From its very beginnings, the social study of culture has been polarized between structuralist theories that treat meaning as a text and investigate the patterning that provides relative autonomy and pragmatist theories that treat meaning as emerging from the contingencies of individual and collective action—so-called practices—and that analyze cultural patterns as reflections of power and material interest. In this article, I present a theory of cultural pragmatics that transcends this division, bringing meaning structures, contingency, power, and materiality together in a new way. My argument is that the materiality of practices should be replaced by the more multidimensional concept of performances. Drawing on the new field of performance studies, cultural pragmatics demonstrates how social performances whether individual or collective can be analogized systematically to theatrical ones. After defining the elements of social performance, I suggest that these elements have become “de-fused” as societies...

Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy*:

Drawing on the textual analysis of an ESRC research project “Making Class and the Self through Mediated Ethical Scenarios”, the paper illustrates how “reality” television offers a visible barometer of a person’s moral value. The research included an examination of the shift to self-legitimation, the increased importance of reflexivity and the decline of class proposed by the individualisation thesis.2 We focused on self-transformation “reality” television programmes as public examples of the dramatisation of individualisation. The over-recruitment of different types of working-class participants to these shows and the positioning of many in need of transformation, enabled an exploration of how certain people and cultures are positioned, evaluated and interpreted as inadequate, deficient and requiring improvement. We found that the individualisation promoted through the programmes was always reliant upon access to and operationalisation of specific social, cultural, economic and symbolic capital.

https://ojs.letras.up.pt/index.php/Sociologia/article/download/2279/2086

The Moral Economy of Person Production: the Class Relations of Self-Performance on “Reality” Television

Carolinians could avoid taking a stand, leaving fire-eaters to rage to their hearts’ content. But the piracy cases stripped away that luxury. They stripped away the mask of unity, too, spotlighting the distress and volatility of white Charleston’s divided mind on questions of slavery and federal relations. When a grand jury refused to indict the Echo’s crew in November 1858, Spratt, serving as chief defense counsel, moved for their release. But he did not stop there. Citing the recent decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford as an example of a local court declaring a federal law unconstitutional, he urged Judge Andrew Magrath similarly to strike down the statutes prohibiting the slave trade. This would be “Higher Law with a vengeance,” protested state Attorney General Isaac Hayne, a short-sighted policy sure to boomerang on slaveholders. Cautious Magrath, however, ignored each counsel’s overwrought arguments, upholding the validity of the piracy statutes and retaining the prisoners in custody. The longer slave traders languished in jail, the louder hard-liners like Spratt trumpeted their cause, and the more Charlestonians squirmed. A popular moderate local politician, Magrath tried to defuse the issue without giving victory to either side. In the case of the Brothers, a Charleston District grand jury in January 1859 refused to indict the crew, and Magrath released them. When the Echo’s hands came to judgment three months later, indictments were returned, but the sailors went free despite incriminating evidence. Finally, in 44 Message No. 1 of His Excellency Jas. H. Adams, Governor of South Carolina to the Senate and House of Representatives, at the Session of 1856, With Accompanying Documents (Columbia, 1856); Report of the Special Committee of the House of Representatives, of South Carolina, on so much of the Message of Gov. Jas H. Adams, as relates to Slavery and the Slave Trade (Columbia, 1857). 45 Charleston Courier, December 1-9, 1858; Isaac W. Hayne, Argument Before the United States Circuit Court... in the Motion to Discharge the Crew of the Echo, Delivered in Columbia, S. C., December, 1858 (Albany, 1859), 6. On Magrath, see R. G. Dun and Company, Credit Ledgers, South Carolina, 1: 411, Baker, HU.

Politics, chess, hats: The microhistory of disunion in Charleston, South Carolina

To trace the complex “passion for meaning” (Barthes) that animated the consumption and interpretation of Yearnings, a television melodrama that aired in China just a year and a half after the Tiananmen demonstrations, requires moving beyond a dichotomy between “the political” and “the popular.” This article argues that Yearnings became a nationwide controversy because it allegorizes post-Tiananmen dilemmas of national identity in relation to socialism and in relation to the diverse class and gender positionings of the characters as well as the viewers. Textualist and reader-response analyses of popular culture need to be broadened by an ethnographic approach that asks sociodiscursive questions about the operations of popular culture as a site for the constitution of national subjects, one that offers complicated possibilities for oppositional practices. [China, national identity, popular culture, gender and class, politics of representations, the state]

Yearnings: televisual love and melodramatic politics in contemporary China

Humanist Narratology and the Suburban Ensemble Dramedy

The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess.

Eurydice Reclaimed: Language, Gender and Voice in Henry James.@@@Henry James and the "Woman Business."@@@The Rule of Money: Gender, Class, and Exchange Economics in the Fiction of Henry James

H ENRY James's fiction and criticism abound with literal and metaphorical instances of business and financial terms. While metaphors far outnumber literal discussions about dollars and cents, both are so pervasive that this economic language acquires a privileged status among his linguistic codes. For just as money is a universal equivalent into which all other commodities must be translated to establish their value, so also James uses economic language as the dominant code to fix the value of characters and ideas in his writing. In this essay, I will explore, through a variety of approaches, the complex uses and meaning of James's appropriation of economic "currency." The majority of criticism of James's economic language in the last twenty years has been formalist; most notably, four studies, by Laurence Holland, Jan Dietrichson, Donald Mull, and Daniel Schneider, have demonstrated unquestionably the quantity and difficulty of these terms.' More recently, Carolyn Porter, Jean-Christophe Agnew, and Mimi Kairschner have focussed Marxist critical lenses upon his business rhetoric.2 All critics who have studied this idea agree that James portrays a gilded world of seductively available commodities and, in addition, that this imagery reveals a quantifying mentality among his characters and their author.3

Peggy McCormack

Papers

The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess.

Eurydice Reclaimed: Language, Gender and Voice in Henry James.@@@Henry James and the "Woman Business."@@@The Rule of Money: Gender, Class, and Exchange Economics in the Fiction of Henry James

The Semiotics of Economic Language in James's Fiction