ABSTRACT
The theory of communicative constructivism is based on the notion of communicative action as the basic process for the construction of social reality. While they demonstrated how they allow for the division of labor and for institutions, the question as to how collectivity is constituted has remained open. In this chapter, I want to turn to the ways in which communicative action becomes collective through one of its “elementary” objectified forms: Applause by audiences. Focusing on clapping in the context of large audiences, the chapter will, first, identify specific forms of interactive coordination of audience members. In addition to these forms of temporal coordination, the chapter analyses how and why so many people would act similarly at the same time. This is what we call the collectivity of communicative action. On the basis of a comparison with other collective forms of communicative action, the chapter will then show that, in addition to situational coordination, the collective performance of clapping requires situated knowledge of what we will call the “frames” of the collective forms of communicative action. On this basis, actors seem to orient their actions toward those collective forms that not only “mean” or “represent” collectivity but also make it perceptible as a common and jointly produced objectification. In this sense, the collective forms of the communicative action of applause are an empirical case of what Durkheim called “effervescence.”
