Performing Fusion: Unsettling the Actor in Cultural Pragmatics

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Sociology

First Advisor

Alexander, Jeffrey

Abstract

This dissertation argues that the cultural pragmatics tradition of social performance theory is useful for how it centers symbolism as an analytic priority and synthesizes questions of structure, agency, meaning and action into one causal model. The six elements of cultural pragmatics—background representations/foreground scripts; actors; audiences; mise-en-scène; means to symbolic production; and boundaries of social power—provide a powerful tool for understanding how individuals work alone or in concert to bring to life cultural meaning for audiences. However, this dissertation argues that much of the scholarship in this tradition overly prioritizes studies of actors and does not pay enough attention to the agency of the other five elements in bringing about performative success or failure, or fusion and de-fusion. Through three articles, I explore puzzling empirical cases that demonstrate the power of audiences, cultural scripts, and the aesthetics of mise-en-scène in bringing about successful social performances. The first article questions U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders’ confounding presidential rise, and argues that his success was due not to his personal charisma or ability as a performer but rather to the agency of his audiences, including political volunteers and organizers. Refining and extending cultural pragmatics theory, this article argues that audiences are the sole arbiters of performative success or failure, and that in their arbitration they become performers themselves. These ‘performances of fusion’ or de-fusion, analytically traceable through ‘arcs of fusion,’ meaningfully impact the success or failure of the performance. By studying audience ‘arcs of fusion,’ scholars are better able to understand why actors who, by traditional expectations, are expected to fail win. The second article examines the recent struggle for interpretive authority between Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling and her audiences of readers following her recent transphobic commentary. Through a case study of the podcast “Harry Potter and the Sacred Text,” which teaches its global community of listeners to use traditional religious devotional practices to read the books, create community, and engage in social justice activism, this article challenges cultural pragmatics logic claiming that actors are always necessary conditions in performances. Though actors are necessary to initially start a performance, this case shows that audiences can appropriate performances away from actors they judge to be unworthy representations of the ideals they formerly shared; in this case, the podcast and their listeners perform fusion with the books and perform de-fusion with Rowling as they judge her transphobic comments to be a breach of the sacred ideals of the Potter world: friendship, loyalty, and anti-authoritarianism. This article demonstrates that performative outcome should not be rendered in binary form as fusion and de-fusion but should rather be theorized as a scale from fusion to de-fusion with liminal fission states in between where audiences can appropriate fusion. Through this refined theoretical apparatus highlighting the agency of audiences and scripts, scholars can better understand why performances in which actors fail continue to succeed. The third article uses cultural pragmatics theory to study the success of American travel writer Rick Steves. Traditional accounts of Steves’ success might analyze his performance through materialist lenses of consumption or colonialism. However, in rendering Steves as a cultural dope or a greedy businessman, these approaches miss the ways in which his philosophy of travel is positioned as a project of moral formation. Cultural pragmatics reveals how Steves’ philosophy of travel is prescriptive and redemptive; in promising travelers a cure for their ethnocentricity, the “Rick Steves way” of travel is more akin to religion. This article explores how Steves leverages the power of mise-en-scène to transform travel from a practice of consumption into a ritual of purification, or a ‘cosmopolitan revelation.’ In doing so, this article helps scholars understand cases in which actors presumed to be superficial, or even failures, win. Collectively, these articles illuminate the power of cultural pragmatics theory as a useful analytic tool for cultural sociologists and humanistic scholars. By offering original theoretical conceptions, the social performance tradition is refined and extended, and through studies of confounding cases, this dissertation offers empirical findings that enrich the study of culture, media, religion, and politics. This dissertation also highlights the importance of studying religion, both as an empirical site and as an analytic form, and argues for the distinct promise cultural pragmatics holds for theorizing the blurring boundaries between traditional religion and secular culture, and paving the path for a sociology of solidarity, belonging, and joy.

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