![]()
Part I
Contemporary social theory
![]()
1
The trajectories of social and cultural theory
Anthony Elliott
One of the principal themes of The Routledge Handbook of Social and Cultural Theory concerns the ever-increasing fascination the world over for all things new. In our twenty-first century world of light living and liquid lifestyles, personal makeovers, corporate rebrandings and organisational reinventions, the culture of next-ness (Elliott and Urry 2010) has moved centre-stage. Instantaneity, speed and newness are essential ingredients to the production and performance of the ‘good life’, to life lived in the fast lane of accelerating modernity. The Routledge Handbook of Social and Cultural Theory was published in 2014, the year in which the Ebola epidemic threatened a global health crisis, ISIS undertook the brutal takeover of entire towns in Syria and Iraq, and European Space Agency robots made a first-ever comet landing. Jump forward some years to this new, expanded edition of The Routledge Handbook of Social and Cultural Theory. The world of academic publishing, despite what some critics might think, is far from immune to the pressures and perils of accelerating modernity and the culture of the ever-new. Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, it was thought important – by the publisher, editors, contributors and (truth be told) myself – to produce a ‘new’, second edition of this handbook. But there are good reasons, beyond the culture of the new, for this. For one thing, much has happened throughout the world during this last decade. From the veritable explosion of enforced migration throughout Europe in 2015 to the impeachment of President Donald Trump in the United States in 2019, the world has shifted, and shifted considerably, during this time. Topics such as power, ideology and race remain vital, but the last decade has brought subjects like mobilities, migrations, technology and posthumanism out of the margins and increasingly to the fore in social and cultural theory. One aim of this new edition of the handbook is to develop a critical assessment of the gains and losses of these shifts in social and cultural theory. Another aim is the candid assessment of how these new trends must urgently be engaged with, as well as their integration into more established and traditional concerns of social and cultural theory.
Preparing the new edition of this volume for publication occurred during a major global crisis. 2020 unleashed a global pandemic and global public health crisis of staggering proportions: Covid-19. If Covid-19 has been a global pandemic that has threatened the very structure of global public health and world order, this has been nowhere more obvious that in the domains of society and culture. In an astonishingly short space of time during 2020, Covid-19 brought the world’s factories to a standstill and severely disrupted global supply chains. Some were quick to predict the collapse of globalisation. Other critics, rightly in my view, argued that globalisation was not only about moving manufactured goods around the world, but moving ideas, information and data too. Amid the many complex dimensions and consequences of Covid-19, the world also witnessed a surge of digital information which turbocharged virtual networks and the flow of new technologies in everything from healthcare to business. Again, as various social and cultural theorists noted, such hi-tech interconnectivity fortunately proved immune to quarantine. There were, for example, unparalleled international research cooperation efforts in the fight against coronavirus, and these global efforts very substantially involved artificial intelligence and related new technologies. Consider, for example, the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, a US partnership involving government, industry and academia to provide access to the world’s most powerful supercomputers in support of coronavirus research. The Consortium has involved Google, IBM, Amazon, Microsoft and NASA sharing some 30 supercomputer systems with the world’s scientific community. Research scientists have run millions of simulations on these supercomputers, training machine learning systems to identify factors that might make a targeted molecule a good candidate in the race against time to defeat the deadly coronavirus.
Social and cultural theorists have been at the forefront in the social sciences and humanities in responding to the threats, risks, dangers as well as new opportunities and options arising from the Covid-19 global pandemic. The Covid-19 Catastrophe, by Robert Horton, critically assessed the actions that governments around the world undertook – or, as was often the case, failed to take – as the virus spread from its origins in Wuhan to the entire world. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, in Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World, developed a scintillating critique of the cultural paradoxes of the crisis and also ventured some future forecasting on the long-term social consequences of the pandemic. MIT organised a major seminar on Culture Clashes in the Age of Covid-19. In Japan, an online panel of specialists debated the role of international collaboration and culture in the time of coronavirus. Across Europe, museums, culture organisations and galleries ran initiatives to engage audiences and facilitate access to resources and activities, even as Covid-19 prevented people from leaving their homes. In all of this, society and culture was to the fore. In all of this, social and cultural theorists raised the vital question: what happens to human agency in a world of structured social differences when agents are, in effect, precluded from engagement directly in the public sphere, and are instead thrown back onto the private realm? This question – the relation between agency and structure – played out in a radical new way during the Covid-19 pandemic, but it is a question – as we will see throughout this handbook – that has long historical roots in social and cultural theory.
Human agency, social structure and cultural forms
The question of the relation between society and culture is paramount in the writings of most social and cultural theorists. The complex, contradictory balance of this relationship, however, has been interpreted, analysed and critiqued for the most part by privileging either society over culture, or culture over society. To work on the question of the relation between society and culture – its interconnections, referrals, disconnections and displacements – has thus involved studying, highlighting and accentuating one term at the expense of the other. What matters in much social theory are the philosophical dimensions and conceptual consequences of defining the ‘social’ – ranging variously across ‘social practices’ and ‘social forces’ to ‘social structures’ and ‘social systems’. Among students of society, an interest in culture appears all too quickly sidelined to the margins of analysis. Conversely, an understanding of society in much cultural analysis is often downgraded in favour of a fascination with, say, ideology, hegemony or discursive formations. So there is usually something missing, something lacking, from these analytical approaches in social and cultural theory. It is as if there is a troubling remainder when a cultural analyst speaks of ideological indeterminacy, and something equally absent when social theorists dismantle everyday life in terms of categories such as globalisation and cosmopolitanism.
Much contemporary social theory has arguably shifted the focus of analysis from society to culture to society again – often enough, it is true, under the fashionable banner of ‘the social’. ‘Society’ is a term that is fundamental to public political discourse; yet it is not one with any definitional consensus in the social sciences (see Elliott and Turner 2012). In general terms, society has often been used to denote value consensus, and as such has served as a kind of sorting device for grasping connections and differentials of social norms between different social groups. It has elsewhere been used to signify generalised social association. Certainly, because society has been cast as largely a universal affair in much traditional social analysis (from structural-functionalism to modernisation theory), it was not until a significant period of social upheaval and cultural discord in the late 1960s and early 1970s that the Western notion of the social as ordered and structured fell on hard times. This dismantling of the concept of society was, in turn, intensified by various theoretical currents – including feminism, multiculturalism and postcolonialism – as well as massive social transformations such as the advent of globalisation and new information technologies. Perhaps not unsurprisingly, the discourse of society received a radical deconstruction and reconstruction from within the disciplinary confines of sociology itself. For instance, structuration theory, as advanced by Anthony Giddens in the United Kingdom and Pierre Bourdieu in France, unearthed how the structured features of social action are, by the performance of action itself, constitutive of structured social contexts. Others argued that the idea of structured society is simply dismissive of the infinite social differences that shape global realities.
If social theory throughout the 1980s was turning in on itself, largely preoccupied as it was with issues of interpretation, justification and critique, the same cannot be said of cultural theory. There was a general celebratory sense during the final decades of the twentieth century that cultural theory had reached beyond its distinctively British beginnings, anchored as it had been in the path-breaking works of Matthew Arnold, F. R. Leavis, Richard Hoggart, E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams, and was now in the business of going global. The whole sensibility of cultural theory during this time was one of transformation and possibility, as both the theoretics and analytics of culture spread throughout the curricula of colleges and universities from San Francisco to Sydney. The topic of culture moved centre-stage across various disciplines and fields in the social sciences and humanities. Culture was increasingly the place to try out competing theories of the world and try on various approaches to grasping everyday life, as the process of interpretative ‘reading’ was applied to cultural texts, events and objects – all the way from the reading of women’s magazines to the study of subcultures. Not that this meant that the term ‘culture’ was any easier to understand than the term ‘society’. Indeed, the doyen of cultural theory Raymond Williams developed the argument that culture was one of the most complex words in the English language.
By the 1990s the underscoring of a general transformation of culture in cultural theory was not only about a transformed relationship to the social sciences and humanities, however. The enhancement of disciplinary knowledge and enrichment of interdisciplinary fields of research was certainly still significant, but many practitioners of cultural theory were seeking an engagement with the wider world reaching well beyond the academic goal of disinterested inquiry. The new cultural theories had ambitions that lay deep in politics and the public sphere. This involved, in effect, a translation of cultural theory, one which connected texts to social transformations, interpretative readings to political interests and libidinal desire to democratic deliberation. Such is the pitch of the major writings of cultural theorists as diverse as Stuart Hall, Fredric Jameson, Michel de Certeau, Terry Eagleton, John Fiske, Dick Hebdige, Laura Mulvey and Lawrence Grossberg.
One aim of The Routledge Handbook of Social and Cultural Theory is to introduce readers to contemporary debates around society and culture. Another aim is to ponder and discriminate the different meanings of these terms. Why ‘society’ has been elevated over ‘culture’ in social theory and why ‘culture’ often comes at the cost of a rudimentary grasp of ‘society’ in cultural theory are fundamental questions explored throughout the volume.
The horizons of social theory: self, society and solidarity
If it is true that classical social theory had in a sense been founded upon the emergence of industrial society, and been associated with questions of the transition from feudalism to early market capitalism, then contemporary social theory has been largely concerned with transitions to post-industrialism, multinational capitalism and advanced modernity. Contemporary social theory, for the most part, has seen itself inaugurate a shift in analytical attention in the social sciences and humanities from institutions to ideology, from class to colonialism and from economics to ego identity. What perhaps has been most striking is the sheer diversity, indeed the exceptional range, of social theory and its astonishingly abundant traditions of thought. From the 1920s and 1930s onwards, social theory was preoccupied with, among other things, political unrest, power and psychodynamics. By the 1950s and 1960s, however, social theory was also coming to denote semiotics, signifiers and sexuality. The foundational social-theoretical ideas of Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud were still of immense significance, but they now needed to be supplemented, or ‘reread’, in the light of new intellectual and political interventions from Germany and France. The terrain of cultural theory was to undergo another of its periodic transformations some decades later, for example during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when postmodernism and debates about postmodernity became all the rage. Today, by contrast, the intellectual and political landscape has changed again, with a whole range of new vital issues ranging from globalisation to governance. Even so, what remains evident is that few areas of academic enquiry remain as interdisciplinary, diverse and politically engaged as cultural theory.
But this is rushing ahead. We need to return to social theory, and consider the transition from traditional to contemporary social thought. The early architects of contemporary social theory, working as it happened in Germany, set out by seeing their work as not confined to the province of any one intellectual discipline. Social theory, according to the early critical theorists, needed to include the insights of sociology, philosophy, political science, economics, psychology, in fact the whole stock of formal intellectual disciplines. The term ‘critical theory’ refers to a series of core ideas worked out by the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt (the ‘Frankfurt School’) in the 1920s and 1930s. Pre-eminent among the first generation of Frankfurt critical theorists were Max Horkheimer (philosopher, sociologist and leader of the institute), Theodor Adorno (sociologist, philosopher and musicologist) and Herbert Marcuse (philosopher and political theorist). While there were many other significant scholars associated with the Frankfurt School, including the literary critic Walter Benjamin and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, it is in the writings of Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse that the cultural-theoretical project of linking philosophy and the human sciences, of interweaving theoretical critique with empirical research, most strongly emerges.1 Among the core issues central to the first generation of critical theorists were the following. What are the core cultural and political dimensions influencing the trajectory of twentieth-century history? What psychological and political factors underpinned the rise of fascism and Nazism? Why are tendencies towards bureaucracy, rationalisation and authoritarianism increasingly prevalent throughout developed societies? And how might theoretical critique keep ...
