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.com by Anna Dom on October 14, 2012 SIGNING IN THE FLESH 219we must do the reverse editing here to restore the redacted materials that promiseto recover less auspicious enselfments and rescue from oblivion more encompass-ing self-framings.The goal is reconstruction rather than deconstruction here.I hopeShusterman will address these issues in his future work, incorporate into his studythe distinction between the signifying media suggested by pragmatist hermeneutics,and trace in a more systematic fashion the tension between vita activa, vita contem-plativa, and vita voluptuosa in the lives of famous and not-so-famous thinkers (e.g.,is Dewey s extramarital affair and Wittgenstein s frustrated homosexuality a propersubject of somaesthetics?).Jeffrey Alexander s magisterial treatise on the civic sphere that includes struc-tures of feelings that permeate social life and run just below the surface of strategicinstitutions and self-conscious elites zeroes in on the issues central to pragmatisthermeneutics (Alexander 2006a:54). Civil hermeneutics, as Alexander (2006a:550)conceives it, examines how civic ideals have been sabotaged by the dominant elitesvisceral reactions that have engendered exclusionary and hegemonic practices.Fur-ther inquiry along these lines could benefit from comparison between the semioticresources of the body and the textual authority of scriptural signs.The role of ci-vility as an embodied virtue deserves special attention in this regard, more so thanhas been accorded in the book.Also, it would be interesting to expand Alexander sstudy of the social construction of the Holocaust (2003:24 84) so that it squares offwith the Torah commandment to exterminate the Amalekites, the Jewish people sresponse to this commandment, and the manner in which this biblical narrative hasbeen reconstructed over the course of time.Of particular relevance to the line of inquiry outlined in this article is the researchprogram designated as cultural pragmatics (Alexander, Giesen, and Mast 2006).Building on the ideas of Erving Goffman, Victor Turner, and Kenneth Burke, sociolo-gists comprising this school study culture as it comes across in strategic performancesstaged by skillful agents who deploy their symbolic and emotional resources in a bidto dramatize meaning structures embedded in cultural scripts. Cultural pragmat-ics accounts for how meaning, in the form of background collective representations,shapes social actors and audiences interpretations in a deeply structural way [whileallowing] for contingency by reconciling culture s constitutive power with social ac-tors abilities to creatively and agentically situate and strategize vis-à-vis the symbolicstructures in which they are embedded (Mast 2006:138 19). To take meaning se-riously, according to this outlook (Alexander and Mast 2006:2, 32, 39), requiresnot only deciphering society s cultural codes but also showing how agents manage to offer plausible performances, not only metaphorically but literally [becoming] thetext, creatively citing hegemonic codes in order to play upon and subvert them (Alexander 2006b:14).Pragmatist hermeneutics shares with cultural pragmatics anabiding interest in the incongruities between words and deeds (Mast 2006:120), al-though the cultural pragmatics agenda is closer to depth hermeneutics with its focuson background structures of immanent meaning (Eyerman 2006:195) while the prag-matist approach hews closer to surface hermeneutics, which concerns itself with bodylanguage games and emergent grammars exerting cross-pressures on agents caught intheir gravitational pull.Since each approach suggests complementary solutions to theproblem of agency and structure, there are ample opportunities for cross-fertilization.Recent research on body metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson 1999), pragmatist neu-roscience (Brothers 1997), neurosociology (Franks and Smith 1999), and somaticmarkers and unconscious memory (Massey 2001) has opened new vistas for under-standing our interpretive practices.What these studies tell us is that the consciousDownloaded from stx.sagepub.com by Anna Dom on October 14, 2012 220 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORYmind is a monkey riding a tiger of unconscious decisions and actions in progress,frantically making up stories about being in control (Overbeye 2007:D1).Once rea-son grasped the situation discursively, it has already been powerfully influenced byemotions.The mammalian brain continuously bombards the cerebral cortex withstrong signals waiting to be rationalized, which explains why emotions have a farmore powerful impact on logical reasoning than the other way around.The affectwill undergo changes once it has been subsumed under a proper label, but its so-matic presence will inform conduct in a way that resists conscious control.We needto adjust our theoretical schema to account for the role that unconscious affect andsomatic markers left by historical upheavals have on our interpretive practices.Finally, pragmatist hermeneutics needs to acknowledge its debt to 20th-centuryhermeneutics.Gadamer and Ricoeur have taught us much about the historical na-ture of meaning appropriation and the role of language in interpretative reconstruc-tion, but the master metaphor of text and textuality that animates structuralhermeneutics is overdue for pragmatist revision. In writing, th[e] meaning of whatis spoken exists purely for itself, completely detached from all emotional elements ofexpression and communication, explains Gadamer (1982:357, 350). In this senseunderstanding is certainly not concerned with understanding historically, ie recon-structing the way the text has come into being.Rather, one is understanding the textitself. There is no room to explore here how Gadamer s own historical enselfmentsmight be implicated in his theoretical stance (Shalin 2004b).Suffice it to say thatpragmatists have reservations about the privileging of written tradition over the oralone.Gadamer (1982:251) goes so far as to contend that tradition is linguistic innature. Pragmatist hermeneutics, by contrast, insists that textualized cultural formsfail to capture the vibrancy and contradictions of lived experience.Written traditionstend to distort voices that fail to come to language and articulate their own emergentgrammars, voices obscured and suppressed by dominant discourses.Ricoeur s formulation is more balanced.He is particularly helpful in explaininghow actions become a matter of record, how they bear on the agent s reputation anddisclose the agent s historical world.Pragmatists agree that action itself, action asmeaningful, may become an object of science.through a kind of objectificationsimilar to the fixation which occurs in writing (Ricoeur 1981:203).But the fact that a text breaks the ties of discourse to all the ostensible references and secures the emancipation from the situational context (Ricoeur 1981:207) spells trouble forpragmatists insofar as they prefer to situate agents on the intersection of multiplediscourses/paradigms and resists assigning an agent to any one world
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