Cultural Theory: The Key Concepts

Andrew Edgar, Peter Sedgwick, Andrew Edgar, Peter Sedgwick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415399388
• eBook ISBN: 9781134149063
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Now in its second edition, Cultural Theory: The Key Concepts is an up-to-date and comprehensive survey of over 350 of the key terms central to cultural theory today.

This second edition includes new entries on:

• colonialism
• cybercultur
• globalisation
• terrorism
• visual studies.

Providing clear and succinct introductions to a wide range of subjects, from feminism to postmodernism, Cultural Theory: The Key Concepts continues to be an essential resource for students of literature, sociology, philosophy and media and anyone wrestling with contemporary cultural theory.

CULTURAL THEORY
The Key Concepts
Second Edition

ABSENCE

In semiotics, a term is absent from a meaningful sequence of signs if it could potentially occupy a position in the sequence, and if its exclusion affects the meaning of the signs which are present.

AE

ACTION THEORY

In social theory, a distinction is usually made between action and behaviour. While behaviour is purely physical (or instinctual) movement on the part of the agent, action is intentional and meaningful, and more precisely, social action is oriented to the behaviour and action of others. Weber (1978) distinguishes four ideal types of action. Traditional actions are performed because they have always been performed so, and thus provide a limiting case of action, being little better than behaviour. Affectual actions are expressive of an emotion. More significantly, zweckrational (goal rational or instrumental) action entails the choice of that which is perceived to be the most instrumentally efficient means to the achievement of a goal. (The goal itself may be assessed in terms of the desirability of the consequences of pursuing and achieving it.) An instrumental action is comprehensible in so far as one recognises or shares the agent’s view of instrumental or causal relationships in the world. In wertrational (value rational) action, the action is oriented to the achievement of a positively valued, and thus taken for granted, goal. Such actions are understood through recognising the importance of the appropriate values to the agent.

Two broad responses to Weber’s account may be identified. On the one hand, emphasis may be placed upon the meaningfulness of the action, and the generation of meaning within the community and within the process of social interaction. For Schutz (1962, 1964), the attributing of motivations to actions (and thus the explication of goals, means or values) is the exception rather than the rule. Mundane social interaction is grounded in taken-for-granted responses to the actions of others, and of others’ responses to one’s own actions. (In effect, most action is unreflective, habitual behaviour.) Should this taken-for-granted life-world breakdown, motivation can be attributed, either retrospectively (with ‘because motives’, explicating the immediate motives of past actions), or prospectively (with ‘in-order-to motives’, that work effectively to explicate the goals of a forthcoming action), for example, in order to defend one’s actions, or orient the actions of others. The meaning of an action ultimately rests upon its negotiation by all participating agents, rather than by an unproblematic appeal to the intentions of the original agent. This approach was developed, to something of an extreme, by ethnomethodology.

On the other hand, within a positivist tradition, the actions of individual agents are subordinated to an overarching social order. Thus, for Parsons (1937, 1951), the complexity of social interaction, in which there is such a range of interpretations (in terms of intentions, motives or goals) that one will never be able to predict with any certainty how another may react, entails that some prior social mechanism must exist in order to reduce complexity and increase predictability. Thus, interacting agents appeal to norms that are institutionalised in society, and internalised by individual agents in the process of socialisation. Norms do not merely codify the rules pursued by each agent and their evaluation of potential goals, but rather serve to direct their actions. In Parsons’s system, the social action of the individual is thereby integrated into the social system as a whole. While Schutz’s agents actively draw upon cultural resources to make sense of action as necessary, Parsons’s agents more or less passively follow determining rules of conduct.

Further reading: Habermas 1984; Joas 1996.

AE

AESTHETICS

Aesthetics is that subdiscipline within philosophy that deals with questions of art and beauty. While it is in many respects an ill-defined and highly disputed area of philosophy, its principal concerns can be seen as those of defining the concept of ‘art’, or at least, providing an account of how we come to recognise artworks as artworks; questioning the relationship of art to the non-art or ‘real’ world (and thereby raising questions about the role of representation (or mimesis) and expression in art, and also of art’s relationship to moral and political activity); and providing a philosophy of criticism (that explores how works of art are interpreted and evaluated).

The discussion of judgements of taste occurs throughout the history of philosophy, from the ancient Greeks. Plato’s Hippias Major contains a discussion of the concept of beauty, and Aristotle’s analysis of the structure of drama (and particularly tragedy) had a prolonged, if at times stultifying, influence on art and art criticism. While diverse reflections on art occur throughout the history of philosophy, it is not until the eighteenth century that aesthetics begins to emerge as a well-defined, and self-confident, division within the discipline. It is not coincidental that this follows on, and may thus be seen to respond to, the separation of works of art from craft works. There is little need to justify or explain the existence of craft works. In contrast, art works, increasingly divorced from political, ceremonial or religious uses, are problematic. In 1746, Charles Batteux coined the term fine art (beaux arts), arguing that such works shared the common property of beauty. The term ‘aesthetics’ is coined by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, publishing his Aesthetica in 1750. However, Hume’s essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (1757) raises a fundamental problem that serves, periodically, to undermine confidence in aesthetics. The problem is whether or not a judgement of taste is purely subjective, for if it is, then rational debate about aesthetic objects is rendered pointless. Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790) provides a complex and masterful response to initial doubts about the viability of aesthetics. By appealing to the resources developed in his theory of knowledge and in his moral philosophy, he is able to provide an account of aesthetic judgement that is grounded in the universal structure of the human mind (so that a genuine judgement of beauty is such that all ought to agree with it); and he separates aesthetic experiences from experiences of merely sensual pleasure, principally in terms of the disinterestedness with which the spectator engages with the aesthetic object, and the lack of any practical purpose that can be attributed to the object. Hegel and Schopenhauer are able to build aesthetics confidently into their grand philosophical systems largely on the back of Kant’s achievement.

If the nineteenth century saw aesthetics flourish, the twentieth century saw a renewal of doubts and assaults. In lectures delivered in 1907, Edward Bullough confronted doubts as to the utility of aesthetics (1957). Aesthetics does not obviously help either the artist create new work (and indeed the definition of general and universal rules defining ‘art’ or ‘beauty’ actual hamper the artist), or the audience to make sense of art (philosophical accounts being too general to illuminate the particular artefact that is before the audience). More bluntly, in the 1960s, the American artist Barnett Newman declared that: ‘Aesthetics is for art what ornithology is for the birds’, meaning that birds have coped perfectly well in ignorance of ornithology, and artists have coped just as well in ignorance of aesthetics.

The sociological criticisms of aesthetics are perhaps more damning than those arising from within philosophy, and it may be suggested that cultural studies grows out of a reaction to the implicit elitism of aesthetics (and more particularly, of the approach to literary criticism defended by Leavis). The development of the sociology of culture, for example in the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 1993), throws into question, not merely the ideological basis of art (i.e. the distinction between high and popular culture that is taken for granted by so much writing in aesthetics), but also the role of aesthetics in perpetuating that ideology, and thus in failing to explore its own cultural and political roots. This is to say that aesthetics may be little more than the illusory justification and glorification of a middle-class leisure pursuit. The main purpose of aesthetics would be that of sustaining the economic (and not the mysterious ‘aesthetic’) value of artworks.

Within philosophy, recent developments within aesthetics have demonstrated a greater sensitivity to the social and cultural contexts within which art is produced and consumed. The American philosopher Arthur C. Danto has suggested that with the rise of modern and postmodern art, and thus of art forms which self-consciously reflect upon their status as art (and which are most dramatically exemplified by Duchamp’s exhibition of a urinal as a work of art (Fountain) in 1917), that art itself now poses philosophical questions. Art asks exactly what art is and what the limits and purposes of art might be. Danto therefore recognises that what art is, and the way in which a particular work of art is interpreted, will depend heavily upon the particular historical, cultural and even political conditions within which it is created (Danto 1981). The institutional theory of art, through its key term artworld, has brought about a recent convergence with the sociological account of art, albeit without the political criticism implied by Bourdieu and others. Thus, for example, Dickie (1984), in recognising the diversity of art forms that have proliferated in the twentieth century (and not least in the development of conceptual art), argues that the criteria for defining and recognising an object or activity as art emerge within those institutions, such as galleries and the journals, which deal with art. An artwork is an artwork because it has been ‘baptised’ as such through its recognition in the artworld of critics, connoisseurs, gallery proprietors, artists and audiences.

In Germany, the paradox and strength of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1984), perhaps the last grand theory of art following in the tradition of Kant and Hegel, is that it vehemently embraces the criticisms of aesthetics and art posed by sociology and Marxism, while maintaining that art (and especially the avant-garde art of the twentieth century) still has a role in resisting ideology. Adorno accepts that art is a product of a particular society (and thus that the production and consumption of art will be intimately bound up with the production of any other artefact and commodity within that society). But art, for Adorno, can still have a moment of autonomy or freedom from that social determinism. It can therefore allow the artist and audience to think in ways that are not condoned by the dominant culture of the day. As such, art keeps alive the hope of resistance to ideology and political oppression.

Further reading: Cooper 1992, 1997; Eagleton 1999; Graham 1997; Maynard and Feagin 1997.

AE

AGENCY AND STRUCTURE

A central problem in social theory is the relationship between the apparently autonomous actions of individuals, and an overarching and stable social order. Durkheim provides a graphic presentation of the problem in his study of suicide (1952), by observing that while the act of suicide must typically occurs in isolation from society and is an action that cannot be repeated, the number of suicides that do occur in a particular society are highly predictable from one year to the next. The problem may be seen in terms of the questions as to whether (or how) structures can determine the actions of individuals; and as to how such structures are created. The most successful and generally accepted solution to these problems may exist in economics, in Adam Smith’s account of the free market. The selfinterested action of many individual agents, each acting independently of all others, results in the co-ordination of the quantity of goods supplied with the quantity of goods demanded. Superficially the market appears to be the result of some guiding ‘invisible hand’, akin to the actions of a puppet master perhaps. Smith’s analysis of the role of the price mechanism dispels this illusion. (The success of Smith’s analysis in economics has misled certain political philosophers, especially in the social contract tradition, to apply it beyond its true scope.)

In social theory, attempts to resolve the tension between agency and social structure have involved various approaches. At one extreme, structural functionalists (following in a tradition from Durkheim) and structural Marxists have tended to belittle the freedom of the individual, reducing social agents to (what Garfinkel called) ‘judgemental dopes’, or mere bearers of a structure, who passively follow rules that they have internalised during socialisation. At the other extreme, the reality of the social structure is denied altogether by ethnomethodologists, or at best, for methodological individualists, is acknowledged as a heuristic, providing a shorthand for what are ultimately multiple individual actions, and thus as having no determining power over the individual. Between these extremes various attempts have been made to understand social structures as the sedimented products of competent human agency, that in turn must be both actively (if unwittingly) sustained or reproduced by such agency, and that provide delimiting (rather than determining) conditions within which action is understood, given meaning, and pursued. In this light, the tension between agency and structure may be seen in Habermas’s (1987) analysis of system and life-world, and in Anthony Giddens’s (1984) theory of structuration.

Further reading: Callinicos 1983; Giddens 1979; Sztompka 1993.

AE

AGRICULTURE

Given its central concern with urban life in industrial societies, and with everyday life as experienced by large proportions of the population, cultural studies have relatively little to say about agriculture (in contrast, say, to cultural anthropology). However, it is worth noting that agriculture is a fundamental form of culture (as its name suggests), and as such a key site at which humanity confronts and transforms nature to its own ends. Agriculture is therefore relevant as the subject matter of much high and popular culture (from Virgil’s Georgics of the first century BC, through Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, to that quintessentially English (radio) soap opera, The Archers (‘an everyday story of country folk’)). Yet also, it continues to be a boundary where the interrelationship of culture and nature is negotiated—as is indicated, for example, by contemporary concerns about the genetic manipulation of crops and farm animals. Such concerns may conceal the fact that existing agricultural products are themselves already the outcome of centuries of cultural manipulation.

Further reading: Newby 1988.

AE

ALIENATION

Theory developed in the early writings of Marx, that seeks to characterise and to explain the estrangement of humanity from its society, and its essential or potential nature. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (1975), Marx attributes alienation (a term that had previously been current in philosophical and theological writings, and most significantly in Hegel) to the division of labour under capitalism. For Marx, humanity is distinguished from all other animal species by its ability, not merely to transform its environment, but to transform the environment through conscious (rather than merely instinctual) activity. The resultant conscious re-engagement with an environment that is no longer merely natural, but is itself the product of the labour of previous generations of humans, gives humanity, uniquely, the ability to shape not only its environment, but also itself. Production is, in summary, a process of objectification, such that subjective human creativity is given objective form in the product. This in turn allows a new self-consciousness on the part of the subject. Alienation is the corruption of this objectivity, and the stifling of humanity’s self-understanding.

The capitalist division of labour is characterised, not merely by the specialisation of labourers in manufacturing, so that no individual works on the whole product but only upon an isolated fragment, but further by divisions between manufacture and distribution, manual and mental labour, and labourer and capitalist. These structural features lead to four manifestations of alienation (Lukes 1969). First, the worker is alienated from the product, in so far as he or she has no control over its subsequent fate. Second, the worker is alienated from the act of production, so that it ceases to have any intrinsic satisfaction. The ability to labour itself becomes no more than one more commodity, having value only in so far as it can be exchanged for any other. Third, the worker is alienated from other workers and from society as a whole. The worker is treated as an isolated individual, and is judged by his or her ability to fulfil a pre-existing function within the production process. Production therefore ceases to be a genuinely co-operative or c...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• LIST OF KEY CONCEPTS
• KEY TO CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• CULTURAL THEORY: THE KEY CONCEPTS: SECOND EDITION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY