Reassembling the Cultural

Abstract

The central argument in this paper is that actor-network theory (ANT) does not do ‘cultural economy’ symmetrically: it has had a lot to say about economy but much less to say about culture. This rejection of culture is ontological and epistemological: culture appears in ANT largely as an artefact of modernist thought rather than as an empirical aspect of agents' performances. And yet if ‘economy’ can be critiqued and reinstated as performative, so too can ‘culture’. To explore this, we focus on objects of concern that – unlike the financial markets that have formed the core of ANT-inspired thinking about the economy – are assembled by actors in and through what they themselves understand to be cultural materials, cultural calculations, cultural processes, cultural institutions. In such examples, ‘culture’ is continuously invoked and enacted by actors in constructing their actions, whatever critical sociologists might have to say about its ontological status. It seems paradoxical that a theoretical approach that makes sacrosanct the associations constructed by agents who assemble their own world, generally discusses ‘culture’ only from the point of view of critical epistemology. Bearing all this in mind, we argue that it is time for us to ‘reassemble’ the cultural.

KEYWORDS:

• actor-network theory
• creative industries
• cultural objects
• models
• brands

Notes

1. The move away from representational accounts of such objects and their effects is clearly part of a sea-change that is much wider than ANT and might include practice theory (Warde 2005); non-representational theory (Thrift 2005, 2007); and phenomenologies of practical and embodied cognition (Bourdieu, Bloch, Ingold). The arguments in this and the next section could have been developed equally through these related approaches.

2. In a larger discussion, this would be a point of departure for relating ANT to material culture studies.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joanne Entwistle

Dr Joanne Entwistle is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King‘s College London. She has written extensively on fashion, aesthetic economy, gender and the body. Her most recent publications include Fashioning Models: Image, Industry, Text (co-edited with Elizabeth Wissinger, Berg, 2012) and The Aesthetic Economy of Fashion: Markets and Value in Clothing and Fashion Modelling (Berg, 2009).

Don Slater

Don Slater is Reader in Sociology at the London School of Economics, and Editor in Chief of the British Journal of Sociology. His research interests include consumer culture and market society, media and technology in the global south, and visual and material culture. His most recent book is New Media, Development and Globalization: Making Connections in the Global South (Polity, forthcoming, 2013). He is currently launching a new research programme, with Joanne Entwistle, entitled, ‘Configuring Light/Staging the Social’, which addresses the configuration of light as material culture in built environments, design practices and everyday life.