refrigerator blindness

I'm back to Jeffrey Alexander again but only for a moment.

He's reaching on his application of the autonomy of culture and his requirement that cultural sociological analyses take culture as an independent variable. Ultimately, or at least based upon his own work, one must conclude that his theory cannot make predictions and only appears to have value when used as a retrospective explanatory tool. Furthermore, actors, interests and values, and other spheres of social life are left out of his "thick descriptions of culture." Yet they come sliding right back in again when Alexander attempts to explain cultural change and the succession of social theories. Instead of self-interested agents, economic incentives, politics, or other "non-cultural" factors, Alexander's theory rests on theory itself as an actor seeking self-preservation and ascendancy ("Broad theories can defend themselves by defining and protecting a set of core propositions, jettisoning entire segments of their perspective as only peripherally important" (Meanings of Social Life, p. 205)). Alexander constructs culture as an actor the same way states are constructed by Skocpol, individuals are constructed by rational choice theories, corporations by organizational theorists, etc, etc.

Ultimately Alexander is so adamant regarding the independence of culture that he really has no way to bring culture back into the world of material consequences without jettisoning that which is most important - an understanding of culture as the affective, dramaturgical and discursive context in which all action is carried out.