Am Soc (2010) 41:423428 DOI 10.

1007/s12108-010-9105-y

Chuck Tilly and Mozart

Viviana A. Zelizer

Published online: 21 August 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010

Abstract With Mozart-like versatility, Charles Tillys brilliant investigations covered a remarkable range of topics and methodologies. This paper highlights two of Tillys lesser-known contributions: as cultural analyst and as feminist scholar. It also introduces his concern with the place of normative arguments in social research. Keywords Culture . Gender . Ethics In his lively biography of Mozart, Peter Gay (1999) tells us about the all-Mozart concert of March 23, 1783, where Mozart acted as conductor and soloist in the presence of Emperor Joseph II. Among the ten featured pieces, Mozart included the Haffner Symphony, number 35, the Aria Se il padre perdei, from Idomeneo, Piano Concerto in C, No. 13, Aria Parto, maffretto, from Lucio Silla, and Fugue for piano. What makes this program so stunning, Gay comments, is not just that Mozart played only his music that evening, or that he inserted a popular showpiece and an improvisation... but that all numbers except for a couple, were of recent vintage. His fertility, Gay notes, had become almost legendary... Not even Beethoven or Schubert would match Mozart in his sheer versatility (Gay 1999: 75; 102). Sounds familiar? Indeed, as the essays in this volume amply document, Chuck Tillys sociological versatility was likewise daunting. He relished simultaneous multiple endeavors. As I read Gays biography, I recalled a conversation with Chuck from some years ago. We were comparing styles of work in academia with the arts, when he told me that he liked to think of his own approach to creative work as somewhat akin to Mozarts. Why? I asked. Because, he confided, of the pleasure he felt in contributing to so many different fields and varying genres.
This paper is a slightly revised version of my presentation at the Memorial Conference for Chuck Tilly which took place in October 2008 at Columbia University, New York City. My thanks to Paul DiMaggio, Michael Katz, Pierre Kremp, Andreas Koller, and Leandro Rotman for helpful comments and suggestions. Andreas Koller deserves our collective gratitude for his exceptional efforts in organizing the 2009 sessions honoring Chuck at the Social Science History Association meetings and for editing this volume. V. A. Zelizer (*) Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA e-mail: vzelizer@princeton.edu

424

Am Soc (2010) 41:423428

In the spirit of celebrating Chucks buoyant versatility, his bubbling cornucopia of ideas, I highlight here two of his less visible yet vital contributions. I will report briefly on Chuck the cultural analyst and Chuck the feminist scholar. A fair warning: this essay is by no means a comprehensive analysis of Chucks work in these areas. It represents only a modest reminder of some less salient Tilly explorations. Chuck the cultural analyst? The first time I heard Chuck present a paper, he was speaking to a small Russell Sage seminar about an early draft of his 1990 Transplanted Networks. I raised my hand and asked him, so what about the impact of culture on the migration chains he was studying? He promptly dismissed my question, flatly declaring (although tempered with a smile): I dont believe in culture. By 2008, this fierce structuralist had not fully converted, but he was increasingly incorporating culture into his analyses, with his own distinctive voice. In the midst of the transformation from what Sidney Tarrow calls Chucks structural persuasion to what Chuck himself labeled relational realism culture gradually seeped into his thinking (Tarrow 2008: 4). In 1992, he wrote in private correspondence about his opposition to Parsonian notions of society and value consensus: Ive long been hostile as well to the invocation of culture as (a) an autonomous force, (b) whats left when you take out class, race, power, and so on, (c) a characteristic of individual personalities, secreted somewhere among the brain, the heart, and the soul. However, he admitted, Ive mellowed on culture... colleagues... [have] made me appreciate that shared understandings and their objectifications... make a significant difference to what possibilities of action actors actually consider not to mention how they interpret the outcomes of their interaction. I finally realized, he wrote, that my notion of repertoires is an eminently cultural notion. Six years later, during an interview with Bruce Stave, Chuck told him: One of my major intellectual projects of the last decade or so has been to build a more adequate account of identity, agency, and culture. The most obvious one, and I think the most successful, has been my idea of repertoires of contention, which is an eminently cultural notion where you have collective learning going on through interaction and you have the residues of this historical process of struggle showing up as constraints on how people relate to each other the next time they make claims (Stave 1998: 203). Once Chuck stopped warring against the weighty Parsonian Culture that lacked specificity or causal mechanisms, he began to see new crucial ways in which culture mattered in explanation. We had long discussions about cultures definition: he opted for varying versions of culture as shared understandings and their representations in symbols, objects, and practices (Tilly 2008: 183). As soon as he emerged from what he once called the world of steely interest and took culture seriously, Chuck characteristically began asking the hard questions: where is culture located? How does it produce its effects? How do shared understandings come into being? How does culture change? Why? Chuck impatiently rejected any notion of culture as an abstract entity or other conceptions which came too close to the Parsonian brand of culture as an autonomous guidance

Am Soc (2010) 41:423428

425

system for a self-equilibrating society. He likewise remained allergic to postmodernist culturalism. Culture, he insisted, is not an autonomous realm, but an analytically separable, empirically intertwined feature of social relations that is susceptible to observation, explanation, and validation (personal communication, 1996). Not surprisingly, Chuck soon co-opted culture into his increasingly expansive relational approach. In Chucks hands, far from being an abstract realm, culture became a social process and product. Cultural content, for Chuck, is to be found within social ties, not as an external constraint. In consonance with my colleague Paul DiMaggios (1994) call for understanding culture as constitutive, Chuck focused on the culturally informed creation, negotiation, and transformation of social relations. Culture, he argued, is not an autonomous force behind social life but a constitutive element of social relations (Tilly 2008: 183. On Chucks growing engagement with culture, see Mische 2011). Rather than simply adopting categories from the surrounding culture, people, in Chucks view, create culture relationally, as they navigate their social lives. Cultural meanings are therefore constantly negotiated and transformed via those social relations. Chuck often spoke of cultures conversational character to convey this view of culture as emerging from creative interpersonal negotiation. In his essay on Contentious Conversation, for instance, he declared: Conversation in general shapes social life by altering individual and collective understandings, by creating and transforming social ties, by generating cultural materials that are then available for subsequent social interchange, and by establishing, obliterating, or shifting commitments on the part of participants (Tilly 2002:122). Indeed, he admired Ann Swidler s notion of culture as a tool kit because it treated people as active agents who refashion culture for their own ends. Yet he faulted Swidler for focusing too exclusively on the resourcefulness of individuals without sufficiently taking into account the relational character of culture. More specifically, over the past 10 years or so, Chuck proposed two strategies for understanding how culture works: cultural ecology and tunneling under. As he explored how stories and identities produce their effects, Chuck dismissed twinned bad answers: the first, alterations of individual consciousness; the second, systemic society makes me do it accounts. Among possible good answers, he began to develop the concept of cultural ecology. By that he meant relationally grounded ways in which large stores of culture became available to any particular [social] site through its connections with other sites (Tilly 2005: 214, for an earlier statement, see Tilly 2000). Recognizing that the concept was somewhat mysterious, implausible, and difficult he provided a more user-friendly translation: As a practical matter we often assume a simple version of cultural ecology: challenged by an impending purchase, an intellectual conundrum, or a weighty personal choice, we turn to a wise friend or colleague not necessarily because she will have the right answer, but because she will know whom to ask or where to search. A computer model of cultural ecology would feature distributed intelligence (Tilly 2005: 214).

426

Am Soc (2010) 41:423428

Here Chuck is drawing on his persistent viewpoint: interpersonal exchanges have a logic that doesnt reduce to individual consciousness or to location within social structure; interaction produces culture and structure. What Chuck called tunneling under the post-modern challenge provides a more specific research strategy. By tunneling under he meant a two-step process. First, we must recognize that a great deal of social construction goes into the formation of entitiesgroups, institutions, markets, selvesthat most people take for granted as real. But then, he insists, instead of stopping there social scientists must go on to explain how that construction actually works and produces its effects (Tilly 2002: 37-8; for an application of the concept, see Smith 2008). In a characteristically insightful as well as sympathetic review of Chucks Identities, Boundaries, and Social Ties, Paul DiMaggio, noting the importance Chuck gives to identity formation, as well as the diffusion of social forms, repertoires and ideas, suggests that: If Tilly would only come out as a sociologist of culture, he would be a very good one (DiMaggio 2007:230). Indeed, although I had been working as a cultural analyst for years before Chuck and I began our conversation, his developing insights on how culture works transformed my own understandings and as a result greatly influenced my more recent explanations of social processes. My views of culture have been irrevocably Tilly-fied (see e.g. Zelizer and Tilly 2006). Let me turn now to Chuck the feminist scholar. Both Work under Capitalism (1998) co-authored with Chris Tilly and Durable Inequality (1998) offer fundamental insights into salient issues in the feminist agenda. Among other contributions, Work under Capitalism provides a powerful account and explanation of why domestic work and other forms of unpaid labor, typically performed by women, should count as crucial economic activity. In a passage I repeatedly cite in my own discussions of carework, Chris and Chuck tell us: Only a prejudice bred by Western capitalism and its industrial labor markets fixes on strenuous effort expended for money payment outside the home as real work, relegating other efforts to amusement, crime, and mere housekeeping (Tilly and Tilly 1998:22). Indeed, Chuck cheered the recent expansion of economic sociology from its earlier almost exclusive concentration on production markets to the analysis of household economies, carework, and informal activity. Published the same year as Work under Capitalism, Durable Inequalitys brilliant exposition of mechanisms that create and perpetuate various forms of categorical inequality has already made its mark in feminist thinking. Take for instance Barbara Reskins 2002 American Sociological Associations presidential address, Including Mechanisms in Our Models of Ascriptive Inequality where she explicitly draws inspiration from Chucks mechanism-based explanations (Reskin 2003. See also Epstein 2007:11). So too, Patricia Roos, another expert in gender inequality, not only praised Durable Inequality in a review essay as a compelling theory of why inequality emerges and how it reproduces (Roos 1999:27) but adopted its arguments for explaining what she calls gendered durable inequities in academia (Roos and Gatta 2008). Whats more, a quick search for Durable Inequality in the Social Science Citation Index (which reflects only article citations, not books) shows that 51 articleswell over a quarter of the 180 articles citing Durable Inequalitydeal with gender.1
1

See Kim Vosss essay in this volume for further discussion of Durable Inequalitys impact.

Am Soc (2010) 41:423428

427

To be sure, Chucks concern with gender issues was not only intellectual. He was a practicing feminist. Most notably, he and Louise Tilly raised three spectacular daughters and an admirable feminist son. When it came to mentoring students, he encouraged and supported generations of women. Of the 36 students that appear in his last updatemade on November 20, 2007of graduate students for whom he was serving as dissertation director or co/director, about half were women (This is only an approximation because some foreign students names make it difficult to identify their gender). There is a third under-the-radar Tilly contribution, which I only mention as further evidence of his boundless versatility. Thats Chuck the ethicist. His reflections on how to approach normative arguments might have blossomed at least into an article, and possibly a book. In Invisible Elbow, for example, Chuck explains what makes social science a powerful complement to ethics and politics. Every ethical or political proposal, he observes, imports, however covertly, a theory of the possible, a selection among alternative actions that theory names as possible, and causal arguments relating actions to outcomes. Since social science develops reliable knowledge of causes and possibilities, he reasons, it obviously bears on ethical and political choices. That is also why social scientific explanations regularly stir passions rarely seen in discussions of astronomy and geology: they constitute claims to pronounce on the possibility assumptions of religious, moral, and political doctrines (Tilly 1996: 596). In his view, clearer descriptions and explanations would facilitate the development of normatively superior programs. Ferruccio Busoni (18661924), the famous pianist, composer, and pedagogue, once said about Mozart: There are bad composers, there are competent composers, there are good composers, there are great composersand there is Mozart (Tuan 2008:117). Back to my earlier Mozart analogy, we can extend Busonis assessment to Chuck. Chuck Tilly, master sociologist, historian, political theorist, and more, populated our intellectual worlds with his multiple ideas and explanations. It still remains a daunting challenge for all of us to think about this magical man in the past tense. How fortunate we are to receive his precious legacy. References
DiMaggio, P. (1994). Culture and economy. In N. Smelser & R. Swedberg (Eds.), The handbook of economic sociology (pp. 2757). New York: Russell Sage Foundation. DiMaggio, P. (2007). Review of identities, boundaries, and social ties, by Charles Tilly. Contemporary Sociology, 36, 229230. Epstein, C. (2007). Great divides: the cultural, cognitive, and social bases of the global subordination of women. 2006 ASA presidential address. American Sociological Review, 72, 122. Gay, P. (1999). Mozart. New York: Penguin. Mische, A. (2011). Relational sociology, culture, and agency. In J. Scott & P. Carrington (Eds), The Sage handbook of social network analysis, forthcoming. London: Sage. Reskin, B. (2003). Including mechanisms in our models of ascriptive inequality: 2002 presidential address. American Sociological Review, 68, 121. Roos, P. A. (1999). Revisiting inequality. Contemporary Sociology, 28, 2629. Roos, P. A., & Gatta, M. L. (2008) Gender (In)equity in the academy: Subtle mechanisms and the production of inequality. Unpublished paper.

428

Am Soc (2010) 41:423428

Smith, T. A. (2008). Remembering and forgetting a contentious past: voices from the Italo-Yugoslav frontier. In C. H. Tilly, R. Franzosi & M. Kousis (Eds), Special issue: Mediterranean political processes, 14002006. Part I: Historical perspective. American Behavioral Scientist, 51, 15381554. Stave, B. M. (1998). A conversation with Charles Tilly. Urban history and urban sociology. Journal of Urban History, 24, 184225. Tarrow, S. (2008). Charles Tilly and the practice of contentious politics. Social Movement Studies 7 (December), 225-246. Tuan, Y.-F. (2008). Human goodness. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Tilly, C. (1996). Invisible elbow. Sociological Forum, 11, 589601. Tilly, C. (1998). Durable inequality. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tilly, C. (2000). How do relations store histories? Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 721723. Tilly, C. (2002). Stories, identities, and political change. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Tilly, C. (2005). Identities, boundaries, and social ties. Boulder: Paradigm. Tilly, C. (2008). Explaining social processes. Boulder: Paradigm. Tilly, C., & Tilly, C. (1998). Work under capitalism. Boulder: Westview. Zelizer, V., & Tilly, C. (2006). Relations and categories. In A. Markman & B. Ross (Eds.), The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 47, pp. 131). San Diego: Elsevier.