Abstract
This article offers a thick description of the United States during the first nine months of the 2016 presidential election competition. It argues that this competition is organized in a theatrical way, and that this period, from April to December 2015, represents act one of the drama. It argues that performances in act one contribute to setting the cultural and interpretive conditions in which citizens will enter and act back on the drama in its subsequent acts, in state primaries and caucuses, and in the general election in November 2016. Building on the works of Roland Barthes and Clifford Geertz, the article gives a structural, or semiotic, interpretation of the dominant symbols and discourses operating in the dramatic field, and using Alexander’s cultural pragmatics, it identifies and analyzes key performances given by candidates Clinton and Trump, which crystalized particular meaning formations and lent the proceedings a sense of dynamism and flow. The article demonstrates how analyzing performances in a manner consistent with cultural pragmatic theory contributes to research on electoral politics, political authority, and legitimation processes.
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Notes
Anne Kane (1991) argues that understanding culture’s relation to the social requires attributing to it two kinds of autonomy, analytic, and concrete. Analytic autonomy represents culture’s structure, content, and form, as organized and ordered by endogenous forces that are irreducible to social structural or cognitive and psychological factors. Concrete autonomy refers to culture’s interconnection with social life in any particular historical moment. I borrow this term from Kane to argue that pragmatist formulations, in practice, presuppose that action exists and unfolds in a pure and unadulterated form and that it is sociology’s job to determine which forces, institutions, and motives then lend it additional shape and direction. My argument is that specifying an action and delimiting it represent interpretive processes of construction and classification, which necessarily renders the real, nude, unadulterated, autonomous act a product of the cultural forces of narration, semiosis, and emplotment in discourse.
Many of these resources, from established institutions like the New York Times, to newer, web-only blog sites like RedState.com and Breitbart.com, offer newsletter subscriptions, which consist of daily emails containing titles and brief descriptions of the site’s articles and commentary, and links to other content available at the site. I created a gmail account and subscribed to receive newsletters from the sites listed here as well as a few others. These emails combined to create in my inbox an archive of the campaign contest’s news coverage. The archive facilitated a structural hermeneutic analysis in unexpected ways. For instance, browsing it swiftly and repeatedly produced an effect like that of a flip book, in which players in the drama appeared as stick figures entering, moving about, and exiting the stage. Browsing the archive like this cultivated recognition of the drama’s syntagmatic development and flow, or of how signs were developing and shifting meaning as the events unfolded. Being a series of emails filled with hyperlinks to texts, videos, audio podcasts, and user comments, the archive allowed for pausing the “flipping” of the flip book pages in order to focus in on a particular episode or event. As such, the emails contained links to materials that facilitated building a paradigmatic or cross-sectional analysis.
To put into context the level of interest the event generated: the first Republican debate in 2011 drew 3.2 million viewers, and cable television’s most-watched series, Monday Night Football on ESPN, averages 13.4 million viewers per game (Koblin, 2015). Compared to other television events that blend the conventions of political analysis and entertainment, the debate far eclipsed Jon Stewart’s farewell episode of The Daily Show, which aired the same night, hit the airwaves as the debate was drawing to a close, and garnered the attention of 3.5 million viewers (Steinberg and Kissell, 2015).
See Norton (2011) for a structural hermeneutic interpretation of the Fox News show, The O’Reilly Factor, which demonstrates how this genre of television programming legitimate their partisan assertions and conclusions.
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Acknowledgements
The author thanks Jeffrey Alexander and Samuel Nelson for encouraging this project and sharing informal reflections on its theme, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and recommendations.
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Mast, J.L. Action in culture: Act I of the presidential primary campaign in the U.S., April to December, 2015. Am J Cult Sociol 4, 241–288 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-016-0009-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-016-0009-3