THE PERFORMANCE OF POLITICS by Jeffrey C. Alexander (2010). Although the book is about the U.S. 2008 presidential campaign, it gives a good understanding of any kind of political campaign, the enormous importance of performances and even of the aesthetic aspects in the battle for power.

"Candidates experience and channel the energy of human contact. These intense, face-to-face encounters look a lot like old-fashioned rituals. The emotions they generate are connected to civil discourse, and culture and emotion are digitized and circulated. The sounds and images of audiences whistling and applauding and of beaming, back-slapping, and fist-pumping candidates reflect collective psychic energy to the candidate and upward, via communicative institutions, into the broader civil sphere".

@academicchatter
@sociology
@anthropology
@politicaltheory
@politicalscience

#Politics #PerformanceTheory #JeffreyAlexander #Aesthetics

Available at Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/performanceofpol0000alex/mode/2up

@cqdcqdcqd Damn I’m excited for your book … have you published or presented anything on the topic yet? Aside: One of my pet peeves is the way that Goffman’s theories got sucked up, decontextualized, and distorted by #performanceTheory. (#SocialTheory guy here, so I have a particular perspective when I read #Goffman.).