Irrationality, Rationality, and the Linguistic Beyond: Toward a Tropological Re-structuring of Motivation in Social Movements

• In Event: 352 - Theory Section Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 04. Power and Social Movements

Abstract

New Social Movement presents a serious problem related to how it constructs a theoretical picture of the nature and dynamics of social movements, which is the role that is attributed to culture. NSM theorists break culture down into discrete concepts, such as identity, biography, narrative, and emotional appeal, and describe the ways in which individual actors use these cultural tools in order to foster a common identity, achieve solidarity, and further the agendas of their movements. I argue that this reductive conception of culture as a series of frames ignores crucial components of the social and cultural bonds that bind individuals together and make social action possible. I attempt to revive and reconstruct the theory of culture as the social precondition of action in a way that avoids the rational/irrational binary by employing what I refer to as the Tropologcial Model. Using this model, I argue that culture and thought are structured like language and that a theory of tropes can explain the ways in which actors symbolically position identity and narrative resulting in their motivation for social action. I examine the central tenets of the previous models and provide reasons why the rational/strategic and NSM models have dismissed the classical conception of culture. Based on this account, I argue that these reasons for dismissal target arbitrary aspects of the classical conception, which do not affect the validity of the core insights into the nature and dynamics of social movements proposed in the classical theory of culture.

Author

• Ritchie Savage, Pratt Institute