Theoretical logic in cultural sociology: Semiotics,hermeneutics and dialectics in the work of Jeffrey Alexander

Cultural sociology is a strange animal. It is both a general sociology that supposedly covers the whole of society by looking at cultural forms that animate social life, and a special sociology that pays specific interest to a particular sector of society where an agonistic of symbols, meanings and narratives is considered to be salient. Within American sociology, cultural sociology has now become a respectable orientation within the discipline. Although there are still some lingering tensions between the toolkit approach (Swidler, 1986), the praxeological approach (Collins, 2004), the symbolic boundaries approach (Lamont and Molnar, 2002) and the code-seeking approach (Alexander, 2003) to culture, cultural sociology as a whole is now one of the most vibrant sections of sociology. While it is close to the humanities and dialogues with the liberal arts, it remains solidly anchored within the social sciences. Unlike cultural studies, it has its own concepts, methods and data. It also has affinities with the older approaches to culture of the Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools, but rejects their materialism and their political parti pris. Bourdieu's critical sociology of the cultural production, distribution and circulation of symbolic goods is well known, but because of its totalizing aspirations and narrowing motivations, it functions more as a foil than as an example to emulate.

Social theory and cultural sociology

Within American cultural sociology, Jeffrey Alexander's strong program has emerged as the strongest attractor in the field. Having made a name as a social theorist before moving into cultural sociology, Alexander has been able to deploy his own approach both as a general sociology of culture in the neo-Durkheimian tradition, and as a sociological theory of the middle range that can be applied over and over again in case studies that show how codes, meanings and performances bring society together, or drive it apart. Given his double identity as a social theorist and a cultural sociologist, more than anyone else who is involved in a special area of sociology, he has been able to redefine sociology as a discipline, in order both to re-envision its past accomplishments in the classical formulations of its problems, and recast itself in terms of a renewed intellectual project. The Center for Cultural Sociology (CCS) at Yale University, or what we could term the “Yale School” of cultural sociology, is unique and paradoxical. As a hub of a vast international network, the CCS stands at the very center of the academic field, while simultaneously opposing the mainstream of American sociology, which remains “scientistic”, utilitarian and crypto-positivist at its core.

For almost half a century, Alexander has developed his cultural sociology into an expanding research program on culture, politics and symbolic materiality involved in performances in what he calls the civil sphere. Thanks to the invention of ever new concepts (autonomy of culture, the binary codes, fusion, civil sphere), the introduction of new themes (social drama, cultural trauma, the iconic turn) and the deployment of new research kits (structural hermeneutics, cultural pragmatics, iconic materialism), the strong program has gone from strength to strength to become a complete, self-contained paradigm with a triple ambition: to renew classical sociology, to rewrite contemporary sociological analysis of culture and to bolster the civil sphere, both as a concept and as a practical reality. As a prominent and influential figure in sociology, because of his professional standing in the field, his publication record (innumerous books, chapters and articles) and the generations of students he has formed and mentored, Alexander has achieved what very few sociologists can hope to accomplish: marking a whole era of sociological development, being prominent not in one, but in two subfields, setting the research agenda for 50 years, becoming the iconic leader of a school of thought. All these accomplishments have been widely celebrated by the practitioners of cultural sociology, in various handbooks of cultural sociology (Alexander et al., 2012; Grindstaff et al., 2019; Inglis and Almila, 2016), in the columns of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology and in a forthcoming two-volume Festschrift.

We also want to pay our tribute here to America's best, and best-known, sociologist, but we want to do it differently. We want to discuss cultural sociology as social and human theorists, by questioning its theoretical logic. As social and human theorists, we have learned from Alexander's early work how to read, reconstruct and re-evaluate classical authors. We have read the four volumes of his Theoretical Logic in Sociology (Alexander, 1982–1983) and appreciated his reconstruction of post-war sociology in 20 lectures (Alexander, 1987). We have followed his progressive dis-enthrallment from Parsons's functionalism (Alexander, 1998) and the unabashed rehabilitation of Durkheim's latest works (Alexander and Smith, 2005). We have observed how he used his tremendous interpretative skills in a powerful metacritique of Pierre Bourdieu that was supposed to finish off once and for all his major rival in the field (Alexander, 1995). Since the turn of the century, Alexander has vacated the field of social theory to develop and promote cultural sociology and civil sphere theory. While the successes of the research programs on cultural sociology and civil sphere show that one does not need to engage in elaborate metatheoretical and theoretical discussions to advance and flourish, we feel, however, that such discussion might contribute to a deepening of cultural sociology's project.

The programmatic text on the analytical independence and relative autonomy of culture (Alexander, 1990b) that opened the reader on culture and society did some of the groundwork. It was far too short, however, to serve as a foundation of cultural sociology. For sure, nobody is expecting another four volumes of Theoretical Logic in Cultural Sociology, although we have been told Twenty Lectures in Cultural Sociology (co-written with Anne Taylor) is in the making. ¹ A good debate about the logic of the cultural sciences and the evolution of contemporary society can raise some interesting issues, and reconnect cultural sociology to some older traditions in philosophy, history and the humanities. In this special issue of Thesis Eleven, we put the question of theoretical logic in cultural sociology at the center and want to bring it in a productive dialogue with hermeneutics, semiotics and dialectics. How does cultural sociology deal with these intellectual traditions and their analytical approaches to culture, society, and agency? What are its relations to the social sciences, the cultural sciences or the human sciences? Does cultural sociology seek to explain, to interpret or to describe culture – or all at the same time? And what does it understand by “culture”? Is it the totality of texts, meanings and symbols? Or is it related to cults and collective practices? What are its relations to pre-theoretical understandings and expressions? Is there anything not “cultural”? What is the motivation behind this interest in signs, meanings and agonistic reasoning, and what is the rationale to define or redefine sociology? How do they come about, and why, and how do they change? What is the necessity of using them in sociological analysis, and how does Alexander himself put them to work in his analyses? What is his (meta)methodology and how are his data culturally constituted? In doing so, how is he proposing some coherent and probing paths for sociological analysis? And how is this not only relevant, but even crucial, for us today?

The autonomy of culture and society

We all know the story by now. Sociology emerged in the nineteenth century as a result of the scientific, industrial and political revolutions in North-Western Europe. These brought into existence society as an autonomous realm that follows its own laws and can no longer be understood as resulting from the will of God or the Prince. What is less well known is that not only society, but also culture was discovered at about the same time. In an early text on the distinctive character of cultural-sociological knowledge, Karl Mannheim had astutely noted the concomitance: “It is striking that the problem of culture first constituted itself for reflective theory at about the same time as the problem of society” (Mannheim, 1982: 37–54). The progressive liberation of cultural contents from theology had been going on since the Renaissance. It came to a head in the Enlightenment. Abandoning almost completely dogmatic theology in order to concentrate on the critique of human's limitations in the constitution of knowledge, Kant had already dutifully noted the fragmentation of reason in the domains of science, ethics and aesthetics. Hegel, by absorbing theology into its Aufhebung movement that positioned a scientific philosophy, tried for the last time to reunite the claims of reason in a system of thought that functioned like a complete and systematic Encyclopaedia, based on the self-development of “spirit” (Geist) – an equivocal term that came to be conflated with a narrow idealistic claim, in spite of its entrenchment in a rigorous scientific dialectical logic. When the traditional order finally collapsed for good, culture became autonomous, in its modern and bourgeois sense of Bildung, at the same time that its substantive definition collapsed in its turn in reference to the new emerging mass democratic society. Its enigmatic “mass culture”, apparently at odds with just about everything societies had known up to then, fused if not confused in commercial production, avant-garde arts and generalized education, together with new media and technological developments. Was this the ironic turn that culture had taken in its awaited “revolution”, as Raymond Williams (1965) expected it to be? Philosophy sanctioned its independence and registered the existence of different value spheres, each with its own validity claims, all struggling for supremacy, particularly within the realm of the philosophy of language. Liberated from religion, which had kept culture under its yoke, the value spheres of science, ethics and art, but also of economics, politics and society, were also understood to follow their own laws, independently from God, but keenly linked to language, in Peircian semiotics, Wittgensteinian formal (first, and later informal) logics, Deweyan practice or Heideggerian ontology.

If the autonomy of society was discovered by political economists and sociologists alike, the autonomy of culture was discovered by philosophers and historians, mainly at first from Germany. The philosophers of culture bickered among themselves about the priority of one sphere over another. Yet, they all agreed about the existence of “spiritual realities”. These are certainly produced by humans in the course of history (“objective spirit as product”), yet they only maintain their formative influence when they are appropriated and perpetuated by humans (“subjective spirit as process”). The dialectics between objective spirit and the subjective spirit, or between the product and the process, as Hans Freyer (1973) phrases it, is what keeps culture alive. And the “sociology of culture”, rooted in its opposition to the “natural sciences” by the Methodenstreit and the works of Heinrich Rickert, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Wilhelm Dilthey, and up to Ernst Cassirer's efforts at establishing its own “logic” (Cassirer, 2000), had laid bare the objectivist attempt at tackling culture as a legitimate object – leaving wide open the question of its reflexivity in analysis. Left astray between its alienated form in the Frankfurt tradition, its formal apprehension in Cassirer's program, or its positivistic functionalism in Parsons’ new synthesis within the social system, culture in the twentieth century seemed at times lost in its various translations. And this, even though it apparently became a prominent figure in the way “counter-culture” rocked the societal boat in the 1960s. The neoliberal agenda rejuvenated the “spirit of capitalism”, while the “culture wars” it instantiated in its wake led to a backlash, first in the US and then, emboldened by revenge, also globally. Both in its national and international characters, culture thus came back, suffused with contradictions and contrasts that did not help anyone to decide how it should, or even could, be defined.

In sociology, this problem of the relation between the objective and subjective dimensions of such definition will reappear and be thematized as a relation between culture and agency. It will be complicated with the emergence of “society” as a third that goes its own way and becomes independent from its creators. This is the classic problem of alienation. It occurs when the “spirit” that animated the actors grows old and the products stay behind as a dead legacy that weighs on the shoulders of the present generation who experience it as meaningless debris, or as the “tragedy of culture,” to use a Simmelian expression – somehow remedied by Cassirer's views on the way we always “respond” to it, in a restored dialogical manner (Cassirer, 2000: 103–127). The conflict between objective and subjective culture, central in the work of Hegel and Marx, but also of Weber, Simmel, Dilthey and beyond, finds its extension in a struggle within culture about the priority of value-spheres. Never shy of dramatization, in the wake of Nietzsche, Max Weber interpreted the death of a God as a return of the old polytheism in new clothes. The struggle between the value-spheres continues up till today with positivists arguing for the primacy of science, modernists arguing for the primacy of ethics, and post-modernists being tempted as always by aestheticism. It would be exaggerated to stylize the opposition between sociologists and their concept of society on the one hand and philosophers and their concept of culture on the other hand, as an opposition between materialists and idealists. After all, everyone wants to bring society alive and reactivate the dialectics between the spirit and matter, culture and agency, so that the course of history is not predetermined in advance. This is where Alexander comes in, by pointing out how cultural sociology has to redefine both subject and object in culture – that is, has to articulate in new relation between them.

Such relation will be first and foremost embedded in texts, that is, narratives and codes, that constantly infuse action, “whether individual, collective, or institutional” (Alexander, 1996: 3), and require a hermeneutical moment of deciphering how meaning is developed within those specific semiotic contexts, framed in structural oppositions. Following the structuralist and poststructuralist attempts at clarifying the methods of accounting for meaning either in a disembodied form, in the former, or a lack of global coherence in the latter, from the early 1950s to the late 1970s, hermeneutics becomes the internal link that strengthens the connection of sociological analyses to its own cultural contribution. Contexts are not opposed to texts: they are inherently molded into them, as otherwise culture and its many textures simply become something that remains an external object, instead of being the very material into which sociology takes on its own cultural shape. That culture can only be disclosed and impinge on action “from within” does not mean that culture cannot be analyzed “from without”, as structuralist and post-structuralist semiotics propose. Rather it means that the hermeneutic moment cannot be eliminated, and has to confront the structural semiotic oppositions in the codification of meaning. Here as elsewhere, the point is to enter the “hermeneutic circle” in the right way to “explain more to interpret better” (Ricoeur, 1990: 433–450).

Reflexivity is engaged at every moment and place in this post-positivist stance (Alexander, 1982–1983, 1990a), because the social meaning of the object, as well as the meaning of the subject, can only be disclosed by a sociology that is itself attentive to its reflexive epistemic operations, an operation that transforms both subject and object through their mutual relational experience. This is basic pragmatism, expressed especially by George Herbert Mead and John Dewey, if not that both never came to envision that it was “culture” that was then really at stake. As they remained both prisoners of their “naturalistic” stance, they did not realize that they were in fact dealing not as much with “nature”, as with the “second nature” that characterizes human evolution. There's no discontinuity, but synechism between interpretations of the first order (emics: common sense) and second order (etics: science). It takes an interpretative sociology not only to understand how the context appears in the text (externalism) and how the subjective meanings are inevitably molded by the objective meanings (internalism), but also to be self-conscious of the reconstructions and interpretations it proposes in a field that is driven by rivalry and conflict.

There is not only a hermeneutics and a semiotics at the root of any and all symbolic expressions, but also a dialectics – so any analysis has to dig into the latter in order to show how their dynamics work. The interpretation of culture, in a way that borrows much of Clifford Geertz's approach, while going beyond its theoretical shortcomings (Alexander, 2011), is precisely what is at stake in the definition of cultural sociology. While all cultural sociologies have to integrate one way or another hermeneutics, semiotics and dialectics, they do not articulate them in the same way. A purely hermeneutic approach underscores that understanding always takes place against the background of shared, and also disputed, meanings. Semiotics for its part makes abstraction of those meanings to define culture from outside, by reference to codes that structure the production of meaning. Dialectics is more historically inclined and has a tendency to explain culture from the point of view of a philosophy of history that does not support any teleology, but rather points to the transformations that meaning undergoes within societal developments, as an anthropology that now pervades all forms of mediations that animate such developments. And in this, of course, sociology shines as a special place for acknowledging both the mechanisms and the directions of those developments.

A cultural sociology has therefore to work out the relations in three directions: as structural relations between signs, as cultural relations between meanings and as social relations between groups. It would be tempting to schematize such complex relations between semiotics (signs), hermeneutics (meanings) and dialectics (groups) as movements that can be represented as vectors the connect three axes. Horizontally as it were, in a cross-sectional view of culture, cultural sociology has to grasp the signs and the codes in their structural interrelations. This semiotic analysis of signs has to be complemented with a hermeneutic analysis of meanings. The codes only work because they structure the meanings from within. To the extent that these meanings are rooted in a pre-theoretical substrate of experiences, the relations between codes and meanings can be represented vertically. These relations are bi-directional. Not just from codes to meanings in a downwards movement of structural determination, but also from meanings to structure in an upwards movement of praxeological structuration of individual, collective and institutional action. To understand how agents can transform cultural structures, one must bring in a supplementary axis of dynamic relations – the diagonal axis of relations both inside and between social groups (classes, status groups, generations, genders, etc.) that work together or struggle to impose their world views in an effort to change the structure, culture and the agents of society. This longitudinal vision of social change through conflict is historical and dialectical. It articulates culture and society via agency. At the same time, such schematization perhaps oversimplifies what is at stake: the transformations that occur in cultural developments according to a dialectical logic that is inherent to meaning in its semiotic and symbolic forms, requiring hermeneutics to reflect on the changing codes and codifications, within the theoretical logic that cultural sociology itself produces as its reflexive contribution to the normative order of the civil sphere. That the latter becomes both the conceptual and practical achievement of cultural sociology represents the major shift introduced by its theoretical logic, as the proper synthesis at which it aspires. There is a strong ideological implication in such aspiration, placing democracy, justice, equality, inclusion and solidarity at the core of such conception of the civil sphere, and one can ask to what extent is such commitment merely utopian?

The opposition between a “sociology of culture” and a “cultural sociology” (Alexander, 1996), with the former conceiving of culture as a superstructure that is determined in the last instance by the material forces of money and power and the latter conceiving of culture as symbolic representations that structure action from within, cannot be conceived either in a too simplistic version that would oppose the “true” social economic relations found in civil society to the “deformed” representations of political institutions. There is a more intimate linkage between those two instances. In his Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, Paul Ricoeur (1986) has convincingly shown that both cannot be mere reflections. Ideologies and utopias only work as symbolic representations – “structuring structures”, if you will – that actively produce worlds. The opposition between cultural Marxism and neo-Durkheimianism points, in fact, to a triangle in which society, culture and action by autonomous agents have to be articulated with each other in an ongoing dialectical movement in which both structure and culture impinge on practices that produce and transform material and cultural structures through various degrees of conflict and consensus.

Now, Marx, Durkheim and Weber can be integrated in social theory in many different ways. The combination of Marx and Durkheim can lead to structuralism, as happened in France during the sixties. In this case, the question is no longer whether culture should have priority over society, but if the reference to culture structures can explain what happens with reference to systems of relations between signs, discourses and practices. The articulation between Weber and Durkheim can also lead to a sociology of action. This is what Talcott Parsons aimed at in his Structure of Social Action. While Parsons insisted on norms and values, though, Alexander shifted the emphasis from the normative to the symbolic, from values to meanings, in his attempt to bridge a French cultural sociology with a more German sociology of action. This is where structuralism intersects with its deeper hermeneutic requirements on one hand, and where, on the other, semiotics takes on its performative aspect through a pragmatist-semiological turn. When one injects with Marx and Weber conflicts between various social groups into this picture, the articulation between semiotics and hermeneutics becomes more dynamic, political and dialectical. The logic of cultural sociology is mingled in a multi-level dialectics that informs its project and motivates its involvement in a social life understood as a civil sphere (Alexander, 2006). Through the conceptualization of the “civil sphere”, Alexander puts forward the most reflexive aspect of his analytical efforts in cultural sociology, since he dialectically reframes the old concept of “civil society” into a living and vibrant symbolic structure that aims at showing how culture plays a central role in the political world structuring societies.

Engulfing all the previous developments of cultural sociology, the civil sphere theory (CST) has now developed into an analytical program of international proportion, as the multi-volume series of conferences and published books on the theme shows. ² In this, one finds an invitation to think about the contribution that cultural sociology can offer to contemporary societies, given their reliance on politically driven civil spheres that are reflexively engaged in the object they analyze. How should this be done? We bet that the logic at work in Alexander's cultural sociology can provide us with a more complete historical vision, a deeper theoretical conceptualization, as well as methodological orientations for doing so, but then one has to make that logic explicit.

The theoretical logic of Alexander's cultural sociology within the civil sphere

We acknowledge that over the last 45 years Jeffrey Alexander's works have attempted to redefine the sociological project through a cultural sociology mostly driven by his reflexive orientation. Given the specific historical experience of their cultural background and foreground, through the reflexive application of critical hermeneutics to their own culture, history and society, any sociologist can question how reflexivity should be put at work in their own province. The original formation of structural hermeneutics gave the interpreter a free hand, with some limits: it emphasized codes and narratives, defined by the analyst who then more or less skilfully would explain events and actions as playing out by the binary of the cultural structures. The transition from structural hermeneutics to cultural pragmatics aligned the codes and narratives to situations of action. While not fully pragmatist in the philosophical sense, it relaxed the privilege of the analyst to show how meanings and narratives were brought alive through performances. The interplay between objective and subjective meanings became more fluid. Civil sphere theory maintains the analytical independence of culture, but transposes it now to the political level, potentially aligning structural hermeneutics and cultural pragmatics to social dialectics. In the same way as the influence of culture on agency can only be safeguarded if meanings, symbols and narratives are not reduced to epiphenomena, the civil sphere as a conceptual space of representation of a solitary collective continuously needs to be defended against authoritarian attacks against the principles of liberal democracy (Alexander, 2025). The active participation of sociological analysis in its development shows the reflexivity of the whole project of cultural sociology; in this project, culture is not considered through its multifarious dispersion, but re-centered around its focus point in the political arena of the civil sphere – and articulated through the specific cultural expressions that are under scrutiny.

By its own formulation, Alexander's cultural sociology invites us to address philosophical, epistemological, normative and theoretical discussions about its relation to classical human sciences (including Durkheim, Weber and Parsons), Critical Theory (Habermas, Honneth, Rosa) and cultural Marxism (Williams, Hall, Bourdieu) and French pragmatism (Boltanski, Thévenot, Lamont, Heinich). To address fully the theoretical logic of cultural sociology, it should now go full circle and return to the tradition of the Geisteswissenschaften (Dilthey, Simmel, Mannheim, Cassirer) to reassess critically the post-Hegelian, neo-Kantian and anti-Marxist position from which it started. In this special issue of Thesis Eleven, we want to probe that logic of the objective spirit of which cultural sociology partakes and explore more systematic interchanges between American cultural sociology and the European traditions of hermeneutics, semiotics and dialectics. The interchange between the three major approaches to the “products of the human spirit” that come from different traditions should not only stimulate dialogue between German Geisteswissenschaften, American pragmatism, French structuralism and Critical Theory, but should also try to actualise them to take into account the contemporary challenges of digital technology, intercultural communication, crumbling globalization and the rising of decolonial discourses, in troubled times. The struggle against resurgent authoritarianism on all continents is also a cultural struggle that takes place in the domain of the Geist. It stands or falls with the civil sphere.

The round table

The idea of this special issue on the Theoretical Foundations of Cultural Sociology came from a panel the editors organized at the XX ISA World Conference in Melbourne in 2023. It was far away and, notwithstanding the huge carbon print, also worth the travel. It was an excellent session with presentations by Jean-François Côté, Nelson Arteaga, Victor Lidz and Csaba Szaló. Thesis Eleven is stationed in Melbourne. We have known Peter Beilharz, the founding editor of the journal, since the turn of the century. We had the pleasure to meet Alonso Casanueva Baptista, another member of the editorial board, and he invited us to submit a proposal to the journal. Later on, Mario Marotta and Jayme Gomes joined the fray. It is only now that all the texts are in that we came to realize that only male plumbers and virile builders are parts of this specific interest in the foundations of cultural sociology – our call for women as participants of this effort did not resonate as expected.

While all the articles are independent, they come to social theory, cultural sociology and civil sphere theory from different angles and different intellectual traditions. Two stand out particularly, however: Talcott Parsons’ general theory of action (Gomes, Lidz and Marotta) and the hermeneutical tradition (Côté, Szalo). The ghost of Parsons is resuscitated by those who approach Alexander via social theory, whereas those who focus on his cultural sociology have recourse to Wilhelm Dilthey. It should also be noted that half of the articles (Côté, Arteaga and Marotta) take issue with the static character that characterizes both functionalism and structuralism. This suggests that to conceptualize social change properly, a theoretical change away from social order might be due. Now that the rule-based social order is unravelling fast, a return to the deep, but slow questions of theory construction might be timely.

The dossier on the social theory and cultural of sociology of Jeffrey C. Alexander opens with an article by Jayme Gomes on the importance of multi-dimensionality. Jayme is a Brazilian scholar who wrote his dissertation on Talcott Parsons and is now doing a post-doc in Berlin. In his article, he offers a rather elegant reconstruction of the formal metatheory of the young Alexander and then proceeds with a detailed investigation of two research overlapping research programs, namely neo-functionalism and cultural sociology, which are both substantive applications of multidimensionality. The article underscores the continuity between the young, the middle and the late Alexander, which may be another way of saying that the social theorist has aged well.

Victor Lidz was a student of Talcott Parsons at Harvard and co-authored various texts with him. His article on the concept of culture is a marvellous time machine. We are back in Parsons’ filing cabinet. Thanks to his encyclopaedic knowledge of history, Victor brings the AGIL scheme back to life. He uses the four-function paradigm to present a full spectrum analysis of the subsystems of culture across vast stretches of time and space. Although he only touches lightly on cultural sociology and civil sphere theory, his analysis shows that Alexander has not ticked off all of the boxes.

Jean-François Côté (2023) is the author of a monograph on Jeffrey Alexander's cultural sociology. In his erudite article on Alexander's structural hermeneutics, he points to a tension between the structuralism of cultural sociology and the dynamism of civil sphere theory. While the former works with a transhistorical binary code of the sacred and the profane, the latter allows for a more dynamic approach of the structural transformations of the civil sphere. Fusing German hermeneutics and American pragmatism into a dialectical and dynamic version of hermeneutics, Côté draws on Hegel to historicize the civil sphere and suggest that the codes themselves are susceptible to reconstruction.

Nelson Arteaga was in New Haven when Côté presented an original version of his article at the weekly colloquium of the Center for Cultural Sociology. In his article, Nelson picks up Côté's dialectical challenge to structural hermeneutics. Defending Alexander, he proposes a post-structuralist hermeneutics that brings in Foucault and Castel to conceptualize the “metamorphosis” of the culture structure. Through a series of problematizations that dislocate the binary, the structure is maintained while being changed at the same time without solution of continuity.

Mario Marotta also touches on the problem of social order and cultural change. He brings Alexander's cultural sociology in dialogue with the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz. While Geertz questioned Talcott Parsons’ insistence on the integration of the cultural system and ultimately put aside the problem of social order, Alexander tried instead to address the problem of order in complex societies by reformulating the Durkheimian approach. According to Marotta, this leads to a threefold problem: the analytical independence of culture, its coherence and stability take on the status of analytical presuppositions, whereas in reality they are variable and should be considered as such.

In his beautiful text on the iconic turn in cultural sociology, Csaba Szaló returns to the writings of Wilhelm Dilthey to reconnect Alexander's aesthetics to life, the body and history. He does not criticize cultural sociology, but in dialogue with hermeneutics, he enhances it with a touch of existential phenomenology and hermeneutics and deepens it with a philosophical anthropology. Reinserted within an expressive arc that joins Life to the Spirit, the connection between the perception of an iconic surface and the feeling of deeper meanings that is central to Alexander's aesthetics can now be understood as the expression and objectivation of an experience in and through a symbolic form.