Spheres, Bubbles, Planets: thinking scale, space, and ephemeral effervescence


Mervyn Horgan, University of Guelph

The best kinds of social theory are necessarily two-faced. They engage with both the embodied reality of everyday life shared by consociates—the ‘paramount reality of the lifeworld’ (Schutz)—and the grander scale of abstract, largely invisible, social structures that organize so many facets of our lives and experiences, both collectively and individually. Building out of cultural sociological insights around the centrality of performance, discourse, symbols and collective representations to social life, with civil sphere theory, Alexander (2006) offers a macro-level, normatively-oriented, empirically-grounded theory that treats the civil sphere as a relatively autonomous sphere of social life. The civil sphere’s animating principle and governing logic centres on solidarity. That’s said, because civil sphere theory’s initial iteration rested exclusively on US cases, the boundaries of the civil sphere were treated as coincident with the boundaries of the nation: expanded inclusion in the civil sphere is tied to expanded conceptions of national solidarity. Consequently, most early studies focused on national media, national politics, national institutions, and national social movements. While developed in the US using US cases, over the last 20 years civil sphere theory has increasingly globalized, with some positing the existence of a transnational, or even global, civil sphere. Given the theory’s universalist aspirations, this scalar movement upward from the national to the transnational and/or global is both analytically ambitious and politically prudent. That said, if civil sphere boundaries are coeval with national boundaries, then solidarity is necessarily restricted, for example by risking being subsumed under state projects or coopted by populist nationalism. Conversely, if the civil sphere operates at smaller scales and in more everyday spaces, it may become more difficult to delineate how its principles can diffuse more broadly. This paper’s aims are substantially less grand than the original theory, but ambitious nonetheless: to conceptualize and spatialize the civil sphere at smaller scales in ordinary spaces. To do this, I outline some lineaments of an emerging everyday interactional turn in civil sphere theory specifically, and in cultural sociology more generally. Using the ‘sphere’ as a generative image, I treat these smaller scales and ordinary spaces as ‘bubbles’. Reated as a metaphor, Liinamaa (2022: 169) notes that bubbles simultaneously connote “fragility and protection”. Bubbles are porous. They expand and contract. They float. They stick. They can burst. Significantly, tensions between internal and external pressures shape their surface and give them a tenuous structure. Bubbles too are associated with effervescence - that fizzing up and flowing over characteristic of lived, embodied solidarity, albeit ephemeral. Reflecting on a wide range of applications, cases, and critiques of civil sphere theory by colleagues across Canada (Alexander and Horgan, forthcoming), in this paper I consider some possibilities and problems that arise when we move ideas and concepts from the big stuff of spheres to the small stuff of bubbles.

This paper will be presented at the following session: