotting specific personalities and events into the classificatory scheme
(Alexander, 1988). Subsequently, he and his former students (notably, Philip
Smith, 1998) have gone beyond the particular case of American civil religion
and drawn up binary codes that they take to be characteristic of the demo-
cratic discourse of civil society in all liberal-democratic societies. As
Alexander states:
Democratic discourse, then, posits the following qualities as axiomatic:
activism, autonomy, rationality, reasonableness, calm, control, realism, and
sanity. The nature of the counter-code, the discourse that justifies the restric-
tion of civil society, is already clearly implied. If actors are passive and

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20 Thesis Eleven (Number 79 2004)

dependent, irrational and hysterical, excitable, passionate, unrealistic or mad,

they cannot be allowed the freedom that democracy allows. (Alexander, 2000:
299)

Smith describes the code of liberal democracy in terms of the binary

opposites of the sacred and profane. The sacred is characterized by an
emphasis on: order, the individual, reason, activism, law, equality, inclusive-
ness, and autonomy. Whereas the profane involves: disorder, group,
emotion, passivity, power, hierarchy, exclusiveness, and dependence (Smith,
1998: 120).
However, a few questions might be asked about what it leaves out or
marginalizes, such as whether Alexander is justified in suggesting that it is
shared by and appealed to by all groups in the national society, as claimed
in his statement that:
Within the confines of a particular national community, the binary codes and
concrete representations that make up the discourse of civil society typically
are not segmented by the ideologies of different social groups. To the contrary,
even in societies that are wrought by intensive social conflict the same
constructions of civic virtue and civic vice are widely accepted by both sides.
(Alexander, 2000: 305–6)

However, if we return to the earlier distinction between nation and

state, we are likely to find that, increasingly in multicultural societies, the
national element is not always firmly anchored to, or supportive of, the
culture of civil society that is congruent with the liberal-democratic state. This
becomes evident once we reflect on the images summoned up by the term
‘nationalism’. The highly charged binary symbolic structures that construct
nationalisms are also highly particularistic and often opposed to the more
universalistic symbols and values that are typical of civil society in liberal
democracies. In the past we have seen clashes between the symbols and
values of nationalisms (or ethnicities) and those of ‘mainstream’ civil society,
as in the cases of the Black Panthers and Black Muslims. Now it is likely to
arise over transnational diasporic ethnicities, such as the religious national-
ism of Hindu Indian-Americans, Muslim Pakistani-Americans, Palestinian-
Americans, Israeli-Jewish-Americans. Of course, it is frequently the case that
these groups seek to broaden political support for their cause by appealing
to wider values of American civil society. But this is only part of the story.
It tends to equate civil society with ‘normal’ political processes – appeals to
a consensual set of values. But ethnic-nationalisms are culturally significant
and of sociological interest precisely because of their totalizing, expressive-
emotional, particularisms, rather than because they are similar to all other
liberal-democratic political processes.
A further area that deserves more consideration is that of the relation-
ship between the rational public sphere, that Habermas and others see as
central to the civil society of liberal democracy, and the sphere of

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Thompson: Durkheimian Cultural Sociology 21

entertainment and popular culture that increasingly permeates civil society.

An example would be the increasing prominence of television talk shows
(especially on 24-hour cable channels), where moral and political issues are
discussed at length, using various formats, some with audience participation,
others with a mixture of experts and ‘ordinary people’. (It would be inter-
esting to compare the media coverage of Watergate in the earlier period with
the role of the talk shows and cable channels in the coverage of recent
scandals, such as the Clinton-Lewinsky affair.) It is at this point that cultural
studies (especially studies of different media formats and styles), viewed
more broadly than that part identified as cultural sociology, may have more
to contribute to sociology than is yet apparent from Alexander’s (and Smith’s)
accounts. It is particularly relevant in developing an appreciation of the
cultural differences between various national imagined communities and the
significance of these differences for the performativity of the sacred-profane
binary codes. In other words, the ways in which the binary codes are played
out or performed varies from one social formation to another.

CULTURAL STUDIES
Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field that encompasses Humani-
ties disciplines (especially literary, film and television studies) as well as
sociological studies of subcultures and the mass media. Debates about the
public sphere and the mass media have figured prominently in cultural
studies. The debate often polarizes between those who follow Habermas in
believing that the 20th century development of consumer culture and com-
modified entertainment has produced a ‘pseudo’ public sphere (Habermas,
1989), and those who take a more optimistic view and even talk of popular
culture as constituting an ‘oppositional’ public sphere, in which ordinary
people can actively participate either directly as in talk show audiences, or
as active consumers who can impose their own interpretations and values
on media content (Carpignano et al., 1990; de Certeau, 1984; Fiske, 1987;
Masciarotte, 1991).
Studies of talk shows in America and other countries provide some
interesting data on variations in the content and performance of cultural
codes between civil societies in different liberal democracies. We can see the
implications of this if we focus on just two of the polarities picked out by
Alexander and Smith: individual versus collectivity/group, and independence
versus dependence. The application of performance theory in a comparison
of American and German talk shows illustrates the different emphases given
to these values in the two societies (Krause and Goering, 1995). (In this
dramaturgical approach, performance is viewed in terms of Kenneth Burke’s
five key terms of dramatism: Act – actor roles, Scene, Agent, Agency, and
Purpose; Burke, 1969.) The differences between American and German talk
shows in these respects can be summarized as follows:

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22 Thesis Eleven (Number 79 2004)

American talk shows foreground the personality of the host/hostess

(Oprah, Donahue, Sally Jesse Raphael), whereas German talk shows may not
even be hosted by individuals, but by moderator teams, and are not named
after an individual. Guests in American talk shows are ‘ordinary’ people
whose expertise lies in personal, often traumatic experience, plus experts
who legitimate the performance, and celebrities. German talk show partici-
pants are presented less as ‘experts’ and more as representatives of a point
of view (a group or collectivity). American studio audiences function like a
Greek chorus, helping to build the drama of the performance. German studio
audiences are usually restricted to the participation of a theatre audience –
applauding, murmuring and laughing (Krause and Goering, 1995).
The function of the talk show also differs between the two societies.
The American talk show tends to reflect the value attributed to the private,
self-disclosing talk usually encountered in therapy. As members of a highly
individualistic and pragmatic society, Americans believe that people are
responsible for and capable of solving their own problems. Psychological
problem-solving via television provides an almost perfect package: the built-
in conflict, the gradually unravelling mystery, the sudden revelations, the
final resolution. In German talk shows, the private level is quickly moved
into the public realm and into agendas for social or political change.
In both Germany and America talk shows are a major voice in the
national cultural debate and reflect the familiar themes of the national narra-
tive. In America it is the primacy of the individual, a narrative rooted in the
country’s pioneer past that celebrates the self-reliance of the individual in
overcoming adversity. This focus on the individual and his or her pursuit of
happiness makes room for difference/diversity, because on the talk show
‘others’ who may be different are drawn into the fold of the national fabric.
‘After all, even sex addicts, strippers, delinquent children, and homosexuals
have rights, as individuals, to pursue happiness in their own ways’ (Krause
and Goering, 1995: 203). An example would be on the Rush Limbaugh show,
where he preaches against anything that limits individual rights.
In American talk shows, it appears as if even the country itself may be
regarded as an individual entity, almost completely self-oriented with little
acknowledgement of a larger world community. In contrast, German talk
shows constantly feature comparisons with other societies, in which
Germany is being re-narrativized through exploring different cultural charac-
teristics. In this respect, the re-narrativizing function of German talk shows
resembles that in other European countries. The American case is unusual
in the extent to which this form of popular culture promotes difference, and
yet contains it within an overall framework in which the existing cultural
narrative is revalidated and reaffirmed. In that respect, the situation in
America is closest to the Durkheimian picture of modern society celebrating
the cult of the individual, and employing public rituals to reaffirm its sacred

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Thompson: Durkheimian Cultural Sociology 23

character. A Durkheimian analysis of other civil societies, such as those in

western Europe, might be more complicated.

CONCLUSION
A conclusion to be drawn from studies of talk shows in different
societies is that, rather than exhibiting universal characteristics of liberal-
democratic civil society, they reproduce the particularities of national differ-
ences and guard cultural boundaries. The strength of Jeffrey Alexander’s
contribution to cultural sociology has been to apply Durkheimian concepts
and insights to the study of problems of civil society in liberal-democratic
states. In doing so, he has drawn out some of the cultural particularities of
American discourses. It would be interesting to see this contribution further
strengthened by taking in some of the findings from cultural studies,
especially in the area of popular culture, and from cross-cultural studies.

Kenneth Thompson is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Open University

UK, and was visiting professor at Yale University in 2002 and UCLA in 2004. He is a
member of the Executive Committee of the International Sociological Association and
a former president of the ISA research committee on Sociological Theory. His current
research interests include media regulation, moral panics, ethnicity and religion,
sociological theory and the sociology of culture. Recent publications include Emile
Durkheim (2nd edn.), Moral Panics, Media and Cultural Regulation, The Early Soci-
ology of Culture, and The Uses of Sociology. Address: Kenneth Thompson, Department
of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, Milton Keynes MK7
6AA, UK. [email: K.A.Thompson@open.ac.uk.]

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24 Thesis Eleven (Number 79 2004)

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