MAKING CULTURE, CHANGING SOCIETY

Abstract

Drawing on the perspectives of science studies and actor-network-theory, this paper develops the perspective of ‘culture studies’ to offer an account of the ways in which culture, understood as a specific form of public organisation, is produced and sustained through the assemblage of materially heterogeneous elements. This is related to an account of the ways in which culture acts on the social through the distinctive ‘working surfaces on the social’ that it organises. The distinctiveness of the perspective of ‘culture studies’ is highlighted by comparing it with more familiar traditions of analysis within cultural studies and cultural sociology. Francis Mulhern's account of cultural studies’ relations to the practice of Kulturkritik associated with the formation of Bildung and the programme that Jeffrey Alexander proposes for the development of cultural sociology are paid particular attention in this regard. The paper concludes with a consideration of the forms of analytical attention that are needed to investigate the ways in which cultural and social science disciplines interact in the production of ‘working surfaces on the social’ through which their modes of action on the social are coordinated.

Keywords:

• culture
• social
• Bildung
• assemblage
• actor-network-studies
• science studies

Notes

1. I offer this example as similar to one Latour gives at a later point in his discussion (Latour 2005, p. 40).

2. Latour (2004, 2005) clearly views Bourdieu as the primary representative of the kind of sociologist who seeks to organise and mobilise power by producing – through the fields that he constructs by means of varied forms of abstraction from the real (surveys, their statistical manipulation, etc) – an invisible social structure on whose behalf he then claims to speak in championing the claims of sociology over those of other disciplines. These charges drew forth an irritated and largely unproductive response from Bourdieu which fails to differentiate science studies from the sociology of science, and disposes of Latour by mere caricature (Bourdieu 2004, pp. 21–30).

3. I use this formulation as there are good reasons for doubting that Foucault's own use of discourse ever stressed such qualities. These are rather ways of describing discourse that gloss his earlier formulations of the concept in the light of the more materialist emphases of his later work (see Sawyer 2002).

4. Mitchell's account of the making of the economy is woven into, and complicated by, an account of a split between the real and its representation which, in earlier work, Mitchell (1988, 1989) clearly views as both a wider and primary rift with a longer history than that of ‘the economy’, as he defines it.

5. My formulations here recast aspects of Larry Shiner's (2001) account of the production of the autonomy of art and culture.

6. Mulhern's book occasioned an extended debate with Stefan Collini and others in New Left Review: see Collini (2001, 2002), Mulhern (2002, 2003), and Simpson (2004).

7. Law and Urry cite the recent work of Osborn and Rose (1999) on public opinion. However, this line of argument was developed much earlier by Pierre Bourdieu in his probing study of the ways in which public opinion research produced its own reality effects: see Bourdieu (1979).