Jason L. Mast’s research while affiliated with Goethe University Frankfurt and other places

This article examines the influx of neurocognitive concepts in cultural sociology and this development’s consequences for representationalism. In the first part, I examine representationalism in two research programs that have shaped cultural sociology from the cultural turn to the present: Jeffrey Alexander’s “strong program” and Ann Swidler’s “tool kit” theory. I also briefly discuss the mixed and contradictory findings presented in one of sociology’s most-cited cognitive works, Paul DiMaggio’s (Annu Rev Sociol 23:263–87, 1997) programmatic statement on cognitive psychology’s potential contributions to sociology, which catalyzed the discipline’s cognitive turn. In part two, I demonstrate how in working with and against these three pillars in cultural sociology, figures such as Omar Lizardo, Steven Vaisey, and John Levi Martin have drawn on the cognitive neurosciences to re-conceptualize culture in ways that may have profound consequences for representationalism as it is practiced in the field. I conclude by arguing that representationalism is present but suppressed in cognitive cultural theory and its empirical investigations; that representationalism finds support in the neurocognitive sources that cognitive culturalists cite; and by asserting that future general theories of action will be predicated on a more interactive relationship between automatic and deliberative cognitive domains than the cognitive culturalists currently allow.

The 2016 US presidential election was characterized by themes of newness, fragmentation, and rupture. This chapter argues that these features were precipitated by manifestations of legitimacy troubles in a host of America’s political and civil spheres, and in and among its democratic institutions. A review of the political legitimacy literature indicates that, despite much commentary to the contrary, a character like the one Donald Trump presented on the campaign trail is not anathema to American symbolic representations of legitimate authority. A cultural pragmatic analysis of the Trump, Clinton, and Sanders campaigns reveals what performances of national identity and claims to leadership look like under conditions characterized by troubled legitimacies.

The 2016 U.S. presidential election revealed a nation deeply divided and in flux. This volume provides urgently needed insights into American politics and culture during this period of uncertainty. The contributions answer the election’s key mysteries, such as how contemporary Christian evangelicals identified in the unrepentant candidate Trump a hero to their cause, and how working class and economically struggling Americans saw in the rich and ostentatious candidate a champion of their plight. The chapters explain how irrationality is creeping into political participation, and demonstrate how media developments enabled a phenomenon like “fake news” to influence the election. At this polarized and contentious moment, this volume satisfies the urgent need for works that carefully analyze the forces and tensions tearing at the American social fabric. Simultaneously intellectual and accessible, this volume is designed to illuminate the 2016 U.S. presidential election and its aftermath for academics and students of politics alike.

The defining feature of the 2016 election is the extent to which noncivil criteria and anticivil symbolism flooded back into the civil sphere. In democratic elections, political campaigns take place in the civil sphere. The civil sphere is one independent sphere within a greater arena of social spheres. It differs from noncivil spheres in that its ideals are derived not from the particularities (identities or interests) that define membership in the other spheres, but from collective imaginings of abstract, universalistic characteristics, and utopian representations of capacities for democratic participation. In democratic elections, political campaigns crystallize shared expressions of the good life and imaginaries of an ideal community of citizens. Elections move the victor and their vision from the civil sphere into the state, centrally.

In this article, I pursue the themes of newness and rupture as representing manifestations of legitimacy troubles in a host of America’s political and civil spheres, and in and amongst its democratic institutions. I present findings from the literature on legitimacy that indicate, despite much commentary to the contrary, a Trump like-character is not anathema to American symbolic representations of legitimate authority. Finally, I offer a brief cultural pragmatic analysis of the election and specify what performances of national identity and claims to leadership look like under these conditions.

This article offers a thick description of the United States during the first nine months of the 2016 presidential election competition. It argues that this competition is organized in a theatrical way, and that this period, from April to December 2015, represents act one of the drama. It argues that performances in act one contribute to setting the cultural and interpretive conditions in which citizens will enter and act back on the drama in its subsequent acts, in state primaries and caucuses, and in the general election in November 2016. Building on the works of Roland Barthes and Clifford Geertz, the article gives a structural, or semiotic, interpretation of the dominant symbols and discourses operating in the dramatic field, and using Alexander?s cultural pragmatics, it identifies and analyzes key performances given by candidates Clinton and Trump, which crystalized particular meaning formations and lent the proceedings a sense of dynamism and flow. The article demonstrates how analyzing performances in a manner consistent with cultural pragmatic theory contributes to research on electoral politics, political authority, and legitimation processes.

Rooted in the modernist project of explaining such grand transfor-mations as industrialization, the rise of urban centers, bureaucratic means of administration and domination, and the state formations of democracies and dictatorships, the social sciences in general and sociological theories in particular have sought to identify and name the hallmark features and processes that deene an emerging histori-cal epoch. eeort continues at the turn of the 21st century, when advanced societies once again appear to be experiencing profound changes in their constituent social and cultural elements. Scientiic knowledge and technology played a central role in narratives of the rise of modernity, and they remain central characters in more recent theories of transformation as well. Having penetrated all spheres of social (and natural) life during the 20th century, science and technology continue to exert considerable transformative power over social formations, leading contemporary theorists to diagnose the current epoch in a variety of ways. Do we live in postindustrial societies (Bell, 1973), knowledge societies (Böhme and Stehr, 1986; Stehr, 1994), network societies (Castells, 1996), or risk societies (Beck, 1992), we ask. As is the character of social theo-rizing, a clear answer eludes our grasp, yet probably lies somewhere in the middle of these formulations. What these social theories share, however, is a commitment to locating the roots of transformations in socio-economic processes. Yet alongside these debates the conceptual dichotomy of the modern and postmodern has arisen, an academic discourse with an altogether diierent epistemological approach to the question of how economy and culture shape one another. 1 Without 1 In what is but a passing reference, Talcott Parsons (1977: 241) expresses, in his Evolution of Societies, his certitude that the idea of postmodernity is premature since the trend of the "next century will be toward the completion of Modernity and Postmodernity 117 describing the postmodern movement in all of its self-exemplifying and dazzling diversity, in the following pages we probe this diierence in greater detail, and examine the very notion of an epochal break, the transition into a postmodern era, as well. postmodern theories and studies that originated in the 1970s, bloomed in the 1980s, and through the 1990s, conceive of the postmodern epoch's emergence as residing in and responding to transformations within the cultural spheres of society. 2 In distinct contrast to theories of the postmodern, theories of modern industrial and postindustrial society have been more rooted in the socio-logical, political, and economic discourses that assert if not the primacy then at least the immense importance of socio-economic activities for the life-worlds experienced in the contemporary, and perhaps more particularly, Western world. theory of the knowledge society, for instance, continues to stress this theorem; while it does speak of a reversal in the relative importance of superstructure and substructure, it nonetheless refuses to deny the persistent relevance of the economic system, let alone exempt it from analysis.

This article approaches the topics of invention and innovation by way of cultural theory. Building on the works of Ferdinand de Saussure and John Austin, the article offers definitions of invention and innovation in semiotic and performative terms. It conceptualizes invention as a process of resignification, and frames innovation as a felicitous performative. Structuralist theory appears to foreclose the potential for these two terms to exist in the empirical world. This article explores these barriers but also locates conceptual spaces for invention and innovation, and identifies these phenomena as they occur in contemporary empirical sites.