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ABSTRACT
In Culture and Agency (1988/1996, CUP), I distinguished between the ‘Cultural System' (C.S.), namely all items logged into the universal cultural archive, and ‘Socio-Cultural' (S-C) interaction, namely how we persuade others ideationally. This paper charts major changes in the C.S. since circa 1980 when a new generative mechanism developed - the synergy between globalized capitalism and digital science. Consequently, (i) cultural change became intensely morphogenetic; (ii) was increasingly treated as a marketable commodity, (iii) perpetrating the scam in which cultural goods (aka. Intellectual Property) lose value if freely shared. The concomitant changes in the S-C emphasized (a) its distracting effects for personal reflexivity, because the ‘presentism’ of SNMs fostered popular cultural wantons, (b) with damaging consequences for traditional social movements, and (c) encouraging Fake News from the political and economic elites, since it is less sanctioned and sooner forgotten than previously, but is more influential. Such elites are now cultural wantons themselves.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Margaret S. Archer studied at the London School of Economics and as a post-doc. at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris, also working with Pierre Bourdieu. She first developed her ‘morphogenetic approach' in Social Origins of Educational Systems (1979 [2013]). She was Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick from 1979 until 2010, writing and editing over forty books, including The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity (2012), Making our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility (2007), Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation (2003), Being Human: The Problem of Agency (2000) and Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (1995). In 2011 she became Professor of Social Theory at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and founded its new Centre d'Ontologie Sociale. She continues to develop her ‘Morphogenetic Approach' as the explanatory framework of Critical Realism's social ontology. The Centre's main project was exploring ‘the Morphogenic Society’ as a possible future for late modernity, in a book Series (Springer) in five volumes. She was President of the International Sociological Association (1986-90); a Trustee of the Centre for Critical Realism; a founding member of FAcSS; the British Nominee for the Balzan Prize, 2013; and a founder member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, becoming its President in 2014. She has recently been awarded Honorary Doctorates (honoris causa) by the Uniwersytet Kardynala Stefana Wyszynkiego, Warsaw and the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain.
Notes
2 If only to ourselves.
3 However, this is unlike everyday terms which involve mutual constitution, such as ‘singing’. There, the song and the singer have separate properties, some of which are irrelevant to the practice – such as the circumstances
of the song’s composition or the marital circumstances of the singer – and some of whose interplay is vital to the practice – the song’s difficulty and the singer’s virtuosity.
4 For a debate on the ontological status of culture, see Archer and Elder-Vass (Citation2012, 1–23).
5 For a theory of the formation of agents’ ‘projects’ in the light of their personal concerns and consideration of their social contexts, see Archer (Citation2003).
6 As stated by Gerth and Wright Mills (Citation1967, 413): ‘A ritual law in which every change of occupation, every change in work technique, could result in ritual degradation is certainly not capable of giving birth to economic and technical revolutions from within itself, or even of facilitating the first germination of capitalism in its midst.’
7 Porpora Douglas (Citation2016) gives some quantification to the growth in cultural items in his paper ‘The Great Normative Changes of the Twentieth Century’.
8 We emphasized in Social Morphogenesis, the first of these Volumes (Archer Citation2013), reasons why ‘variety’ could not be enumerated and thus confined ourselves to statements of ‘more’ or ‘less’ of it.
9 This is why it is always important to insist that the delineation of morphogenetic phases is analytical and depends on the research question in hand.
10 Consider this, for example, in relation to our own discipline.
11 This changes over time and increasingly interested parties attempt to stake out the future to their own advantage, which is why investment in ‘futures’, intellectual property rights and patents assume such importance.
12 Corporate Agents are those who have articulated a collective aim and organized a means to try to attain it, whereas Primary Agents merely share life chances in common.
13 See Elder-Vass (Citation2016, especially Part III).
14 See Byrne (Citation2012)
15 See Lenhart (Citation2010).
16 Roy Bhaskar (Citation2016, 205) rightly maintained how these crises are related; ‘the various crises feed into each other; the ecocrisis exacerbates the economic crisis, which produces ethnic and political tensions, which threaten the international political structure of the system; so that we have in effect the concatenation of the crises in such a way that they mutually reinforce one another’.