Solidarity,Media,and the Limits of Postcapitalist Theory

Media, Representation, and Solidarity in CST

For Alexander, a healthy civil sphere is an autonomous civil sphere. That is, the social institutions responsible for cultivating community work best when cordoned off from the hierarchical tendencies of noncivil spheres. Noncivil spheres, as Alexander defines them, are facets of social experience ineluctably structured by vertical relationships of authority, whether it be parent-child, employer-employee, or guru-disciple. To be fair, Alexander recognizes that when he paints such a picture, he is presenting an ideal against which the variations of lived experience can be analyzed and explained. Generally, the civil sphere is polluted to some degree or another by noncivil forces, and once such compromises occur, the level ground of solidarity gives way to the stratified terrain of subordination and exclusion. “The world of ‘we’ becomes narrowed” Alexander writes, “the world of ‘they’ becomes larger and assumes multifarious forms” (p. 194). As such, the relative purity of the civil sphere and the tension along its walls “is not merely a theoretical issue,” Alexander contends, but “a central empirical and ideological concern” (p. 194).

The process by which civil pollution and purification play out are detailed in the lengthy case studies that make up the second half of The Civil Sphere. One case study centers on patriarchal constructs of “feminine difference” (p. 258)—indigenous to the noncivil worlds of family and religion—to enter the civil sphere in various guises, including the 19th century’s “Republican M/otherhood” (p. 244) and the 20th century’s feminine mystique. Once transplanted, these constructs delegitimize women’s equal standing in public life. Another example, drawn from Alexander’s lengthy case study of the African American Civil Rights struggle, was the centrality of “messages testifying to the civil incompetence of blacks” (p. 272) in postreconstruction popular culture. Blackface minstrelry and other genres built on vicious caricature were thus a vehicle for bringing the ideologies of White supremacy—itself a rancid product of the noncivil sphere of economic relations—into the solidarity-producing institutions of the civil sphere. Later, as mid-20th-century national news media grew sympathetic to the Civil Rights movement, essentially endorsing its leadership’s savvy claim to the nation’s democratizing traditions, Black-White solidarity was mainstreamed through much of the nation. Meanwhile, Southern newspapers, most of which functioned as mouthpieces for the region’s White power elite, grew more shrill, doubling down on exclusionary frameworks that questioned the “motives and relations” of movement leaders and “suggested their inability or unwillingness to participate in civil society” (p. 296).

Solidarity in CST, with regard to media culture, is thus defined and operationalized in terms of diversity and dignity; one can recognize a healthy civil sphere when a diversity of groups are afforded visibility in media channels and their claims to justice are treated with dignity and respect. The importance of such questions of representation cannot be overstated. Proliferating stereotypes and rising levels of scorn and condescension are among the starkest signs of a creeping intolerance. Yet, it is worth asking whether representations of others and discourses of justice are the only ways that media serve as agents of solidarity and fragmentation. If we treat media as systems of symbolic production, as Alexander does, are there other symbolic formations that also fundamentally revolve around questions of social solidarity? Furthermore, is it possible for media industries to circulate powerful messages of inclusion while at the same time accelerating social trends that undercut solidarity? And if that is the case, how would such an irony fit into Alexander’s schema and what would it mean for the broader theory of the civil sphere?

One way to explore such issues would be to key in on an era of U.S. history and examine episodes when questions of solidarity were especially acute. Depending on the drift of contemporary affairs, the civil sphere might very well grow in the direction of greater inclusivity, or, it could just as easily seize up, leading in the direction of greater divisiveness. To understand how media fit into this process, we might then scan the terrain for popular texts that seem to have addressed this ambiguous near future. We might also examine how media fit into the rhythm of everyday life for those experiencing such states of contingency. And finally, we might examine the institutions that produced and distributed those media. Such an approach would be inductive and our understanding of the relationships between media and solidarity would thus flow from what we learned about particular environments.

For a number of reasons, the mid-20th century, or the half century running from roughly 1930 to 1980, offers a good place for exploring these questions. First, the period played host to at least two existential crises—the Great Depression and World War II—that brought Western capitalist democracy to the brink of collapse (Katznelson, 2013). Second, one can point to this half century, as Alexander does, as a period when the symbolic legitimation of progressive social movements, from organized labor in the first half to movements for racial, gender, and sexual equality in the latter half, resulted, for a time, in widening definitions of cultural citizenship. Even if it was still possible to identify a political-economic elite that was undeniably White, male, and managerial in composition, the momentum of historical change was toward power sharing with historically marginalized groups (Self, 2012).

Third, there is good reason to see the mid-20th century as the height of a national media culture (Baughman, 1992; Kammen, 1999; Susman, 1984). Although Americans’ media diets were by no means homogenized, the combination of Hollywood film, network broadcasting (radio and television), glossy magazines, newspaper syndicates, mass book clubs, and Top 40 radio offered audiences nationwide ready access to a standard menu of sounds, images, and narratives, amid regional particularities. This was the “mainstream” in which, to borrow Alexander’s metaphor, notions of solidarity swam. And just as important, long-unfolding and tumultuous processes of urbanization and industrialization had engendered a kind of modern, metropolitan life that could no longer be looked upon as novel by a rural majority. Rather, a modern consumer society based in large cities and towns, along with the suburban satellites appended to them, had become the norm (Cohen, 2003; Cross, 2002; Teaford, 2006). Again, although this metropolitan way of life was undoubtedly striated by important regional, class-, and race-based differences, the central role occupied by media consumption in consumer culture helped produce a consistency of activity—picking up an evening paper, fishing a magazine out of the mailbox, going to the movies, catching a ballgame, or tuning into a broadcast—in Americans’ leisure hours. Thus, if a capacious civil imagination hinged on a more or less common media culture, the necessary groundwork was certainly in place during midcentury modernity. Yet, when we look closely at this world, we find a landscape that’s messiness clashes with the elegance of Alexander’s framework. What patterns can be discerned are not especially good fits for CST.

Incorporating Crisis: Solidarity and Uncertainty in New Deal-Era Media Culture

New Deal-era America, Ira Katznelson (2013) has argued, can best be understood as a period marked by “an unremitting sense of fragility” (p. 38). Stubborn depression, the rise of totalitarian alternatives to democracy, the global conflagration of World War II, the nuclear annihilation that punctuated the war, and the arms race that haunted the postwar world all created a climate of “immeasurable risk” (p. 33). In such contexts, Katznelson writes, “estimates of possibilities and effects grow increasingly opaque. Modeling the future becomes ever more elusive” (p. 33). Whatever the immediate state of affairs were for any one person during the Depression—the majority of whom were ultimately spared the ravages of unemployment—a sense of systematic instability hung in the air. Yet, at the same time, everyday life proceeded apace amid bread lines, Bund rallies, stagnant markets, and other signs of radical uncertainty (Levine, 1993). In the world of media, this meant that publishers published books and magazines, reporters reported the news, crooners crooned, actors acted, and directors directed. And audiences, for their part, awash in this “culture of sight and sound” (Susman, 1984, p. 161), watched, read, and listened in record numbers. Within this body of material, what did audiences like best?

For much of the 1930s, they liked Shirley Temple. And as John Kasson (2014) has shown, Temple’s phenomenal popularity cannot be understood outside the radical uncertainty that hung over the era. As such, Kasson’s analysis is worth examining in some detail. Despite the obvious drag of the Depression on disposable income, the 1930s were a time of transformational growth for the American film industry in which movie going reached its most habituated state. Financial consolidation and technological change, along with the continued urbanization of the U.S. populace, led to a wave of theater building in city neighborhoods and small towns across the United States. “The total number of theaters never surpassed that of the twenties,” historian Lary May (2000) writes, “but attendance increased due to high turnover, much lower prices, and expansion into hitherto closed markets” (p. 123). Those Americans who had previously enjoyed only a distant connection to film culture in “rural areas in the South and North came into the fold,” May (2000) elaborates, “and moviegoing became more ingrained among workers and lower middle-class residents in large cities” (p. 124).

For those managing the thousands of theaters dotting American communities, there was little debate as to who was the decade’s biggest box office attraction. In the four years spanning 1935 and 1938, Shirley Temple’s films outdrew those of all other performers—no mean feat for an industry that structured its marketing efforts around star power. To describe Temple, however, as simply the decade’s biggest movie star would mischaracterize her place in Depression culture. Rather, she was an icon who audiences heaped adulation upon in a manner unlike child stars in any other era, before or since (Kasson, 2014). Kasson’s monograph details the extraordinary depths of this popularity, ranging from the 135,000 people who in 1936 sent Temple birthday greetings, many of whom included gifts, to lookalike contests held across the globe. All the while, in the world of children’s merchandising, Shirley Temple dolls constituted nearly a third of the nation’s dolls sales in 1935, while her signature toddler dresses became the default look for girl’s clothing lines. And lest one get the impression that Temple was only a children’s phenomenon, she proved spectacularly popular with adults as well, who in a 1937 Fortune magazine poll named her their second favorite star and in many regions placed her atop the poll. After all, somebody had to buy the merchandise and enter their daughters in lookalike contests (Kasson, 2014).

What are we to make of Shirley Temple, and what can she tell us about solidarity and the civil sphere? Kasson (2014) argues that Temple’s fame speaks volumes about the affective terrain of an industrial-modern capitalist democracy teetering on collapse. Constituting a “politics of cheer,” (p. 1) Temple alongside Franklin Roosevelt, whose smile was just as ubiquitous in 1930s media, were “conspicuous demonstrations of confidence” that penetrated “deeply into the private lives” (p. 1) of Americans young and old. Kasson’s argument is not that Temple inspired Americans to soldier through, but that media industries, especially in times of crisis, circulate “emotional currency” (p. 2) that play a part in shaping the national mood. Not unlike the fictive capital that swells economic bubbles (Nelson, 2012), this emotional currency, regardless of whether it indexed any real referent (in this case, any reason to be happy), could nevertheless be capitalized on in the present. In essence, Temple’s image functioned as a loan taken out against a near future imagined as a sunnier place—a world in which existing social ties had not disintegrated and existing strains had not devolved into fascistic terror.

If Alexander’s schema is intended to serve as a grand theory of symbolic life and social solidarity, how well does it accommodate a cultural episode like Shirley Temple? In short, it does not. Indeed, there is something of a blind spot in CST regarding cultural phenomena that address social life in the future tense, or what Arjun Appadurai (2013) has called “the future as a cultural fact.” As Appadurai has argued, scholars must recognize that

the future is not just a technical or neutral space, but is shot through with affect and sensation. Thus, we need to examine not just the emotions that accompany the future as a cultural form, but the sensations that it produces: awe, vertigo, excitement, disorientation. (pp. 286–287)

To be sure, Alexander is interested in temporality. But in CST, the vector of time extends in only one direction—into the past. Time, as Alexander writes, can best be understood as “historical sedimentation” (p. 199). Places fill with people and those assigned founding roles are endowed with “primordial characteristics… believed to explain the success of the effort to build a democratic nation” (p. 200). This characterization of time is useful as a theory of collective memory. One only need consider allusions to minutemen and tea parties, not to mention the language of Constitutional “intent,” to recognize the political potency of origins stories. Given the scope of Alexander’s project, a lack of any systematic explanation of memory work would have been a major omission. Yet, if one’s intent is to explain the expansion and contraction of fellow-feeling, a failure to attend to predominant ideas about what society will soon look like—in essence, popular social forecasting (Carey & Quirk, 1992)—is just as glaring an oversight. To cite a current-day example, talk of a majority-minority America clearly plays a role in a contemporary politics marked by redistricting efforts and voter suppression initiatives. Following Appadurai (2013), then, if we treat “the future as a specific cultural form or horizon, we will be better able to place within this scheme more particular ideas about prophecy, well-being, emergency, crisis, and regulation” (p. 286).

What accounts for Alexander’s omission of the future as an active element in the formation of civil society? Why don’t crises and their imagined outcomes register in Alexander’s schema? One possible explanation is timing. The Civil Sphere was published in 2006. Perhaps if it were published a half decade later, Alexander would have felt compelled to address the extreme economic uncertainty that followed the 2008 financial meltdown. Yet, risk and its social life had become major topics in sociology during the 1980s and 1990s, due in large part to the growing prominence of theorists like Ulrich Beck (who not incidentally goes unmentioned in Alexander’s 52-page bibliography), and as such would have been readily available to a scholar as plugged-in to social theory as Alexander. Thus, a better explanation than timing might be fit. Crises, or “momentous juncture[s]” (Turner, 1981, p. 146) when the continued existence of an institution, group, or way of life is called into doubt, are hard to untangle from questions of materiality. Indeed, the term’s roots are in pathology, describing the human body’s pivot point between life and death, from which it later migrated into political-economic discourse to describe the social body’s moments of dire uncertainty (“Crisis,” 2013). Crises, or signs that existing bonds may soon crumble or that sources of everyday security may soon disappear completely, precisely the kinds of fears addressed in Depression America’s “escapist” fare, are perhaps too material for CST’s antimaterial framework.

Incorporating Markets: Capitalism, Postcapitalism, and the Civil Sphere

To understand why, we need to take a closer look at how markets and capitalism fit into Alexander’s theorization of civil society. According to Alexander’s (2006) periodization, late 18th- and early 19th-century conceptions of civil society I (CSI) attributed civilizing effects “to a plethora of institutions outside the state,” including, but not limited to, the market (p. 24). As the century wore on, however, the blunt edge of industrialization led to a radical redefinition in social thought as an “emerging hatred of capitalism” led civil society II (CSII) theorists to conflate civil society with “market capitalism alone” (p. 26). For Alexander, this was a disastrous turn toward reductionism:

for not only does civil society come to be treated simply as a field for the play of egotistical, purely private interests, but it is now viewed as a super-structure, a legal and political arena that camouflages the domination of commodities and the capitalist class. (p. 26)

Those who followed this critical path, Alexander writes, were simply unable to recognize that the economic was not all encompassing, but rather one sphere in a complex whole that included several abutting spheres, essentially with the capacity to modify and regulate each other.

For those versed in the history of the social sciences, this formulation might sound reminiscent of structural-functionalism. ¹ And though Alexander draws a distinction between CST and the “functionalist theories” outlined by scholars from “Spencer and Durkheim to Parsons and Luhmann,” it is hard not to notice the parallels, especially to the postcapitalist premises of mid-20th-century social thought. As Howard Brick (2006) has argued “the conviction that capitalism per se was an evanescent phenomenon in modern society, as progressive tendencies drove beyond the power of concentrated wealth and primacy of market forces” (p. 150) was a defining element of the postwar academy’s efforts to modernize social theory. It wasn’t, according to this perspective, that capitalists or the profit motive had disappeared, but nor were they at the vanguard of social change as they had been in the long-19th-century milieu of a Marx, Sombart, or Weber. Rather, the political-economic story of the 20th century, from the Parsonian perspective, revolved around the mitigating of capitalism’s most disruptive tendencies—or to put it another way, the process of placing capital back into its box through the empowerment of counterbalancing social institutions, from the regulatory state to the union hall and research university. As a result, there were simply too many nonmarket factors at work in Fordist economies, even those like the United States that most furtively waved the banner of free enterprise, to argue that economic life could “be understood adequately or fully, as ‘capitalist’” (p. 2). If anything, the technocratic push to achieve equilibrium between various spheres of influence and power in social life had essentially displaced market logics as the motive force behind social transformation. And in fairness to Parsons, he was writing in a time of Keynesian mixed economies, full-employment imperatives, progressive taxation, and strong industrial unions. Indeed, even if the United States never went as far in the direction of social democracy as a postwar United Kingdom or France, which it certainly did not, economic conservatives found themselves in alien-enough territory to understand themselves as insurgents, who, as they saw it, would need to expend enormous energy and resources if they hoped to turn back the clock (Phillips-Fein, 2009).

Between the early 1970s and 1990s, these efforts paid dividends and though by no means fait accompli, neoclassical conceptions of markets did regain primacy as a kind of master-metaphor for society and an organizing principle of social action (Burgin, 2012). Since then, advocates of this neoliberal worldview have not only dominated the citadels of policy making, but have, as Nelson Lichtenstein (2006) writes, “generated a popular political constituency that celebrated entrepreneurship, devalued government regulation, and linked the idea of an unfettered capitalism to maintenance of democratic rights and the health of civil society” (p. 7). This reengineering of global political-economy and evisceration of the postcapitalist social contract are the backdrop against which CST was formulated; yet, they are absent from Alexander’s (2006) account. And to the extent that such a reinvigorated capitalism could register in CST, it would have to do so as an aberration, one of many possible “distorted and oppressive boundary relations” (p. 35) that might arise in modern societies. The problem with this argument is that it universalizes the chastened markets of the New Deal order as the default position, when in actuality this postcapitalist moment was closer to a historically unique “long exception” (Cowie & Salvatore, 2008) to the norm. Or to put it in epidemiological terms, the default position regarding markets should be outbreak, not quarantine.

CST’s postcapitalist premises raise an interesting question: Is it well suited for eras when markets were to some extent reembedded (Polanyi, 1944/2001) in social relations? Though no longer grand theory, this more limited use of CST might focus on the intellectual history of communication in social climates where piqued economic conflict and crisis-fueled fears had receded into the background of social thought, albeit without disappearing completely. During such moments, as Brick (2006) demonstrates, influential social thinkers did indeed argue for the importance of understanding cultural pillars such as media, religion, and family outside the seemingly deterministic, or simply stale, economic discourses they had inherited. CST, in this regard, could be a useful tool for excavating and reanimating such patterns of thought. Notwithstanding CST’s problematic fit for the extreme uncertainty of Depression-era culture, parts of Alexander’s framework could be employed as a useful lens on the mentality of mid-20th-century opinion leaders, media industry executives, and communication policy makers. Or to put it another way, what the world looked like from the offices of Rockefeller Center or the FCC headquarters, where writers, executives, and bureaucrats increasingly assumed the adequacy of corporate beneficence and economic growth to engender a more tolerant, equitable society (Brinkley, 2010; Stamm, 2011).

Incorporating Built Environments: Decentralization and the Geography of Solidarity in Postwar Media Culture

As much as a study of the mentalities behind media production might tell us about new conceptions of community and solidarity, such an analysis can only go so far as an explanation of social change. Whether or not postwar thinkers assigned political-economic forces primacy, such phenomena as capital flight, tax incentives, redlining, and growing trade deficits nonetheless played out to dramatic effect, as historians of deindustrialization and suburbanization have shown. These deeply economic phenomena gradually remade the built environment of metropolitan communities across the United States and in so doing had a profound impact on the capacities of American media to foster connections among diverse local communities. Manufacturers, lured by cushy tax packages, moved to spacious lands on the suburban outskirts, bringing blue-collar Whites with them (Self, 2003). In many cases, businesses pulled up stakes altogether and shifted operations to the union-averse environs of small Midwestern towns and Sun Belt cities (Schulman, 1991; Sugrue, 1996). At the same time, real estate developers established middle-class enclaves in outlying rural areas, drawing white-collar workers out of an earlier generation of close-in streetcar suburbs (Jackson, 1985). As economic space was reorganized through this latest round of “creative destruction,” so was the geography of American media culture, as such core institutions of industrial-modern city life as movie theaters, sports arenas, and department stores followed middle-income Whites into the suburbs (Cohen, 2003; Gomery, 2000; Nasaw, 1993). Those that did remain downtown took on a new relationship to the metropolitan spaces engulfing them as urban planners, desperate to keep city centers vibrant, built veritable expressways between them and the distant bedroom communities understood to be their life support. Yet, these entertainment meccas became less and less central to the spatial imaginary of contemporary leisure as downtown was understood not so much as the cultural center of gravity than one point in a larger nexus of attractions scattered across the metropolitan area (Teaford, 2006).

Decentralization ushered in new day-to-day patterns of media use. Removed from neighborhood cinemas and downtown movie palaces, new media technologies like television struck suburban audiences as all the more appealing (Spigel, 1992). Meanwhile, radio programmers moved toward recorded music, creating a flow of songs, banter, and advertising that was especially well suited to automobile-based listening (Douglas, 2004). These developments are often read by media scholars and cultural historians as a long chapter in the decline of public culture. Yet, transformations to the spatial imaginary of modern life were well underway by the time the Levitt brothers broke ground in Long Island, and visions of decentralized living were often as colored by left utopianism and liberal growth politics as conservative venerations of property and familial self-containment (May, 1990; Rome, 2001). But whatever the ideological pedigree of mass suburbanization, the social experience of media culture that developed in the half century after 1950 had much less to do with the solidarity of “the crowd” than had the urban industrial media culture that had grown up in the half century before then (Nasaw, 1993). Television viewing didn’t always take place in nuclear family solitude, but it rarely took place amid throngs of strangers. And when large crowds did convene around cultural productions, as in the case of sporting events, where a fan might spend an afternoon surrounded by 40,000 strangers, that visceral dose of solidarity was typically bracketed by the atomized solitude of the car journey instead of the public experience of the subway or trolley ride (Avila, 2006).

In all of these ways, engaging with media furnished fewer chances to feel the leveling effects of the crowd in “amusement spaces” that, as David Nasaw (1993) writes, “afforded residents of divided cities the experience of belonging to social groupings that were totalizing rather than divisive” (p. 46). Translated into the language of solidarity and the civil sphere, this meant fewer opportunities to encounter others in the shared spaces of public culture, and subsequently fewer opportunities to see them not as others, but as community members with shared rights to the common culture constituted within those spaces. Crucially, the “national public” constituted in these entertainment venues was premised on overt exclusion or second-class treatment of people of color. Moreover, the growing presence of people of color in such settings was read by anxious Whites as dangerous signs of decline (Simon, 2004). Yet, whatever power these “centers of civility and public sociability” (Nasaw, 1993, p. 256) may have had to fully enfold racial minorities into the crowd following the Civil Rights movement never had the opportunity to come to fruition as the entire landscape of public amusement culture was remade.

Such dramatic shifts in media consumption would seemingly have major implications for a theory like CST. But again, they do not register in Alexander’s schema, in this case because distribution, exhibition, and consumption are entirely absent from his definition of media. For Alexander, media culture is symbolic content, not the institutions, built environments, and ways of life through which individuals engage that content. Even audiences’ interpretations of media’s symbolic output fall outside of CST’s parameters. As a generation of media scholars attuned to reader response theory has shown, not everyone reads a message in the same way. Overlooking the polyvocal nature of media texts has particularly important implications for CST because interpretive ambiguity problematizes the presence of inclusive messages in mainstream media. Alexander, for instance, points to such iconic television programs as All in the Family, Roots, and the Cosby Show as evidence of expanding visions of solidarity in the 1970s and 1980s. “Such representations,” Alexander (2006, p. 79) writes, “communicated in direct and emotionally powerful ways, allowing Americans to express their civil judgments in figurative rather than intellectual language, which made it easier, in turn to identify with one or another solidarity group.” All in the Family’s Mike “Meathead” Stivic, Archie’s “long-haired and rebellious, but ultimately sympathetic” son-in-law (p. 78), Root’s Kunta Kinte, and the family of Claire and Theodore Huxtable abetted the social body’s “civil reconstruction” (p. 79), Alexander argues, as White viewers made room in their hearts for African Americans and advocates of racial justice.

This was likely true for many people, and it certainly speaks to the intentions of these programs’ creators. But it is also true that many audience members read these texts in dramatically different ways. For some White social conservatives, a portion of whom affixed “Archie Bunker for President” stickers to their bumpers, Archie was less an out-of-touch dinosaur than a straight-talking, truth-telling folk hero (Nussbaum, 2014). For its part, Roots was absorbed by many viewers into the broader context of ethnic recovery projects that ultimately kept predominant conceptions of American identity tied to whiteness by more closely aligning it with turn-of-the-20th-century European immigration, or what Matthew Frye Jacobson (2006) has called “the displacement of Plymouth Rock by Ellis Island in our national myth of origins” (p. 9). And with regard to the Cosby Show, as Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis (1995/2006) found, much of the program’s popularity among White viewers owed to the hospitable conditions the program lent to projections of a postracial America devoid of structural barriers to success.

Engaging with the scholarship on reader response may have allowed Alexander to grapple with the complexities that interpretive flexibility poses to a theory like CST. Instead, in overlooking this literature, even Alexander’s primary case study becomes problematic. Sympathetic accounts of the Civil Rights movement did run in national news media. But again, there is good reason to believe that such accounts were not always read sympathetically, and crucially, this interpretive divide did not fall on a tidy north-south axis. One place, though far from the water cannons and cattle prods of Southern cities, where civil rights news was read in a manner that would have left its authors befuddled, was Orange County, California. As Lisa McGirr has shown, the well-educated White professionals and homemakers in the county’s affluent suburbs, who turned out in droves for ultra-conservative candidates like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan in the mid-1960s, broadly read the Civil Rights struggle as an ominous development. For many of them, still clinging to a McCarthyite lens on domestic politics, the movement was sure evidence “of a communist plot to foster disorder” (McGirr, 2001, p. 184). And for those less inclined to conspiratorial thought but still deeply suspicious of the freedom struggle, federal support for civil rights was prime evidence of an emboldened national state increasingly willing to trample “the Constitution and [ride] roughshod over states’ rights” (p. 184). Thus, when photo-essays depicting freedom riders, lunch-counter sit-ins, and children’s marches arrived in the homes of these Americans, there is little reason to believe they were read in the sympathetic manner that Alexander assumes. And as midcentury anticommunism morphed into populist opposition to liberal policymakers and intellectuals by the early 1970s (McGirr, 2001), there is little reason to assume that many Orange County conservatives cast their sympathies with “Meathead” as he pleaded liberalism’s case each week. Rather, the New Left sociologist in training may very well have lent a face to what conservatives saw as a dangerous “new class” of public-sector knowledge workers, intent on foisting their values on an unwilling majority (Rodgers, 2010).

None of this means that the progressive aims of a Norman Lear or an Alex Haley were all for naught. In all likelihood, there were millions of households in which programs like All in the Family and Roots were viewed and discussed as intended, helping to create an intellectual climate at the domestic level in which the sharper edges of racial prejudice were softened, or, for younger viewers, less likely to develop in the first place. But if individual readings varied, how do we explain those variations? Were there patterns that marked them? Were certain viewer demographics more likely to produce “bad fans” (Nussbaum, 2014) than others? Certain locations?

Evidence of audience response is notoriously difficult to find at the individual level, let alone the community level. Moreover, demanding that cultural historians anchor every analysis of content in reader-response evidence would create an impossible standard to meet; there is great value in knowing what the media content of another era looked and sounded like, what its producers hoped to say, and what businesses thought would sell. Yet, CST, which assigns media a capacity to change audience sentiments rather than to simply circulate certain kinds of messages among them, demands more than that. It requires some level of documentation that inclusive messages were not only circulated in large numbers, but internalized by audiences, and that that internalization was connected to a way of life in which actions in noncivil spheres were also reflective of a more empathetic social imagination.

If such a study was possible, it would almost certainly need to be conducted at the community level. At this kind of manageable scale, community tastes identified through local media fare, sales and ratings data, oral history interviews, and other sources could be situated within the political culture, social life, and economic developments that marked the community at the time. William Graebner’s (1993) study of youth culture in postwar Buffalo or Roy Rosenzweig’s (1983) classic study of working-class leisure in turn-of-the-20th-century Worcester might serve as models. By bringing these elements together, one might then be able to map particular “structures of feeling” (Williams, 1977, p. 128) in which moments of imaginative solidarity played out in material contexts. Doing so would require specific attention not only to media content but to the local media institutions and the built environments through which individuals accessed that content. To cite a hypothetical example, if a suburban White teenager found herself moved enough by an ode to urban struggle like Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City” (1973) to add it to her record collection, where would she have been likely to pick up a copy? At a downtown record emporium where taxes flowed into city coffers that funded social programs serving the city’s heterogeneous populations? Or, at a newly built suburban mall where tax receipts helped fund county roads and good schools for a relatively homogenous group of White middle-class families? If it was the latter, that does not necessarily make the record buyers’ actions hypocritical. It does, however, tell us something about the making and unmaking of solidarity with regard to media industries and changing patterns of media consumption.

Beyond the infrastructure of local media, a community study would also require close attention to the broader economic landscape, or how capital was moving into, out of, and through the community at the time (Cowie, 1999). Was this a place where new office parks were sprouting up at every other off ramp? Or, was it a town where moving trucks were hauling away factory equipment? Answering such questions is imperative because when a viewer tuned into a program like Roots, they did so through a process that was at once imaginative and material. They experienced the program by sitting in their home and gazing at a particular make and model of television set, the presence of which reflected that household’s class-based experience of economic security. And further, the viewer’s ability to relate to the standard of living depicted in the dozens of commercials that segmented Haley’s saga, along with her or his capacity to understand those living standards as something closer to a basic right than a restricted privilege, was also conditioned by a certain experience of security or uncertainty.

Conclusion

For historians and media scholars interested in adopting CST, then, the challenge will involve connecting Alexander’s core concerns—the sociological dimensions of identity, solidarity, and symbolic life—with some kind of materialist framework that can realistically deal with the socioeconomic landscapes through which media circulate. However, doing so and remaining relatively true to Alexander’s (2006) thinking could prove difficult, as key sections of The Civil Sphere are devoted to writing off materialist thought as the source of a “distortion” (p. 27) through which the rich dynamics of civil life were reduced to mere outgrowths of “market capitalism alone” (p. 26). Compelling arguments—Alexander’s among them—can be made that reducing politics, religion, and family life—all of which predate capitalism—to market phenomena “alone” requires some level of distortion: Those facets that betray a penchant for self-interested gain must be amplified, while those that don’t must be dialed back. Mass media are different, though. They are outgrowths of market capitalism, having almost entirely developed within some phase of 19th-, 20th-, or 21st-century capitalism. Thus, removing what Alexander counts as noise—questions of markets, commoditization, structure, class power, and crisis—does not produce fidelity, but rather an imagined past in which mass mediated symbols somehow existed outside of commercial infrastructures and built environments shaped by capital flows. Moreover, it suggests an illusory time and place where people immersed in capitalism’s vicissitudes did not require stories and symbols—cultural fare—to explain the material circumstances around them. Unadulterated, CST misses the deeply economic quality of all media productions, even those laudably aimed at building bridges among peoples. Media historians who want to make larger social arguments cannot afford such an oversight. Otherwise, we’ll never figure out how a pair of generations weaned on Beatles records and Norman Lear sitcoms ushered in a new gilded age.