Saint Jeff

Propagandizing for sainthood is no easy chore. Canonization is a mighty lift. In these paired articles, Celso Villegas and Galen Watts have in mind this very outcome. Their subtitle writes in neon, ‘The Case for Canonization.’ As they open ‘Jeffrey C. Alexander has proven himself worthy of the highest recognition in sociology: the status of a classical theorist.’ Despite the scepticism in some quarrelsome quarters of the very concept of the ‘canon,’ these authors hope to open the pearly gates.

It is a mixed blessing to have such enthusiastic reputational entrepreneurs, willing to write at extensive, if occasionally exhausting, length. Saints are appealing targets for those with sharpened darts. Ask Saint Sebastian.

In considering the reputations of theorists, let us make clear that Jeffrey Alexander (or Jeff and Jeffrey C. Alexander – casual or distinguished) is deservedly among the most highly respected and intellectually compelling sociological theorists of the past half-century. He shares the spotlight with Pierre Bourdieu, Randall Collins and Anthony Giddens (and perhaps a few others, according to the reader's fancy). Let us refrain from referring to the crew as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Still, there are moments in our fraught societies in which such finality seems uncomfortably near at hand.

Some elements are common to the most admired theorists. First among them is their capacious knowledge. In this they – and here Alexander – share a broad vision of what constitutes a universal field theory with Durkheim, Weber, Simmel and Mead. They are generalists. Call them theorists, but do not assign them to any categorical ‘sociology of.’ The outstanding ones – a category in which Alexander falls – erase firm boundaries between macro-, meso-, and micro-, believing that all is capital-S sociology. The espied landscape is vast.

Those of us of a certain age and a certain predilection recall the promotion in 1982 of Theoretical Logic in Sociology. The publication of these four volumes by this young scholar was a major event: attention must be paid. Aside from the text itself, the University of California Press attached ‘book braids’ (also known as ribbon markers) in each volume. How many worthy readers of Thesis Eleven have been treated likewise? The ribbons, as much as the alleged hubris of the topic, may have contributed to their spiky reception among some partisans. I confess here that I keep these volumes in a bookcase in our public-facing den, whereas Jeff's The Civil Sphere resides in my office, close-at-hand and well-used.

My purpose in this brief response to these unbrief briefs is not (or not only) to provide puckish prickling – no mud or roses here – but briefly to suggest some paths not taken from the standpoint of a micro-sociological interactionist who was a student of Erving Goffman at the University of Pennsylvania and Talcott Parsons’ colleague Robert Freed Bales at Harvard.

Some years back I was invited to lead a seminar at Jeff's Center for Cultural Sociology in the heyday of the ‘Strong Program.’ Duly honoured, I chose to critique my host. Central to my own identity is the reality that I am not capacious, but comfortable in my own little corner, focusing on the agentic power of small group cultures (or what I have termed idiocultures (Fine, 1979)). Playfully, I termed the approach I took a ‘puny program’ (perhaps it could be termed a punny program!). As might be imagined, the discussion was lively, friendly and contentious.

My concern with the Strong Program is the assumption of cultural autonomy (or semi-autonomy). We err if we remove our focus on agency as the generator and the maintainer of culture. Collective memory could not exist outside an active community. Indeed, we might recognize this reality in the case of the Culture Club, the idea generator that Jeff created with his students. The Culture Club, as well as other interactive domains, depend on the development, the sharing and the preservation of images, ideas and practices. To be sure, we learn from the soup of awarenesses to which we are exposed, but develop through interactive domains as well as through media exposure, themselves presenting content created through group negotiation. While the belief in structural autonomy has appeal to the discipline – and for some even defines us to us – we of the micro-tribe know that too tight an embrace involves an erasure of what is happening before our eyes and under our nose. Culture is not an individual creation. Being alone and apart gets one nowhere. What we need and what I have devoted my career to asserting is that culture (and structures as well) emerges through the ‘arts of together.’ We exist in a world of tiny publics: knots within networks that do the work of societal creation and remembrance.

Ethnographers understand this because we watch it happening. Structures hide behind walls, while interactions are scenic. People love, long, lust, laugh, clash and brawl with each other with cultural consequences. Often this is face-to-face. Over the centuries and now more than ever, mediated communication attempts to capture some of the frisson of immediacy. Jeff, for all his virtues, is not an ethnographer, perhaps not since his days as a leader of the Harvard unit of Students for a Democratic Society. (I was too sceptical of utopianism for such a movement, which, perhaps, is why Erving M. Goffman was so appealing. No Thesis Eleven for me.) But here Jeff might have seen silky theory debated in rough practice. To believe in the autonomy of ideas is to marginalize the insistence of action. Action is a keen word in sociology, but we must choose a ‘general theory’ of it or ennoble, in Goffman's (and rock impresario Dick Clark's) phrase, ‘where the action is.’

So, I bring this squib to its conclusion. Let us admit, Marxists, Weberians, structuralists, interactionists all, that Jeffrey C. Alexander deserves our gratitude for keeping the flame of theory alive at University of California, Los Angeles, at Yale, in journals and in the ritual chains of our attention. His accounts unpack the uprisings of history: the Obama election; Indian−Pakistani tensions; the Holocaust; and the Arab Spring. In his writings, Jeff makes a persuasive case for the essence of theory as a light to permit us to see how democracy can be said to exist. It survives through the performance of culture, by blinding reality structure, and within our mutual commitments. Whether this suffices for canonization, I cannot judge but surely suffices for a dollop of secular worship.