Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy

TLDR

Cultural studies have long been divided between structuralist views that treat meaning as autonomous text patterns and pragmatist views that see meaning as emerging from individual and collective actions shaped by power and material interests. The author proposes a theory of cultural pragmatics that unifies meaning structures, contingency, power, and materiality by replacing the concept of practice with a multidimensional notion of performance, arguing that social performances have become de‑fused in complex societies. Using performance studies, the theory shows that social performances—whether individual or collective—can be systematically analogized to theatrical ones, defining elements that, when fused, enable audiences to identify with actors and achieve verisimilitude through effective mise‑en‑scène. The theory finds that performances succeed only when they refuse the de‑fused elements, allowing actors to communicate meaning and pursue interests, while incomplete refusion leads to inauthentic action that fails to persuade.

Abstract

From its very beginnings, the social study of culture has been polarized between structuralist theories that treat meaning as a text and investigate the patterning that provides relative autonomy and pragmatist theories that treat meaning as emerging from the contingencies of individual and collective action—so-called practices—and that analyze cultural patterns as reflections of power and material interest. In this article, I present a theory of cultural pragmatics that transcends this division, bringing meaning structures, contingency, power, and materiality together in a new way. My argument is that the materiality of practices should be replaced by the more multidimensional concept of performances. Drawing on the new field of performance studies, cultural pragmatics demonstrates how social performances whether individual or collective can be analogized systematically to theatrical ones. After defining the elements of social performance, I suggest that these elements have become “de-fused” as societies have become more complex. Performances are successful only insofar as they can ‘“re-fuse” these increasingly disentangled elements. In a fused performance, audiences identify with actors, and cultural scripts achieve verisimilitude through effective mise-en-scène. Performances fail when this relinking process is incomplete: the elements of performance remain apart, and social action seems inauthentic and artificial, failing to persuade. Refusion, by contrast, allows actors to communicate the meanings of their actions successfully and thus to pursue their interests effectively.