This paper examines the influence of both the agential and structural aspects of culture on the 2017 UK General Election. The empirical section of the paper is organised around three aspects of the Labour campaign narrative: its promise to provide a national ‘alternative’, its mobilisation of Corbyn as simultaneously an individual and an icon, and its use of rallies and social media as alternative stages from which to project its meanings. It identifies the material conditioning, coding and counter-coding, narrativisation and counter-narrativisation of key events, issues, and figures, demonstrating how the substantive contestation of the campaign occurred within a consensual formal grammar that constrained symbolic action and often produced consequences unintended by cultural workers themselves. It, therefore, demonstrates how culture retained a relative autonomy in influencing meaning outcomes in part due to its formal semiotic logic. It introduces the notion of ‘code-rerouting’ to cultural sociology’s stock of conceptual tools and highlights how failure to conform to the structuring norms of civil rituals, such as presenting oneself to public scrutiny during a campaign, or failure to project coherence between surface and depth, individual and icon, past and present, or between private and public can prove fatal to performative felicity.

本文考察了文化的代理和结构方面对 2017 年英国大选的影响。本文的实证部分围绕工党竞选叙述的三个方面进行组织：承诺提供国家“替代方案”，将科尔宾同时作为个人和偶像进行动员，以及将集会和社交媒体用作替代阶段从中投射其意义。它确定了关键事件、问题和数据的物质条件、编码和反编码、叙述和反叙述，展示了运动的实质性争论是如何在一种双方同意的形式语法中发生的，这种语法限制了象征性的行动，并经常产生意想不到的后果文化工作者自己。因此，它 展示了文化如何在影响意义结果方面保持相对自主性，部分原因在于其形式符号逻辑。它在文化社会学的概念工具库中引入了“代码重新路由”的概念，并强调了如何未能遵守公民仪式的结构化规范，例如在竞选期间将自己展示给公众监督，或未能在表面和深度、个人和偶像、过去和现在，或者私人和公共之间，都可能对表演的幸福造成致命的影响。