Professor Jeffrey Alexander, a sociologist at Yale, writes in this 2012 book:
* Being a public intellectual, in other words, is not just a matter of telling the truth and of being separate and free-floating and truly representing the universal. It is a matter of performing as if one were all these things.
* Politicians win power by convincing voters to believe, becoming symbolic representations of the hopes and fears and dreams of collective life. After they take hold of the reins of power and gain control of administration in the state, the new rulers cannot just order people about, expecting them to obey or else. They need to make government meaningful, to align administration with the stories citizens tell each other about what they hope and what they do and where the best of society should be. So the powerful couch their commands as requests and frame their administration as the last, best hope of humankind. If they cannot, and end up just issuing commands, the people will not see government as a symbol of their values and, in a democracy, they will take the rulers’ power away.
* Individuals, organizations, and parties moved “instinctively” to hook their actions into the background culture in a lively and compelling manner, working to create an impression of sincerity and authenticity rather than one of calculation and artificiality, to achieve verisimilitude. Social movements’ public demonstrations display a similar performative logic. Movement organizers, intensely aware of media organizations’ control over the means of symbolic distribution, direct their participants to perform in ways that will communicate that they are worthy, committed, and determined to achieve acceptance and inclusion from the larger political community. Social actors, embedded in collective representations and working through symbolic and material means, implicitly orient towards others as if they were actors on a stage seeking identification with their experiences and understandings
from their audiences.
* The struggle to re-fuse speaker and audience, to connect with the members of civil society through felicitous performance – this is what the democratic struggle for power is all about. Those who want power must be elected, and they will not get votes unless their performances are successful, at least to some degree. This is why politicians and their advisors must put their heads together, run focus groups and conduct polls, and do daily interpretive battles with journalists as well as those on the other political side.
* To become a hero, one must establish a sense of great and urgent necessity. The moment is precarious and burdened with terrible significance. America has fallen on tough times; the Dream lies in tatters. The nation has fallen off the hill. We have been desecrated and polluted by the second Bush presidency. We must be purified, and for this we need a new hero. Obama presents himself as having overcome great personal adversity on the road to auditioning for this position of national hero. Born into a deeply polluted racial group, he was inspired by an earlier African- American prophet- hero whose rhetoric about the dream of justice had become deeply etched in the collective consciousness of American civil society. After Obama secured the nomination, on June 4, joyous proclamations of imminent salvation were offered by African- Americans and circulated by the communicative
institutions of American civil society. His victory seemed to presage an end to race hatred and the realization of the true solidarity promised by American civil society. In Africa, Obama’s Kenyan relatives and their countrymen described his ascension as signaling redemption, the possibility of global solidarity.
* To become a hero is to enter into myth. It is to cease being merely a mortal man (or woman) and to develop a second immortal body in Kantorowicz’s sense (Kantorowicz 1957), an iconic surface that allows audiences an overpowering feeling of connection with the transcendental realm of a nation’s idealistic political life that lies just underneath. Obama has begun to grow this second body. He is no longer just a human being – a skinny guy with big ears, a writer, an ordinary man – but a hero. As an iconic hero, this symbolic body will not die. It will be remembered no matter what happens to the living man. Most political figures cannot grow such second skin. They are
respected or liked, or even deferred to, but their second body, the mythical public body, is weak and puny, so they remain politician rather than myth. Overshadowed and wimpified by their opponent, they are “wounded” in political battles, revealing their mortal natures. Jimmy Carter was wounded by Ted Kennedy’s late primary run, and injured further by Teddy’s overwhelming and vainglorious speech at the Democratic convention. Carter faltered in the general election campaign, watching helplessly as the once mundane Ronald Reagan grew a sacralizing and mythical second body. Bill Clinton versus George H. W. Bush ran this play in reverse. Decades before, Richard Nixon’s five o’clock shadow, not properly covered by makeup, darkened and polluted him, allowing John Kennedy to shine like a bright young god during their decisive presidential debate (Greenberg 2004).
* The blogger is not just a new kind of factual gatherer, but a new kind of interpreter, one that speaks openly and ideologically and personally even while supposedly on behalf of the people themselves.
