Cultural Theory E-Book

Philip Smith

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 752

Beschreibung

This second edition of Cultural Theory provides a concise introduction to cultural theory, placing major figures, traditional concepts, and contemporary themes within a sharp conceptual framework.

• Provides a student-friendly introduction to what can often be a complex field of study
• Updates the first edition in response to reader feedback and to the changing nature of the field
• Includes additional coverage of theorists from the classical period to include Nietzsche and DuBois
• Introduces entirely new chapters on race and gender theory, and the body
• Considers themes that have become more important in theoretical activity in recent years such as computers and virtual reality, cosmopolitanism, and performance theory
• Draws on theories and theorists from continental Europe as well as the English-speaking world

Leseprobe

Contents

Preface to the First Edition: About this Book

Preface to the Second Edition

Acknowledgments

Introduction: What is Culture? What is Cultural Theory?

Culture in Classical Social Theory

Karl Marx

Emile Durkheim

Max Weber

Georg Simmel

Friedrich Nietzsche

W. E. B. DuBois

Suggested Further Reading

Culture and Social Integration in the Work of Talcott Parsons

Early Work on Social Action

The Middle-Period Systems Theory

Late Systems Theory: The AGIL Model

The Triumph of Modernity

Parsons: An Evaluation

Suggested Further Reading

Culture as Ideology in Western Marxism

Georg Lukács

Antonio Gramsci

The Frankfurt School

Walter Benjamin

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

Jürgen Habermas

Louis Althusser

The Decline and Future of Western Marxism

Suggested Further Reading

Culture as Action in Symbolic Interactionism, Phenomenology, and Ethnomethodology

Erving Goffman

Labeling Theory

Phenomenology

Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology after Garflnkel and Sacks

Ethnomethodology and Phenomenology: An Evaluation

Micro Theories: A General Evaluation

Suggested Further Reading

The Durkheimians: Ritual, Classification, and the Sacred 69

The First Half of the Twentieth Century

The Second Half of the Twentieth Century

Suggested Further Reading

Structuralism and the Semiotic Analysis of Culture

The Characteristics of Structuralism

Ferdinand de Saussure

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Georges Dumézil and Algirdas-Julien (A. J.) Greimas

Roland Barthes

Marshall Sahlins

The Fate of Structuralism

Suggested Further Reading

The Poststructural Turn

Structuralism and Poststructuralism: Two Commonalities . . .

. . . and Three Divergences

Michel Foucault

Jacques Derrida

Concluding Remarks

Suggested Further Reading

Culture, Structure, and Agency: Three Attempts at Synthesis

Pierre Bourdieu

Anthony Giddens

Norbert Elias

Empirical Work Influenced by Bourdieu, Giddens, and Elias

Suggested Further Reading

British Cultural Studies

Theoretical Development: A Summary

Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart

The Birmingham School

Textual Studies of the Mass Media

Studies of Subcultures and Class Cultures

Explorations of Political Ideologies

The Diffusion of British Cultural Studies

Evaluations of British Cultural Studies

Suggested Further Reading

The Production and Reception of Culture

The Study of Media Effects

Contemporary Work on the Reception of Culture

Taste Cultures and Celebrity Culture

The Production of Culture

Evaluation

Beyond the Arts and the Media

Suggested Further Reading

Culture as Text: Narrative and Hermeneutics

Structuralist Poetics

Mikhail Bakhtin

Umberto Eco – The Role of the Reader

Narrative and Social Process

Bakhtin on the Carnivalesque

Hermeneutics

Suggested Further Reading

Psychoanalytic Approaches to Culture and the Self

Sigmund Freud

Post-Freudian Theories of Self and Society

The Frankfurt School

Jacques Lacan

Post-Lacanian Psychoanalytic Cultural Theory

Postmodern Psychoanalytic Cultural Theory

Psychoanalytic Theory and Imagination

Some Concluding Comments

Suggested Further Reading

The Cultural Analysis of Postmodernism and Postmodernity

Postmodernism in Architecture

Postmodernism in Art and Literature

Postmodernity in Social Theory

Further Critiques and Debates

Globalization and Culture

Suggested Further Reading

Postmodern and Poststructural Critical Theory

The Critique of Modernity

The Suspicion of Science

The Attack on General Theory

Textuality

The Rise of Pragmatism and Attacks on Foundationalism

Social Theory as a Moral and Political Enterprise

The Analysis of Identity and Difference

Postmodern and Poststructural Critical Cultural Theory: Evaluation and Critique

Suggested Further Reading

Cultural Theories of Race and Gender

Race

Gender

Evaluations of Cultural Theories of Race and Gender

Suggested Further Reading

The Body in Cultural Theory

The Somatic Society: The Body and Social Order

Body Techniques, the Corporeal Schema, and Sensual Sociology

Body Projects/Options/Regimes, Body Pedagogics, and Corporeal Realism

Body Modiflcation and Technologies of the Body

Commodiflcation, Old Age, and Death of the Body

Evaluation

Suggested Further Reading

References

Index

© 2009 by Philip Smith and Alexander Riley First edition © 2001 by Philip Smith

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First published 2001Second edition published 2009 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Philip (Philip Daniel), 1964–

Cultural theory : an introduction / Philip Smith and Alexander Riley. – 2nd ed.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-4051-6908-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4051-6907-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Culture. I. Riley, Alexander. II. Title.

HM621.S57 2009 306.01–dc222007052261

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Preface to the First Edition: About this Book

As we enter a new millennium, “culture” seems to be one of the things that everybody is talking about, both within and outside of the academy. It is widely held that that we are living in a world where signs, symbols, and the media are becoming central to the economy, that our identities are increasingly structured by the pursuit of an image, and that inequality and civic participation are defined by discourses of inclusion and exclusion. Anecdotal evidence would seem to support this view. The trial of O. J. Simpson, for example, was not just a judicial event, but also a cultural one where symbolism, narrative, and belief intersected with race politics. Conflict in the Balkans during the 1990s and afterward was driven by deeply-seated nationalisms, each grounded in complex historical memories. The growing power of corporations like Sony and Nike is linked to the iconography and mythology surrounding their products as well as to their functional efficiency. Today the political challenges raised by feminists, gay/ lesbian activists, indigenous peoples, and racial minorities are as much about identity and cultural recognition as about economic inequality and legal rights. If we reflect on our own everyday lives, we will find that here too, culture is ubiquitous. It shapes our purchasing decisions in the mall, the television programs we choose to watch (and how we watch them), our responses to global events, our face-to-face interactions with other people, and even our sense of who we are.

In such a context the ability to understand culture becomes a vital component of competent and active citizenship. Cultural theory provides one important resource for this task. It offers paradigms, models, and concepts that can be applied in the diverse settings that we encounter in our personal, public, and intellectual lives. It is not merely an arcane academic literature, but rather a resource through which we can reflect intelligently on the world around us and, perhaps, make informed choices and assume a greater level of control. This book provides a brief introduction to the field. It is, of course, already possible to find many works on library and bookstore shelves introduction social theory. Yet these tend to marginalize cultural theory, allocating it little room and discussing key theorists from a point of view that is not directly relevant to those working in the cultural field. Such texts are typically concerned with other issues, such as divergent models of class or the state, distinctions between various network theories, and so on. These themes are not usually of central interest to those exploring meaning as a component of human experience. There are also books about specific cultural theories, theorists or theoretical issues – postmodernism, Marxism, Foucault, and so on. These tend to be narrow in focus and to assume specialized knowledge. Often the author will have an axe to grind, leading to a one-sided commentary on issues and debates.

This book is different. It provides what I hope will be seen as a balanced and wide-ranging introduction and overview of contemporary cultural theory. It assumes no specialist knowledge whatsoever, but at the same time will deal with some of the most sophisticated and complex issues in contemporary social thought. The book will be of primary interest to those working in sociology, and of substantial use to students in the fields of anthropology and cultural studies. It will also contain material relevant to cultural geography, urban studies, and history. In short, anybody with a stake in undertaking the theoretically informed investigation of culture and society will find this book a worthwhile resource.

As there is a lot of ground to cover the book moves very quickly. The style is direct rather than discursive. The intention is to provide the maximum amount of essential information and the greatest number of conceptual tools in the minimum amount of space. With an aim to helping readers acquire a basic familiarity with the area, the book contains a number of features.

Priority has been given to introducing major thinkers, perspectives, and concepts. Many key terms are highlighted in bold when they are first introduced. These will build up the reader’s theoretical vocabulary. There is an emphasis on scholars and themes that everybody working in the area knows and talks about, regardless of their own personal research orientation. In many cases original publication dates and titles of classic books are also included in the text, as well as standard bibliographic information. This will help readers understand the chronology of the field. In some cases, however, I have referred to studies that are representative rather than definitive. This is particularly the case when giving a feel for the kind of work that goes on in a given field where there are no dominant figures or foundational texts (e.g., chapter 10). I have also mentioned some of my own research in one or two places. This is not because I consider myself a leading thinker worthy of extended discussion, but rather to give the reader an idea of my interests and, by implication, biases. One of the lessons we have learnt from poststructuralism is that a neutral, omniscient text is an impossibility. Hence my intention is to offer food for readerly reflexivity about possible limitations of this book.Material is organized according to theoretical traditions rather than empirical topics. In this way the conceptual connections and lines of influence between diverse scholars can be highlighted. Using this perspective, more contemporary research can be understood as the product of an intellectual lineage.As can be seen in the material you are now reading, bullet points are used from time to time to condense certain bodies of information down to essentials, summarize main points, and cut out laborious digressions.Throughout the book critical comments and evaluations will enable the reader to consider the limitations of each theory and provide balance.Notes on selected major scholars help provide a broader biographical, intellectual, and geographical context for understanding the theories discussed in the body of the text.Suggestions for further reading are provided which will help direct those with an interest in any particular area. Where possible, original texts have been suggested to encourage immediate reader familiarity with the style and thinking of leading figures.Chapters in the book are self-contained, each dealing with a theoretical perspective or field. The book has been written so it can be read in any order. Cross-referencing assists in this task. This will allow it to be instantly adapted to any course of study or research need.Where possible, emphasis has been given to theories and theorists that are influencing current debates and inquiry. I have tried to avoid lengthy discussions of figures who are today, for the most part, only of historical or scholastic interest (e.g., Comte, Spencer, Ruskin). By contrast, greater attention has been accorded to concepts and thinkers which seem to crop up time and time again in contemporary publications, theses, and project work.

Philip Smith Brisbane, Australia, 2001

Preface to the Second Edition

The first edition of this book received considerable critical and popular acclaim. Known as “the magic book” in some student circles because of the clarity and breadth of its coverage of a sometimes difficult and wide-ranging field, it has been translated into several languages and used for reference and teaching by scholars around the globe. This is a gratifying result.

In this fully revised and expanded second edition, we have aimed for the same delicate balance of accessibility and sophistication. It will be up to our readers to decide whether or not we have attained this objective. Eight years have passed since the publication of the first edition. The field of cultural theory has continued to grow and change during that time, the stock of specific thinkers and theories has risen or fallen, new conceptual terms and arguments have emerged. In addition to attending to these shifts in the field, we have listened closely to the readers of the first edition and added sections and chapters on a number of themes and topics that they suggested were important in such a volume.

The most obvious of the changes are the two entirely new chapters at the end of the book. The two fields of cultural theory treated in those chapters (race and gender in chapter 15 and the body in chapter 16) have been the intellectual equivalent of growth stocks in recent years, with much creative work being produced and audiences both scholarly and popular expanding rapidly. Other new material focuses on late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century cultural theorists whose importance to the field has recently become more widely recognized and whose ideas help shed light on more recent theoretical developments – e.g., Friedrich Nietzsche and W. E. B. DuBois. Contemporary thinkers working in or close to traditions discussed in the first edition whose influence has risen in the new millennium have been added to the relevant chapters – e.g., Roy Bhaskar in chapter 3, Randall Collins in chapter 5, and Manuel Castells in chapter 13. Finally, many of our revisions are devoted to discussion of themes and concepts that were present at the time of the first edition but which have grown considerably in their importance in the field – e.g., computer-mediated communication and virtual reality, cosmopolitanism and globalization, narrative and performance theory.

Although a good deal of the material here is new, the overall framework outlined in the preface to the first edition remains unchanged.

Philip Smith, New Haven, USA Alexander Riley, Lewisburg, USA 2008

Acknowledgments

We deeply thank the editorial team at Blackwell, and especially Justin Vaughan, for supporting the new edition with such enthusiasm. Sarah Dancy moved the project through the production stage with efficiency and expertise. Smith’s Yale colleagues Jeffrey Alexander and Ron Eyerman and the graduate students in the Center for Cultural Sociology provided a constant stimulus in thinking about culture. Riley’s Bucknell undergraduates road-tested the first edition as well as some of the new material in this second edition and gave the book a collective “thumbs up.” Thanks are due also to our many scholarly colleagues around the world who have provided feedback on the book and to the team of anonymous reviewers who examined our prospectus for the revised volume. The broader communities of scholars and cultural theorists in the ASA Culture Section and elsewhere, with whom we have interacted over the years, certainly have earned a mention in this section as well. A tip of the virtual hat goes to “daughterofdadust,” the amazon.com user who gave the original edition of the book a five-star rating. Finally, a special note of thanks is reserved for our families, Philippa Smith and Esmeralda and Valeria Riley, for all their support and understanding.

We dedicate this second edition to four towering and unique figures in cultural theory who have passed away since the first edition was published, in recognition of their contributions to the field: Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, Mary Douglas, and Clifford Geertz.

Introduction: What is Culture? What is Cultural Theory?

At the start of any text it can be useful to define the central concept. In the case of “culture” this has proven to be surprisingly, even notoriously, difficult. According to one expert, Raymond Williams, “culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language . . . because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct systems of thought” (1976: 76–7). An illustration of this diversity is the fact that, writing way back in the 1950s, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn (1952) were already able to assemble an astonishing number of definitions of culture from popular and academic sources. We begin, then, with a brief but necessary examination of some of the history of this complicated concept in order to move toward a usable definition for this book.

In its early uses in English, culture was associated with the “cultivation” of animals and crops and with religious worship (hence the word “cult”). From the sixteenth century until the nineteenth, the term began to be widely applied to the improvement of the individual human mind and personal manners through learning. This was a metaphorical extension of the idea of improving land and farming practices. For this reason we can still speak of someone as being “cultured” or, if they are uncouth, as “having no culture.” During this period, the term began to refer also to the improvement of society as a whole, with culture being used as a value-laden synonym for “civilization.” A typical usage of the time might compare the nations of Europe that had “culture” with the “barbarism” of Africa. Such an expression would have included technological differences as well as those of morals and manners. However, with the rise of Romanticism in the Industrial Revolution, culture began to be used to designate spiritual development alone and to contrast this with material and infrastructural change. Along with Romantic nationalism in the late nineteenth century, there came inflections which accented tradition and everyday life as dimensions of culture. These were captured in the ideas of “folk culture” and “national culture” which emerged around this time.

According to Williams (1976: 80), these various historical shifts are dimly reflected in the three current uses of the term “culture”:

to refer to the intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development of an individual, group, or society;to capture a range of intellectual and artistic activities and their products – film, art, theatre (in this usage culture is more or less synonymous with “the Arts,” hence we can speak of a “Minister for Culture”);to designate the entire way of life, activities, beliefs, and customs of a people, group, or society.

Until very recently, the first and second of these uses were the most common, and were often synthesized in intellectual work. Aesthetes and literary critics like Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, and F. R. Leavis used the term to refer to works of high art which could educate, edify, and improve those who came into contact with them. Arnold, for example, wrote that culture was “a pursuit of total perfection by means of getting to know . . . the best which has been thought and said in the world . . . culture is, or ought to be, the study or pursuit of perfection . . . sweetness and light . . . an inward condition of mind and spirit” (quoted in Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952: 29). The German concept of Kultur also taps into this theme by broadly equating culture with civilization and with individual or collective moral progress. Such uses are often highly value-laden and elitist, seeking to validate artistic products that experts and dominant social groups consider as important or interesting.

The third usage of culture was championed by many anthropologists in the first part of the century and remains central to that discipline today. It is an interpretation that is more value-neutral and analytic. It asserts that “culture” is to be found everywhere and not just in the high arts or in Western “civilization.” It is of course this third usage of the term with which we are working in the contemporary social sciences. Yet even delimiting the concept in this way allows for a fairly wide range of social scientific definitions. Insofar as it is possible to isolate a core usage for the social sciences today, it revolves around the following themes: cultural superiority and inferiority play almost no place in contemporary academic study.

Culture tends to be opposed to the material, technological, and social structural. While it is recognized there may be complex empirical relations between them, it is also argued that we need to understand culture as something distinctive from, and more abstract than, an entire “way of life.”Culture is seen as the realm of the ideal, the spiritual, and the non-material. It is understood as a patterned sphere of beliefs, values, symbols, signs, and discourses.Culture is recognized as having a powerful and complex relationship to practices and performances as well. Much cultural study today is engaged in exploring the influence of cultural codes, narratives, and discourses on the specific activities of groups and individuals.Emphasis is placed on the “autonomy of culture.” This is the fact that it cannot be explained away as a mere reflection of underlying economic forces, distributions of power, or social structural needs.Efforts are made to remain value-neutral. The study of culture is not restricted to the Arts, but rather is understood to pervade all aspects and levels of social life. Ideas of

Figure 0.1 Wendy Griswold’s cultural diamond

Looking back at Williams’s discussion, this prevailing understanding combines the anti-elitism, value-neutrality, and relativism of the anthropological approach to culture, with perspectives on culture as the non-material that are derived from nineteenth-century idealist and Romantic philosophy. It can also be seen as an emergent product of developments in cultural theory itself, especially the work of Parsons and subsequent innovations from structuralism, poststructuralism, and hermeneutics (we come to these later on in this text), which emphasized the autonomy of culture from other aspects of social life. Broadly speaking, the theories of culture dealt with in this book can be fit into one of two categories: (1) those that see culture as something produced by society in various ways, and (2) those that see culture as an autonomous force steering society. The trend in cultural theory seems to point in the direction of the second of these options, but debates between the two perspectives remain vivid and important and we do our best to attend to that fact throughout the chapters that follow.

Navigation through the undeniable complexity of varying definitions and conceptual boundaries applied to the term “culture” is aided by the use of heuristic devices like Wendy Griswold’s cultural diamond (see figure 0.1). This is a figure that attempts to lay out the four elements involved in the production and reception of any piece of culture (the cultural object itself, its creator/s, its receiver/s, and the social world/ context in which it comes into existence and takes meaning) and the six relations between these four elements (Griswold 2003). Though Griswold is clear that this “accounting device” does not specify the nature of those relationships, it does provide a helpful visual representation of the elements and relations the cultural analyst must account for in the effort to describe or explain the meaning of a particular cultural object, whether it be a GAP t-shirt, a national memorial, or a rap CD. We should note that while the cultural diamond is quite readily applicable to material cultural objects, its utility for examining non-material culture (e.g., a pattern of belief such as racism, or a diffuse societal ethos and worldview such as the “culture of democracy”) is somewhat less clear. This is perhaps still more testimony to the complexity of the term and the difficulty involved in trying to find a single analytical lens through which to examine it.

“Theory” is a word that is perhaps as difficult to define as “culture.” We can defer to the dictionary here and define theory as “[a] supposition or system of ideas explaining something, especially one based on general principles independent of facts” (Concise Oxford English Dictionary 1980: 1201). Theory, then, is more than a description of, or generalization about, the empirical world. Rather, it consists of abstract and systematically ordered understandings and models that can be used to account for what actually goes on in the world. “Cultural theory,” the topic of this book, can be thought of as a literature aiming to develop such tools in a specific domain – explaining the nature of culture and its implications for social life. As we shall see, there is a broad and astonishingly diverse literature. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify three core issues that are absolutely pivotal to debates in the field and which provide an underlying thematic continuity:

1 Content. Theories provide tools for understanding the make-up of culture. As we shall see, divergent traditions have understood culture as values, codes, narratives, ideologies, pathologies, discourses, and common sense, as well as in many other ways. Each of these understandings has its own repercussions for interpreting the ways that culture works and how we should study it. One of the central themes to emerge in the examination of much of the theory examined in this book is a split between theories of culture as essentially a code or text and theories of culture as action or ways of doing.

2 Social implications. Here, theory is concerned with offering models of the influence that culture exerts on social structure and social life. Theorists attempt to explain the role of culture in providing stability, solidarity, and opportunity or in sustaining conflict, power, and inequality. Cultural theory also suggests divergent mechanisms through which this influence is channeled, ranging from individual-level socialization through to macro-level institutions and social systems.

3 Action, agency, self. The connection between culture and the individual is what is at stake here. The most critical issue concerns the ways in which culture shapes human action. Some thinkers stress the constraining nature of culture, while others point to its ability to enable action. Issues relating to the cultural construction of the self, motivation, and identity are fundamental to both sets of arguments.

Throughout this text, we will find these overlapping but analytically distinct themes taking a central role as theories are described and evaluated. Chapter 1 begins this exploration with a brief survey of the role of culture in what has come to be known as classical social theory.

CHAPTER ONE

Culture in Classical Social Theory

In a letter of 1675, the scientist Isaac Newton wrote: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The point he was making was that his own contribution to knowledge would not have been possible without those of his intellectual predecessors. Likewise, contemporary cultural theory has been made possible by significant earlier work. Coming to an understanding of this foundation is therefore a step of great importance. While we could begin this process with a discussion of thinkers extending back through the Enlightenment and on to Ancient Greece, perhaps the most useful place to start is in the body of literature generally thought of as classical social theory. More particularly, we begin with the work of four founding figures in sociology, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel, and two other thinkers from roughly the same period, Friedrich Nietzsche and W. E. B. DuBois. While these last two have not traditionally been classified among the founding figures in the emergence of the discipline of sociology, they nonetheless made contributions to the sociological study of culture that have been widely and increasingly recognized in the past few decades. Many current debates are shot through with foundational themes, problems, and perspectives that originate in the works of these six scholars. As thinkers with powerful minds, they provided a set of core concepts and tools that are still serviceable 100 years or more after they were developed. When they are not drawing directly upon them, current authors as likely as not are revising, refining, or critiquing lines of thinking that originated around a century or so ago. We forget history at our peril, and so knowledge of these resources provides an essential starting point and common ground for all cultural theorists.

Karl Marx

One of the greatest minds of the Victorian era, Karl Marx is generally thought of as an anticultural theorist. This is certainly the case when we focus on his historical materialism. Such a position is most clearly advocated in his late masterwork Das Kapital (Capital), the first volume of which was published in 1867 (Marx 1956). Here, he proposed what has become known as the base/superstructure model of society. According to this perspective, the real motor in capitalist society was the mode of production (very roughly, the economy) that was concerned with providing for material needs. He identified as key aspects of this sphere the private ownership of the means of production (e.g., factories, machine technology) and a system of relations of production that pivoted around the exploitation of productive labor. Arising from these was a broader social structure organized around a class system. This divided society into owners and workers. Under this materialist understanding of industrial society, culture (along with politics and the law) was seen as an epiphenomenal super-structure built upon a determinant economic base. For Marx, culture in industrial society operates as a dominant ideology. This has several characteristics:

It reflects the views and interests of the bourgeoisie (the ruling, capitalist class of owners) and serves to legitimate their authority.It arises from and expresses underlying relations of production. As Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto: “Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property” (1978 [1848]: 487).It makes that which is conventional and socially constructed (e.g., wage labor, the commodity form) seem natural and inevitable. It transformed into “eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from [the] . . . present mode of production and form of property” (1978: 487).It engenders a mistaken or distorted view of reality. This condition, sometimes known as false consciousness, allows people to feel happy with their miserable lot. Religion, for example, was an “opium,” which prevented the formation of class consciousness (awareness of a common class identity and interests) among the proletariat (workers).

The broad perspective marked out in Kapital and Marx’s other writing remains foundational for writers in the tradition of critical cultural studies, whether or not they are specifically Marxist in orientation. To this day, scholars writing from such a position suggest that we should read cultural forms as reflections of hidden interests and social forces. As a counter to the insidious power of ideology, the duty of the analyst is to expose distortions and reveal a more rational and true picture of the world – a process known as demystification.

The materialist Marx of “scientific socialism” that we find in Das Kapital is perhaps the best known. However, in his earliest writings that were more strongly influenced by the thinking of the German idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), Marx provided indications of a more culturally sensitive vision of social life. Writing in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (also known as the Paris manuscripts), Marx (1978a) developed a more humanistic vision with an emphasis on the mental life of the subject. He spoke of species being as a form of solidarity toward which people aspire. He also wrote about alienation. This complex term had multiple meanings. Some were economic, referring to the objective exploitation of labor power (e.g., not being paid a fair wage) and the rise of the commodity. In other contexts it refers to separation from fellow humans, sentiments of isolation, and an inability to live in a fulfilling community. Marx drew contrasts between the authentic life possible in organic and craft settings and the subjective alienation that was experienced under industrial capitalism. He suggested that with the arrival of communism and the end of private property, there would once again be an end to alienation. While the ideas of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts are often rather metaphysical and difficult to apply in empirical research, they have exerted a major influence on critical cultural theory (see chapter 3).

KARL MARX (1818–83)

Marx was born in Prussia and studied philosophy, languages, law, and history at university. He then worked as a journalist and was a member of a circle of Young Hegelians – a group of idealist intellectuals influenced by the ideas of the philosopher Hegel. His radical opinions attracted disapproval from the Prussian authorities, and he was accused of treason and exiled. During the 1840s he shifted from Hegelian idealism to a materialist position. He began to publish his major works and developed a lifelong friendship with Friedrich Engels, who was later to support him financially. Marx lived in Paris, Brussels, and eventually London. Here he spent much of his time reading in the library of the British Museum and writing in the area of history and political philosophy. When not engaged in his academic work, he assisted in the formation of the Communist movement. He died in March 1883.

Reference: Tucker 1978

The great strength of Marx’s thinking has been his ability to connect culture to power and economic life in systematic ways. The price of this, it is generally agreed, has been an inability to theorize the autonomy of culture and a tendency, especially in his later work, to view human action in a deterministic framework. Under the Marxist vision, the economy seems to drive both collective ideology and individual behavior with a clockwork precision. Marxist thought in the twentieth century massively elaborated upon the agendas initiated by Marx, while also attempting to move beyond a narrow mechanistic determinism. Efforts have been made to explore further the links between culture, class, and domination, but in ways that emphasize the centrality of the ideal as well as the material in maintaining capitalism. As we will see in chapters 3 and 16, the concepts of alienation and commodification have proven useful tools in this quest to think through the reciprocities between capitalism, human subjectivity, and ideological forces. More recently, post-Marxist critical theory has challenged the class-driven focus of traditional Marxism and argued that social divisions centered on gender, sexuality, and race are equally important. We explore such alternatives in chapters 7, 9, 14, and 15.

Emile Durkheim

For much of the twentieth century, Emile Durkheim was best known as an advocate of functionalism and positivism. This is the Durkheim who advocates “social facts,” the systemic integration of society, and the need for objective data that tests laws and hypotheses. Yet an increasingly prominent way of thinking about him is as an advocate of cultural analysis. Central to this reading is Durkheim’s insistence that society was very much a moral phenomenon held together by sentiments of solidarity. These played their part in ensuring the survival of a smoothly functioning, well-integrated society in which every piece had its place.

In his doctoral thesis, The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim (1984 [1893]) argued that simple and industrial societies were characterized by different kinds of solidarity. In the former, people were more alike and performed the same tasks. The result was mechanical solidarity. In industrial societies, by contrast, there was a division of labor and organic solidarity. Durkheim suggested that under mechanical solidarity people tend to think alike, as they all do the same work. There is little tolerance for deviance, and conformity is the norm. Within organic solidarity there is more tolerance for difference thanks to the role diversity that comes from the increased division of labor. Durkheim used the term collective conscience when talking about the shared moral awareness and emotional life in a society. According to Durkheim, the collective conscience could be seen very clearly during the punishment of deviants. Such episodes documented collective outrage and were expressive as much as practical in orientation. He argued that in societies with mechanical solidarity, punishments tended to be harsh and violent, while organic solidarity saw punishment aimed at the reintegration of the individual into the group.

Looking at the sweep of history, Durkheim suggested that although the increasing division of labor had opened up the potential for greater individual freedom and happiness, we have not managed this transition very well. He argued that anomie had resulted. This is a situation of social dislocation where customary and cultural controls on action are not very strong. In his study of Suicide, Durkheim (1966 [1897]) looked at suicide data in order to document the social conditions under which an individual will experience anomie. He suggested that lack of social integration and rapid social change could be key factors in this process.

EMILE DURKHEIM (1858–1917)

Durkheim was born into the tight-knit Jewish community of north-eastern France. He was the son of a rabbi and he studied Hebrew and scripture alongside his regular schooling. While this background was repudiated by his embrace of secular modernity and civic morality, it may have influenced his later religious sociology. Early in his academic career, Durkheim taught philosophy and obtained a position at the University of Bordeaux. The publication of The Division of Labour in Society,The Rules of Sociological Method, and Suicide in the 1890s moved him to the front of the French intellectual stage and established sociology as an academic discipline in France. He moved to Paris in 1902 and founded a school around the journal L’Année sociologique. During World War One, Durkheim’s son and many of his promising students died. His health suffered as a consequence of these losses and he died in 1917.

Reference: Coser 1971

The Division of Labour in Society and Suicide are similar in their approach in that Durkheim argues for the centrality of social facts over individual volition. These are collective or “social” in nature and are external and constraining on the individual. Durkheim suggested that sentiments, moralities, and behaviors could be explained away as social facts that were linked to other objective features of society like social organization, societal differentiation, and social change. There is a tendency toward reductionism here which undercuts his emphasis on the moral and normative aspects of social life. That is to say, sentiments and beliefs, like other dimensions of the social, are accounted for as a response to social structural forms and needs. In particular, they tend to work to generate social order and social integration. This vision of a stable society made up of mutually reinforcing institutions, sentiments, and roles is known as functionalism.

In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim (1968 [1915]) turned to the study of religion in order to explain processes of social integration. Some scholars have argued that this later book is less reductionist than his earlier work. Durkheim sees religion more as a sui generis phenomenon that needs to be explained on its own terms. Consequently, he produces a picture of culture as a dynamic and motivating force in society rather than as simply a response to social needs for organization and harmony.

Durkheim claimed that all religions revolved around a distinction between the sacred and the profane. The sacred involves feelings of awe, fear, and reverence and is set apart from the everyday or profane. The sacred is potentially dangerous as well as beneficent, and is often separated from the profane by special taboos, while its power is regulated by special rites (e.g., ritual, prayer, sacrifice). Durkheim suggested that “a society can neither create nor re-create itself without at the same time creating an ideal” (1968: 422). The point is that the sets of symbols and beliefs in religious systems provided societies with a way of thinking about and concentrating their diffuse moral sentiments and feelings of common identity.

According to Durkheim, the purely ideal power of symbol systems is complemented by concrete acts of observance. He pointed out that societies periodically come together in ritual in order to fulfill the need to worship the sacred. These events involve the use of bodies and symbols and further help to integrate society in that they bring people into proximity with each other. With the aid of music, chants, and incantations, they generate collective emotional excitement or collective effervescence. This provides a strong sense of group belonging. Durkheim, to conclude, argued that the reconstruction of social bonds was the real reason for the existence of religion and ritual – not the worship of gods. He writes: “There can be no society which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and the collective ideas which make its unity and its personality. Now this moral remaking cannot be achieved except by the means of reunions, assemblies and meetings where the individuals . . . reaffirm in common their common sentiments” (1968: 427).

Durkheim’s study was largely based upon ethnographic data collected from Aboriginal Australia. However, he was eager to argue that it had wider applicability to contemporary settings. These might be more complex than those of a small-scale society, but the fundamental role of religion was the same. He asserted that even the seemingly secular had a moral basis that was essentially religious in nature. He asks: “What essential difference is there between an assembly of Christians celebrating the principal dates of the life of Christ, or of Jews remembering the exodus from Egypt or promulgating the decalogue, and a reunion of citizens commemorating the promulgation of a new moral or legal system or some great event in national life?” (1968: 427). For Durkheim, of course, there was very little difference. Certainly he believed that the religious vision of society he had developed was one with universal relevance.

Major criticisms of Durkheim’s cultural sociology usually elaborate on one or another of the following points:

He assumes culture brings social consensus or social integration and therefore cannot account for its role in generating conflict or sustaining social exclusion. As David Lockwood (1996: 23) puts it, his “interest in consensus does not extend to include the question of whether strength of commitment to collective beliefs is related to inequalities of power and status.”His perspective is one-sided in an idealist direction. It privileges the role of culture in generating social stability and patterns of social interaction. He has little to say about the role of force, power, interest, or necessity as key variables influencing social life (see Tilly 1981).His evolutionary perspective is often empirically wrong and denies the complexity of traditional societies and their beliefs by assuming that they are somehow more “basic” or “elementary” than those of industrial settings.There is a mechanistic tendency in his works thanks to the influence of functionalism. This sees patterns of action, belief, and sentiment (culture) arising from the needs and organization of the social structure rather than from the agent’s choice or interpretation of the social world. As we have seen, Durkheim speaks of social facts as external and constraining on individuals rather than as enabling creativity and agency.

On the positive side, Durkheim’s advocates suggest that his later thinking provides a key resource for linking culture with social structure in a way that resists materialist reductionism. Society for Durkheim was an idea or belief as much as a concrete collection of individuals and actions. Writing about religion, for example, he insisted that it “is not merely a system of practices, but also a system of ideas whose object is to explain the world” (1968: 428). By placing the study of such idea systems at the center of his analysis, in addition to the study of practices, Durkheim’s work marks an important early call for a more culturally sensitive form of social inquiry.

Durkheimian cultural work in the twentieth century listened to this call and expanded on a number of themes in his work while, in many cases, also trying to compensate for the perceived errors in his thinking. We return to look at this literature in later chapters and demonstrate the continuing vitality of the Durkheimian tradition. In chapter 2, we examine the work of Talcott Parsons, which elaborated Durkheim’s functionalist understandings of the reciprocal relationship of culture and society. Chapter 5, by contrast, has at its center explorations of ritual, classification, morality, and symbolism that have built mostly on the legacy of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

Max Weber

Max Weber is a complex author whose work covered a vast historical and theoretical territory. It is arguably the case that Weber’s oeuvre does not amount to a systematic social theory, but rather consists of scattered, brilliant insights. Much of his work is quite materialist, pointing to the role of power, military force, and organizational forms in maintaining social order. However, there is also a strong idealist streak in some of his writings and we will focus on this here.

At the center of Weber’s relevance for cultural theory is his understanding of human action. Weber’s thinking on this topic, like his religious sociology (see below), was decisively influenced by the German hermeneutic tradition (see Coser 1971: 244ff.). This, in turn, was a specification of the German idealist legacy of Kant and Hegel. Kant had argued that we needed to make a radical distinction between the mind and the body. While the latter was constrained, the former was free from determination. Consequently, human life was very much about freedom. This emphasis on the power of the ideal had influenced thinkers like Hegel, who saw the development of history as the spontaneous unfolding of Geist, or “spirit.” As a young man, Marx had shared this view. As we have seen, he later reacted against idealism of this kind by developing a rigorous materialist explanation of cultural and mental life. Weber, by contrast, tried to learn from idealist philosophy at the same time as acknowledging realities of power, economic development, and so on. In thinking through this issue, he was influenced by the writings of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), who was a powerful figure in the German hermeneutic tradition of the nineteenth century. Dilthey argued that knowledge concerning humans had to take account of the meaningful nature of action. What was required was Verstehen, or understanding. This requires the observer to try to reconstruct the subjective meanings that influenced a particular line of action – an activity that could involve recreating shared cultural values as well as empathizing with individual psychologies and life histories. Dilthey argued that the study of human life belonged to the Geisteswissenschaften (literally: “sciences of the spirit”) rather than the natural sciences (see also pp. 188–9).

Drawing upon Dilthey, Weber also advocated a Verstehen approach to social analysis and suggested that human agents be thought of as active and meaning-driven. He expressed these ideas most clearly in his monumental Economy and Society (1968 [1922]). Weber insists that it is the job of the analyst to try to uncover the motive or subjective intent behind an action: “for a science which is concerned with the subjective meaning of action, explanation requires a grasp of the complex of meaning in which an actual course of understandable action thus interpreted belongs” (1968: 9).

As a start in this direction, Weber drew attention to two contrasting modes of action. Wertrational, or value-rational action, was driven by cultural beliefs and goals, such as the search for religious salvation. Here, there is a “conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious or other form of behavior” (1968: 25). By contrast, Zweckrational, or goal-oriented action (also known in cultural theory as purposive rationality, means–ends rationality, and instrumental action), was driven by norms of efficiency. These emphasized the need to calculate precise means of attaining specified ends, but lacked the ability to identify overarching moral directions and culturally specified goals. Weber suggested that as we entered modernity, zweckrational action was becoming more common (see below). His discussions on Verstehen and on the forms of social action have provided significant philosophical support for advocates of interpretative sociology. While many of these have been “micro” in orientation, the broader community of cultural sociologists has also built upon Weber’s conceptual edifice and argued that we need to interpret the social world rather than subject it to positivist, “scientific” scrutiny.

In cultural circles, Weber is probably best known for his work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1958 [1904]). In this, he argues against materialist views of the origins of capitalism, asserting that religious beliefs also played a part. He looked at the role of the doctrine of predestination held by early Protestants. This argued that fate with respect to heaven and hell was determined before birth. Salvation could not be bought or sold nor earned by good deeds. According to Weber, this led to feelings of unease. Protestants looked for signs that they had been chosen to be saved by God. Economic success was one such sign. The unintended consequence of the doctrine of predestination was a rational and planned acquisition of wealth with an associated Protestant ethic about the need for methodical and disciplined hard work. Over time, the religious foundations of capitalist accumulation dropped from view, leaving a field characterized by a shallow, unfulfilling, and constraining zweckrational mode of action and an economic order of “pure utilitarianism” organized around thrift, profit, and constraint. Weber writes: “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so . . . [The modern economic order] is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism” (1958: 181).

The Protestant ethic book has often been misunderstood as an idealist argument. In point of fact, Weber was an admirer of Marx as much as of German idealism. When we look at Weber’s total oeuvre, we find an account of the rise of capitalism that is complex and multidimensional. Weber argued for the importance of economic and organizational factors as well as religious motivations and opposed one-sided explanations, whether material or ideal in nature (see Weber 1958: 183). Seen in this light, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is part of a larger jigsaw of explanation.

Although the Protestant ethic thesis is perhaps Weber’s best-known work, it is perhaps misleadingly so. Other texts in his study of the great religions of the world are arguably better researched and more comprehensive. Certainly, Weber himself saw his study of the Protestant ethic as only a small component of a much wider and more systematic research agenda. In his monumental comparative inquiry, he emphasized the universality of the problem of salvation in all known religions. He suggested that the Judeo-Christian tradition was characterized by a “this-worldly asceticism” which promoted evangelical activism and world-transforming activity. By contrast, the religions of the Orient, such as Confucianism, Taoism, and Hinduism, suggested that salvation could come from withdrawal from the world, conformity to tradition, and contemplation. Weber saw these differences as contributing to the rise of industrial modernity in the West. Even though China had been technologically advanced in the Middle Ages, its religious values had prevented the emergence of the entrepreneurial innovation and social dynamism to be found in Europe at the same time.

Clear affinities exist between Weber and Durkheim in that both point to the centrality of religion as a core dimension of culture. However, Weber’s approach places a greater emphasis on the intellectual content of abstract belief systems, while Durkheim foregrounds visceral, embodied emotions. A more significant difference is in their attitude toward the role of religion in contemporary societies. As we have seen, Durkheim was very clear that moral ties and sacred goals were of vital importance in today’s world. Weber, by contrast, advanced a thesis of disenchantment. This asserted that with the onset of modernity, meaning was being emptied out of the world. We are living in an age of bureaucracy, where the focus is placed on efficiency and rationality rather than on attaining some kind of transcendence or pursuing ultimate meanings. In Weber’s terms, the Zweckrational was coming to replace the Wertrational. Life had lost its sense of purpose, and people had become trapped in what he called an iron cage of meaningless bureaucracy and rationalism.

Two other themes remain to be addressed in this all-too-brief review of Weber’s contribution to cultural theory. The first is the discussion of the forms of authority or legitimate domination (Herrschaft). Weber (1968: 215ff.) insisted that rule was justified by reference to broader structures of meaning, and suggested three ideal types (models or simplified versions of reality) to understand this process. Traditional authority was based on the idea that things should be as they always had been. Weber had little to say about this, but suggested it was prominent in small-scale and pre-industrial societies. A problem here is for the ruler to introduce change. Charismatic authority is organized around the belief that a ruler possesses exceptional powers or some kind of divine gift. Weber argues that this form of authority is linked to social dislocation and social change and is antithetical to economic considerations. A key feature of charismatic authority is its instability. According to Weber, the charismatic leader is under constant pressure to produce signs of their power. If they fail to produce results, their charismatic power can evaporate. Further problems revolve around the issue of succession. Once the charismatic figure dies, a power vacuum can arise. For these reasons Weber suggested that over the long term charisma was inevitably routinized and replaced by a bureaucratic mode of domination. While charisma has generally been treated as a psychological or interpersonal phenomenon, it can also be understood in more cultural terms. Weber’s writings discuss religion, prophecy, salvation, and redemption as much as group psychology, and so the concept has much to offer those interested in the role of symbolic patterns in political life (for further discussion, see Smith 2000). Legal-rational authority characterizes highly bureaucratized contemporary societies. It emphasizes the role of law, procedure, and efficiency as standards against which administrative acts are judged. According to Weber, disenchantment arises as this form of authority replaces the more religiously and symbolically meaningful forms associated with tradition and charisma.

MAX WEBER (1864–1920)

Weber grew up in an affluent but rather repressive Protestant family. He attended Heidelberg University as an undergraduate and participated in its masculine culture of drinking and dueling. He later studied at the University of Berlin. Here he adopted a more ascetic lifestyle and studied obsessively. His interests and reading were diverse, and included history, law, and philosophy. Unlike Simmel (see below), his talent was recognized early and he obtained a prestigious chair at Heidelberg at a young age. Weber’s mental and personal life was very complex. He never consummated his marriage and in 1897 had a mental breakdown after an argument with his authoritarian father. Restored to health in 1903, he began writing again and also speaking out on public issues. Weber was highly critical of Germany’s conservative elites, yet he never fully embraced radical politics. By the time of his death in 1920, he was recognized as a leading intellectual in his country.

Reference: Coser 1971

The final concept from Weber to be considered is that of status. In contrast to Marx’s class-driven model of social organization, Weber distinguished between class and status. Class refers to position in the economic order. Weber provides examples such as entrepreneurs, laborers, and rentiers. Status, which is of most interest here, refers to groups with a common “style of life” and a shared level of social prestige. Weber pointed to the ways that the authority of elites often depended upon their distinctive culture and value system. They might share customs, conventions, and educational training. These could be used as the basis of obtaining deference or other kinds of special privileges such as monopolies and sinecures. Weber argued that class and status could interact in complex ways. He claimed there was no necessary reason why a group with economic power would also enjoy the other forms of power, as Marx had argued. He notes that a student, a civil servant, and an army officer might have very different class locations and yet share a common status, “since upbringing and education create a common style of life” (1968: 306).

Weber’s work has a number of attractive features. He provides a compelling argument for the centrality of human agency to sociological explanation. In highlighting the pivotal and near-universal significance of religious beliefs in human life, he creates space for the autonomy of culture. His theories also foreground questions of power and domination and link these in definite ways to culture. These attractive features, however, are perhaps undercut by an insistence on the disenchantment of the modern world and on the routinized and rationalized qualities of contemporary life with a corresponding instrumental (rather than normative) regulation of human sociality. It is almost as if Weber is arguing that culture was once important, but now needs to be excluded from social analysis. Perhaps for this reason, it is rather difficult to identify a Weberian school or camp in contemporary cultural theory. To follow Weber to the letter is to insist on the weakness of meaning in contemporary society, and the decline of religious and normative motivations for action.

Unlike Durkheim and Marx, both of whom founded self-defining and comparatively bounded traditions, Weber’s work has had a diffuse impact in a number of fields. This reflects his own scholarly diversity. Work influenced by Weber has taken some of the following paths:

Research has taken place on the social implications of religious beliefs, including those relating to political legitimation and political culture. Durkheimians like Edward Shils, for example, have made use of Weber’s ideas in this area (see chapter 5).Weber’s writing on Verstehen and the forms of social action have provided an extremely useful charter for qualitative inquiry, especially where issues of social action are being considered. They also influenced Parsons’s discussions of the bases of agency in The Structure of Social Action (see chapter 2).Studies of stratification which wish to escape from the straitjacket of class theory have often turned to Weber for help. Many investigations of cultural capital and social status count Weber as an important intellectual heir. Discussions of “fields” and habitus in Bourdieu, for example, have distinct Weberian parallels (see chapter 8).Explorations of societal rationalization as a component of modernity and modern culture take Weber as a keystone. Many scholars working in this area are Marxists who use Weber to think further through the impacts of alienation and bureaucratic control on modern life. We review some of these theories in chapter 3.

Georg Simmel

According to his core of enthusiastic devotees, Georg Simmel deserves to be ranked alongside Marx, Weber, and Durkheim in the pantheon of founding fathers. Efforts to elevate his status have been hampered by Simmel’s tendency to avoid systematic theory. He wrote in an essayistic style on a bewildering variety of topics. Although his writings are universally acknowledged to be brilliant and insightful, they have also been considered to be lacking in the persistent intellectual focus that was required of a really major figure. Since the 1980s, this perception has slowly been changing and Simmel is now widely understood as a thinker whose work needs to be taken very seriously.