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Decorative sociology: towards a critique of
the cultural turn
Chris Rojek and Bryan Turner
Abstract
In this paper we outline a critique of `decorative sociology' as a trend in
contemporary sociology where `culture' has eclipsed the `social' and where literary
interpretation has marginalized sociological methods. By the term `decorative
sociology' we mean a branch of modernist aesthetics which is devoted to a
politicized, textual reading of society and culture. Although we acknowledge slippage
between the textual and material levels of cultural analysis, notably in the output of
the Birmingham School, we propose that the intellectual roots of cultural studies
inevitably mean that the textual level is pre-eminent. In emphasizing the aesthetic
dimension we seek to challenge the political self-image of decorative sociology as a
contribution to political intervention. We argue that while the cultural turn has
contributed to revising approaches to the relationships between identity and power,
race and class, ideology and representation, it has done so chiefly at an aesthetic
level. Following Davies (1993), we submit that the greatest achievement of the
cultural turn has been to teach students to `read politically'. The effect of this upon
concrete political action is an empirical question. Without wishing to minimize the
political importance of cultural studies, our hypothesis is that, what might be called
the `aestheticization of life' has not translated fully into the politicization of culture.
We argue that an adequate cultural sociology would have to be driven by an
empirical research agenda, embrace an historical and comparative framework, and
have a genuinely sociological focus, that is, a focus on the changing balance of power
in Western capitalism. We reject the attempt to submerge the social in the cultural
and outline the development of an alternative, integrated perspective on body, self
and society. We conclude by briefly commenting on three sociological contributions
to the comparative and historical study of cultural institutions which approximate
this research agenda: Norbert Elias, Pierre Bourdieu and Richard Sennett.
What features characterize contemporary cultural studies? This question is
peculiarly difficult to answer because the geo-political development of cultural
studies has not followed a uniform pattern. For example, in the USA the main
focus is on media, communications, technoculture and multiculturalism. In
Canada, an interest in peripheral cultures and cultural ambiguity is more
pronounced together with an older tradition in media studies associated with
the work of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan and the studies in
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`excremental culture' pursued by Kroker. In Australia the questions of
colonialism, post-colonialism, dependency, feminism, aboriginality, multiculturalism and cultural policy have been at the forefront.
But all of these traditions owe a great deal to the Birmingham School, and in
particular to Stuart Hall rather than Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart.
We submit that the output and intellectual culture developed in the
Birmingham School between 1964 and 1979 was the decisive juncture in the
formation of Cultural Studies as an academic discipline. Further, Hall, as the
embodiment of the diasporic, hybrid, passionate, proselyitizing, politically
committed intellectual, was the pivotal role model for students of Cultural
Studies.
We maintain that the Left-wing intelligentsia in Britain has always displayed
a troubled, querulous attitude to authority in any form. Criticism, often of a
literary or quasi-literary bent, has generally been more prominent than plans
for the reconstruction of the social and cultural fabric. The English state
formation process never accomplished a binding settlement in favour of the
commons (Turner, 1990). The historical lesson of the collapse of Cromwell's
republic, the restoration of the monarchy and the constitutional settlement of
1688 was that the English have a deep respect for tradition and compromise.
Historical sociologists like Perry Anderson in the New Left Review built up a
political analysis of twentieth-century English society which recognises this
legacy of compromise in politics, middle-brow attitudes in culture and a lovehate relationship with continental philosophy. The limitations on aspirations
for radical change in the English body polity and a fondness for `commonsense' philosophy and empiricism generated a tendency for irony and invective
in the writings of the intelligentsia. Britain never experienced centralized,
systematic or violent revolutionary change. Nor, even today after more than a
decade of scandal, melodrama and tragedy in the Royal Family, has it seriously
contemplated republicanism. Its radical traditions have always occupied the
margins of power. The radical Left-wing intelligentsia predominate in the
Academy, the media and on the backbenches rather than government.
Acceptance of the Mannheimian doctrine of the free-floating intelligentsia
was a relatively easy stance, given its own historical marginalization.
On result of this is that the English tradition in social and political theory
has been resolutely limpid, and dominated by what one might call a pragmatic
empiricism. Thus, the writings of J.S. Mill, J.M. Keynes, the Webbs, T.H.
Green, Ginsberg, Beveridge and T.H. Marshall generally focused narrowly on
English socio-political conditions and presented a contractual view of society
and culture. These writers rejected continental traditions investigating wider
questions of the spirit, being and Western civilization as numinous, fruitless
irrelevancies.
Arguably, the most interesting moments in English social and political
theory have occurred when English traditions have lost control to the realities
of globalization. For example, the Second World War produced the enforced
emigration to Britain of leading continental intellectuals like Karl Mannheim,
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Karl Popper, Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Norbert Elias. One might have expected
the efflorescence of social and political theory and the disintegration of English
insularity. This did not happen. Mannheim and Popper embraced English
traditions in championing liberalism, limited government intervention in
educational reform and the politics of `the open society'. Both were suitably
rewarded with prestige chairs at the LSE and other honours. Sohn-Rethel
could find work only as a school-teacher in Birmingham; 1 and Elias spent
many years living a hand-to-mouth existence before, at the age of 57, gaining
his first lectureship in Britain at the newly-fledged sociology department in
Leicester.
Elias's work on the civilizing process (1978; 1982) is now acknowledged to
be one of the century's most important contributions in sociology. However,
throughout his time in Leicester, he was regarded as an odd-ball. His work on
the civilizing process, which existed in mimeo-draft form as early as the 1960s,
seems to have been regarded as an exotic, period piece by most of the new
generation of vibrant young sociologists who studied and taught at Leicester
between the 1960s and the late 1970s. 2 With the exception of Eric Dunning, few
members of the Leicester department developed intellectual solidarity with
Elias's approach. Thanks to the determined leadership of Ilya Neustadt,
Leicester in the 1960s and 70s, established itself as one of the UK's leading
teaching departments. Yet, surprisingly few of Leicester's illustrious graduates
have done more than make the most cursory references to Elias's work in their
own writings. 3 As Elias (1994: 67) explained, somewhat poignantly in his
autobiography, `I was an outsider, and that only changed after I left England'.
The rise of cultural studies
The intellectual origins of cultural studies, at least in Britain, grew out of an
intellectual and institutional crisis in departments of English. The debates
between Leavis and his critics gave rise to the notion that the study of texts had
to escape from its colonial roots and embrace theory and philosophy. The
result was the creation of literary studies which, under the impact of
decolonization and subaltern studies, soon developed into comparative literary
studies. Under the influence of Roland Barthes, literary studies discovered the
power of postructuralist linguistics. This discovery removed research from textbased study into intertextuality and led English researchers to the panoply of
structuralist literary devices ± tropes, metaphors and aporias ± which had been
developed on the continent.
The other key ingredient in the rise of Cultural Studies was the discovery of
the popular. The pioneering work of Raymond Williams (1958, 1965) and E.P.
Thompson (1963) in the 1950s and 60s, made the case that working class
culture should be taken seriously. This was a direct challenge to elite values. It
suggested that ontological and epistemological readings of culture in the
Academy were seriously deficient.
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Looking back, the imagination and work of both men seem constrained by
ties of nation and politics. Intellectually speaking, each had emerged in the
British Left's assimilation and critique of communism. This was both a source
of strength and insularity in their outlook. Both were curiously at odds with the
forces of globalization, individualization, sexual liberation and hybridity that
we now think of as characterizing late modernity. Both rejected elite culture,
yet both developed curiously elitist tendencies in reacting to the cultural turn.
Both favoured the concrete over the representational challenges laid down by
post-structuralism.
The same cannot be said of Stuart Hall. Hall was a generation younger than
either Williams or Thompson. Although he migrated to Britain from Jamaica
in the 1950s, he always emphasized his cultural and ethnic marginality. Very
soon, as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, Hall was demonstrating a decidedly unBritish interest in questions of continental philosophy and sociology.
Hall, we argue, is the main symbol of the cultural turn in English social. He
cuts an unusual figure in British academic life. He is enormously charismatic, in
a culture which has been traditionally tepid about leaders and gurus; and of
course, he is one of only a handful of intellectuals from the black community to
have achieved recognition in what is still, overwhelmingly, a white dominated,
system. In order to understand cultural studies then, it is necessary to review
some aspects of Hall's path-breaking work in Birmingham.
The legacy of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams involved a debate
about the relationship between an authentic community and social class and
racial dimensions. Literature provided a set of historical signposts which traced
the demise of community. Much of The Uses of Literacy (Hoggarth, 1957) and
Culture and Society and The Country and the City (Williams, 1958; 1973) is
nostalgic for working-class Leeds or Welsh mining villages, combined with a
dislike for the artefacts of mass culture. This literary and political orientation
translated into a romantic view of vanished working-class cultures and
reinforced the sense that English cultural studies must address the crisis of
identity in English national life.
Hall took over this tradition, and sought to concretize it in the crisis of the
British nation-state, the collapse of colonialism and the wider traditions of
continental Marxism. Gramsci was the decisive influence, but the various
conceptual innovations and the style of thought associated with poststructuralism was also a significant, and largely unacknowledged, influence.
Deep questions in the classical tradition of sociology pertaining to the social
dynamics of density (Durkheim's `moral individualism'), the viability and
methodologies of causal analysis (Weber) and the Marxist tradition in the
study of totality (Jay, 1984), tend to be reduced to matters of cultural encoding.
Everything ± the economic, the demographic, the religious and the moral ±
becomes a matter of cultural `layering', and `sliding'. This problematizes his
claim to have been engaged in the development of a genuinely materialist
approach to culture.
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Criticism of the cultural studies tradition
In criticizing cultural studies we maintain, firstly, that cultural studies is largely
a-historical in its research focus. The ideas of Gramsci and, to a lesser extent
Althusser, provided the intellectual fibre of social theory in the Birmingham
School. Hall (1986b; 1987; 1991; 1992) in particular, regularly pays fulsome
tribute to Gramsci's influence and continued relevance. Of course, Gramsci
and Althusser, followed Marx in examining capitalism as a deeply rooted,
evolving system of control and domination. While Gramsci's analysis of
hegemony recognized the historical dimension of moral authority in Catholic
Italy, Althusser's structuralism was not concerned with historical analysis as a
causal account of transformations in the mode of production ± hence the
conflicts with and between Thompson, Poulantzas and Miliband. Of course
Birmingham cultural studies recognized that social analysis requires an
historical dimension. But the main impetus of theory and research was, and
continues to be, focused on exploring how control and exploitation operate in
the present day. The result is a remarkable absence of historical depth in the
Birmingham School oeuvre. Hence, in contrast to his former associates in the
New Left Review, notably Anderson, there is no attempt by Hall, or by any of
his close associates, to achieve a long-term developmental perspective on
cultural formation. Instead, they rely almost exclusively on secondary sources
for their historical perspective. The most important influences here are the
`people's' history produced by Thompson (1963) and Samuel (1981), and the
more analytic approach to history developed by Williams (1961, 1963, 1973).
The Birmingham tradition did not produce work comparable to Anderson's
(1974a, 1974b) or Mann's, (1986) analysis of the lineage of the modern nation
state. British cultural studies has developed nothing to compete with the
French Annales School where the concept of historical duration guided an
interdisciplinary approach to cultural phenomena in their historical setting.
Secondly, cultural studies has a poor tradition of comparative research. The
School's research and publications focus on the national English condition
rather than trans-national processes or comparative history or civilizational
analysis. Thus, when questions of the `crisis' or `resistance' are posed, they tend
to be examined through the lens of English (rather than Scottish, Irish or
Welsh) experience (Hall and Jefferson, 1976; Hall et al., 1978). While Hall's
later work increasingly turned to global questions of ethnicities, multiculturalism and diaspora, this inquiry is conducted largely at an abstract level
using English experience, and particularly the crisis in English national
identity, to illustrate the theoretical discussion. Moreover, it is striking that the
concepts of hybridity and diaspora in Hall's work are basically limited to AfroCaribbean and Asian migrant experience. It is a partial perspective on
hybridization and post-nationalism which pronounces the significance of race
and colour at the cost of genuinely muti-cultural picture of the dynamics of
ethnic conflict, assimilation and negotiation. It was left to Gilroy (1993) to
produce a more detailed historical account of British colonialism.
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The neglect of comparative research is reinforced by the main empirical
methods used by the Centre. The principal qualitative method of empirical
analysis is ethnography (McGuigan, 1997). This adoption of ethnography
was partly a strategic decision made to separate Birmingham work from
the alleged aridity of English theoretical and quantitative traditions, both of
which were regarded as tainted by positivism. Ethnographic methods answered
to Hall's requirement for vital, relevant research to balance the theoretical
work conducted in the Centre. The result was the magnification of immediate
and local conditions and the diminution of historical and comparative
perspectives.
Thirdly, cultural studies is deeply politicized. The theoretical approach
demands engagement with a political project of cultural transformation. Hall's
advocacy of Gramsci's concept of the `organic intellectual' stereotyped the
work of `traditional intellectuals' as superficial and evasive. This bestowed an
automatic moral significance upon the cultural studies approach which
contrasted with the alleged acdemicism of established research traditions. As
Hall (1992, reprinted in Hall, 1996: 268) clarified:
It is the job of the organic intellectual to know more than the traditional
intellectuals do: really know, not just pretend to know, not just to have the
facility of knowledge, but to know deeply and profoundly.
An important inference of this claim is that the knowledge generated by
traditional approaches is, through custom rather than design, regarded, on a
priori grounds, as suspect. The self-image of organic intellectuals is of
intellectual workers who are closer to material reality and more seriously
interested in `what is really going on', in Goffman's (1967) sense of the term,
than intellectuals working in other traditions. This conveyed palpable moral
force upon Birmingham School research and writing. The work in the 1970s on
schooling, ideology, culture, the media, policing and Thatcherism has
tremendous zest, and this partly reflects indignation that these subjects are
neglected in other research traditions. But it also produced its own variety of
moral arrogance, intellectual narrowness and over-confidence which has
carried over into the cultural studies critique of established humanities (such as
English and History) and social science disciplines (like sociology and political
science). Following Gramsci, Hall's understanding of the composition of the
organic intellectual did not stop with the commitment to intellectual excellence.
The transmission of knowledge to the cultural forces suppressed by capitalist
hegemony is a commitment of equivalent importance. This invested cultural
studies with a proselytising impulse which remains evident to the present day.
However, to return to the point we made in our introductory remarks, cultural
studies has contributed to an approach to culture which places immense
emphasis upon the importance of aesthetics. The exemplary work here is
perhaps Hebdige's (1979) study of subculture which attempts to fuse a
phenomenological based Marxism with a semiotic, post-structuralist approach.
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However it is not the only example. The works by McRobbie and Nava (1986),
Grossberg (1992, 1997), Dyer (1986) and to a lesser extent Willis (1978, 1990),
each prefigure aesthetics in their analysis of culture, with the result that the
political import of their work is diluted.
The expansion of cultural studies throughout the university system worldwide in the 1980s and 1990s exceeded expectations. The growth was so rapid,
and so far in excess of the intellectual achievements of cultural studies as a
distinctive approach to theory and empirical research, that it left some Vice
Chancellors and social critics wondering if the subject was suffering from overexpansion and unrealistic expectations. Hall (1992) himself expressed doubts.
He fretted about the de-politicization of cultural studies work, especially in the
United States, and lamented the displacement of the concept of the organic
intellectual with careerism. However, by the time Hall articulated his worries in
print, a new intellectual movement had risen in the firmament which posed a
fresh critical, and even apocalyptic, counterpoint to both cultural studies and
traditional sociology.
Postmodernism and the cultural turn
The roots of postmodernism lie in the intellectual crisis of Western Marxism.
Central to this crisis was the collapse of communism and the intellectual
ossification of feminism. Both of these movements claimed advantage over
other approaches, on the basis of a rigorous materialist analysis of social and
economic conditions. After 1968 both fell foul of apparently irrevocable
materialist realities. Proletarian revolution never occurred in Western societies.
Where it did happen, contra Marx, it was as the aftermath of mass warfare or
as the consequence of imperialist forces. This absence of class-driven revolution
in western capitalism raised doubts about both the validity of Marxist
historical materialism as a scientific theory of socio-economic change and as a
form of political practice. The dominant ideology thesis was challenged
(Abercombie et al., 1980) on the grounds that the evidence of ideological=
cultural hegemony was weak, and that the emphasis on ideology was actually
incompatible with Marx's notion of historical materialism.
Equally, Western Marxists were forced to concede to Eastern European
social critics like Djilas (1957) and Bahro (1978) who maintained that
`presently existing socialism' in the Soviet-type system had produced an
inhuman tyranny. The Gorbachov reforms symbolized the end of an era.
Although Western Marxism briefly reconfigured in the 1980s around an attack
on the Thatcher-Reagan monetarist programme of welfare reform, it has been
essentially in disarray ever since.
Feminism revolutionized understanding of power and subjectivity. It
opened up the themes of marginality, difference and sexual identity; it also
connected significantly with debates in decolonization and subaltern studies,
which became crucial in the formation of postcolonialism. Yet it never
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achieved the transcendence it promised. One strain within radical feminism
regarded male involvement in any aspect of theorizing or practising gender as
intrinsically suspect. This tendency in radical feminism produced a largely
fruitless impasse in feminist responses to the Foucauldian view of power and
the micro-politics of difference articulated under postmodernism. The theory
of patriarchy became a stale and repetitive analysis of hierarchical power
(Walby, 1997). Feminism reacted to, rather than provided new paradigms in
the emerging areas of the sociology of the body (Turner, 1984). While some
feminists embraced Foucault's emphasis on micro-politics they rejected his
analysis of the crisis in radical politics as over-pessimistic (Ramazanoglu,
1989). Feminism still retained a conviction in the necessity of social
transcendence.
However, Foucault's emphasis on the arbitrary `order of things' clearly
struck a chord with many feminists. In particular it was influential in the work
of feminist writers who struggled to recast the concept of heteronormativity in
response to the challenge of subjectivist approaches, such as queer theory. This
produced a new fissure among feminists. More widely, generational divisions
emerged. Younger feminists, who had grown up with the postmodern emphasis
on fragmentation, diversity and identity politics, became increasingly disillusioned with the dirigiste mentality of the 1960s and 70s generations who
dominated feminism in the Academy. Few feminists today postulate woman as
a `universal collective subject'. The work of Butler (1990), Braiodotti (1994)
and hooks (1981, 1990) suggests a new form of `decentred' feminism which
embraces aspects of the postmodern and practices the politics of ambivalence.
This left the agenda and common ground in feminism more disputed than ever
before.
A sense of frustration with the tensions in feminism emerges with clear force
in Jacqueline Stevens's recent review essay (1998), in which she rejects the
possibility of a unitary feminist agenda and recognizes the possibility that
`feminist theory seems to be dead'. The cuts in higher education funding during
the Thatcher-Reagan years condemned the new generation of post-feminists to
the margins of casualized academic labour and intensified the schisms among
feminists.
Postmodernism did not start a revolution. Rather, it filled a power vacuum
caused by the collapse of Marxism and the realignment of feminism. Its
emphasis on the death of the subject, signifying culture, the method of
deconstructivism and the valorization of irony, amount to a return to an
openly idealistic approach to the study of cultural phenomena. Postmodernism
like feminism has taken many forms. The differences between for example
Baudrillard (Rojek and Turner, 1993) and Lyotard (Rojek and Turner, 1998)
are an indication of the range of postmodern theoretical positions. Despite the
important differences, both Baudrillard and Lyotard represent a common
rejection of official Marxist theory following the inability of communism in
France to respond effectively to the Events of 1968. European postmodernism
had one pivotal origin in the cultural analyses of the Situationists. The concept
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of spectacle as a reflection on class politics in capitalism was one crucial
component of the intellectual road to cultural postmodernism.
Postmodernism abounded with passion (Game and Metcalfe, 1996), but this
had a dominant negative quality since it was directed at the alleged failures of
the traditional and radical traditions rather than a positive vision of the future.
Indeed, as we shall see, postmodernism accomplished the thesis that an
epistemological and ontological break had occurred in the development of
culture, without positing a basis for transcendence. As a result, circular
argument quickly became a feature of postmodern discourse. The denial of
boundaries around human subjectivity problematized the concept of empirical
reality but it failed to suggest a way forward.
There is a parallel here with cultural studies. Hall borrowed from Foucault
the idea that culture is constituted by the power=knowledge dichotomy. This
had a dual effect. First, it problematized the distinction between the centre
and the margins in social and political thought. Gitlin (1995) goes so far as to
propose that the margins became the centre. The result is that cultural politics
became obsessed with nomenclature and issues of positioning. This obsession
reinforced the tendency to analyze all human life in terms of texts and
intertextuality. The fascination with liminality and borders is an important
identifying characteristic of cultural studies. But the `centre' becomes
curiously amorphous and implausible in direct proportion to the expenditure
of analysis on the excluded and the marginal. For example, the Orientalist
debate turns on a conceptualization of the Occident which sets up a false
conceptual dichotomy by skating over the split-subject distinctions in each
polar category (Said, 1978; Spivak, 1990, 1993; Bhabba, 1994). In his later
work Said (1993a; 1993b) has attempted to distance himself from the
dichotomy by proposing that there is an indissoluble gap between
representation and its putative object. So that, for example, in analyzing
`Orientalism' it is not necessary to posit the existence of a concrete actual
object. However, to allow for this much slippage between representation and
its putative object is to introduce a degree of generosity into analytical
propositions which makes judgement between positions impossible. As
Young (1991) notes, if Said is saying that true representation is impossible,
upon what basis is he criticizing the Orientalists?
Second, and by extension, it politicized the academic reading of culture. In
the 1960s, feminism coined the slogan that `the personal is political'. Cultural
studies took this over and analyzed everything as political. In de Certeau (1984)
even walking down the street is a political act, while Fiske (1989a; 1989b),
rather fancifully we would say, invites us to read the youths that hang around
shopping malls as `urban guerillas'. More generally clothes, music, sport,
shopping, tourism and film, were all analyzed as `being political'. Without
wishing to minimize the importance of politics in culture, we submit that there
is a danger in an over-politicized reading of culture life. Politics loses its focus.
Instead of the Hobbesian war of all against all, the subject is plunged into an
`undecideable' sea of micro-relationships.
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The roots of postmodern epistemology lie in Heidegger's attack on
metaphysics (that is the possibility of a universal subject), but few postmodern
and poststructuralists are willing to recognise or accept Heidegger's endorsement of fascism. Derrida's deconstructive technique, which attempts to
discover the underlying logic of a text, reinforces the anti-humanist tendency
in postmodern thought because it rules out the universal. Deconstructivism is a
modern version of Weber's interpretive sociology, but without any acceptance
of `causal explanation'. Such an approach rules out phenomenology, and the
actor's subjectivity, because its poststructuralism rejects the subject. Only
deconstructive methodology binds postmodernism together.
Here the work of Foucault and, to a lesser extent, the influence of cultural
studies, are apparent. Postmodernism yokes it with an orientation which
highlights and, arguably, exaggerates, the aestheticization of everyday life. This
exaggeration, in turn, has fed back into cultural studies. The combination of
aestheticization and politicization enables students of cultural studies to keep
in contact with the mobility of cultural change while remaining politically
`relevant' despite having any policy of change. But the anti-humanist legacy
bequeaths a highly subjectivist take on political analysis and intervention.
The critique of decorative sociology
We propose that Decorative Sociology privileges politicization and aestheticization over, what we would term, `engaged detachment', in the analysis of
human interaction. We offer the concept of `engaged detachment' as an
alternative to the role model of the organic intellectual, espoused in the cultural
studies tradition. We return to take this point up in more detail in the next
section of the paper. At this stage in the discussion, it is valuable to recap our
central comments on Decorative Sociology, which consists of the elements of
cultural studies and postmodernism that we have analyzed above. Expressed in
summary form, these criticisms are:
1. There is an orientation to the analysis of human interaction which is
driven by theory and theoretical responsiveness to change, rather than a
stable research agenda. Social history in practice becomes the history of
theoretical changes. For example, there is a tendency to confuse the
history of postmodernism as a theory with the history of postmodernity
as a social and economic condition. With the decline of literary studies,
reading theory replaced reading literature. There is a concomitant
tendency towards theoreticism.
2. There is an absence of any commitment to historical or comparative
analysis follows from the privileging of theory and the textual
understanding of interaction. Texts have no history, because they exist
in a timeless, placeless space of intertextuality. The intellectual narcissism
of Orientalism is evident in the priority assigned to European (especially
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French) theory. Deconstructive methodology rejects classical sociology
and adopts a literary analysis of texts which are assumed to have
materiality. This theoretical strategy also precludes the possibility of
cumulative theory. This emphasis on contemporaneous analysis places
the burden of perpetual reinvention on social analysis since every time a
new major revolution is claimed (`digital technology', `globalization',
`post-Fordism', `post-nation-state', `hybridity', `network society', `webworld') the conceptual battery powering existing research traditions must
be disconnected and replaced with a new energy source. There is an
endless and infinite transformation of theory paradigms. With textual
interpretation and understanding of analysis and interaction, the
prominence of philosophy, and especially anti-humanist philosophy, in
decorative sociology is no accident. By `reading' social life as a text,
decorative sociology equips itself with a payload of endless terminological disputes and esoteric debates about the disappearance of reality.
The privileging of the cultural over the social and economic means that
social and economic issues are interpreted as questions of cultural
layering and analysis focuses on deconstructing categories.
3. The aestheticized (there are no universals) orientation is fused with a
politicized (there is no final vocabulary) genre. There is both a rejection
of cross-cultural and historical relevance and a sense of moral superiority
about the correctness of the political views articulated. Cultural studies
assumes the relevance and authority of its own interpretations while
rejecting the possibility of any grand narrative.
4. Although profoundly politicized, Decorative Sociology has no tenable or
sustained political agenda. To develop a detailed policy would be to take
a position and therefore challenge the commitment to relativism. Instead
of engaging with state politics, ornamentalism concentrates on the level
of micro-politics, thereby exacerbating the problem of its own relevance
to politics or policy. In some ways it is a secular modern version of the
antinomian tradition in religion and classical political economy.
Antinomianism literally means `against the law'. Although it is something of a generalization, we hold that, on the whole, the AngloAmerican academic traditions of left-wing criticism have been uncomfortable with participation in any form of politically institutionalized
power. Dissidence has been privileged over genuine collectivism. The
approval that the left-wing intelligentsia generally gave to the policies of
Clinton and Blair in opposition, has turned to fickle disenchantment with
the realities of power once these politicians gained office. A weakness of
the Anglo-American academic left is that it has been happier criticizing
policy than constructing and implementing alternatives.
It is our contention that Decorative Sociology has taken root with such
tenacity that it is now the most powerful tendency in critical cultural studies
and cultural sociology. Of course, the popularity of Decorative Sociology
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cannot be explained by the power of intellectual genres alone. The privileging
of theory and textual approaches in social and cultural analysis also reflects the
shortage of real research funding in the social sciences and humanities. This is
particularly true of historical and comparative research which often requires
high levels of research support and long lead-in times before it bears fruit. The
shift to new forms of performative management within higher education
intensifies the trend.
In turn, this is reinforced by the current trend in academic publishing which
is to reduce acquisition programmes in work based in original empirical
research on the grounds that the material does not `travel well'. This, combined
with the commercial challenges of year-on cuts in library budgets, the decline in
the real value of student grants, and the intensification of modularization, has
renewed interest in textbook publishing and quasi-reference publishing. There
has been a flood of Handbooks, Companions, Dictionaries and Profiles.
Discursive commentary, rather than systematic analysis, is the bedfellow of
these tendencies in publishing. To put it provocatively, the academic star
system in cultural studies, media studies, communication studies and the
sociology of culture, rewards people for exegesis and penalizes them for longterm qualitative and quantitative work. In underfunded and small humanities
departments, empirical research will typically involve a part-time research
officer reading a sample of texts from the mass media, typically the TV.
Restoring cultural sociology: Bourdieu, Elias, and Sennett
Although we argue that these tendencies are pre-eminent in contemporary
cultural studies and cultural sociology, it should not be inferred that we are
suggesting that there is no alternative. In part, our argument is that the
research agenda of classical sociology is still relevant. Weber's sociology was
designed to comprehend the characteristic uniqueness of the social conditions
in which we live. Clearly that uniqueness is defined by fundamental changes in
the relationship between the body and society, the expansion of cultural and
information systems, and the transformation of the economy by culture, and
changes in our understanding of emplacement. Cultural studies while
appropriately recognizing the cultural as a key element in these changes has
no adequate theory or methodology to grasp the transformation.
Needless to say, we do not advocate that simply going back to classical
sociology is enough. Changes in cultural representation, economic production
and biological reproduction have rendered much classical sociology obsolete.
Our preference is that sociology should return to the social via a reformulation
of action theory which thoroughly takes into account recent developments in
the sociology of the body. Thus we maintain that three preconditions are
required in this respect.
First, reformulated action theory must be predicated in the notion of the
embodiment and emplacement of the actor (Turner, 1984). The vulnerability and
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sensuality of the embodied, emplaced actor has to be a necessary assumption of
any theory of action. Such a theory would define vulnerability with reference to
ageing, disability and disease and sensuality with the sympathies and attractions
that arise from the propinquity, density of populations and the multi-media.
Secondly, we hold that reformulated action theory must acknowledge the
precarious nature of social space and concomitant social institutions (Gehlen,
1980). Institutions are always a partial and precarious response to human
frailty, sensuousness and social contingency. Bauman's (1987; 1993) insistence
that social theory must recognize contingency and the unfinished character of
human relations is something that we would wish to endorse.
Thirdly, following from our preference for a methodology which is built
around a comparative and historical perspective, we wish reformulated action
theory to conceptualize social actors as interdependent in time and space.
Interdependence is technological, economic, political as well as cultural. The
interconnections between these levels cannot be assumed, as they are in vulgar
versions of globalization theory. Rather, they are matters for empirical
analysis, requiring deep levels of sustained funding. We acknowledge that the
current system of public funding in higher education is unlikely to generate the
appropriate level of funding. Commercial, essentially capitalist sources of
funding, such as the Soros Foundation or the Hamlyn Trust, may be more
sympathetic to the kind of research we believe needs to be done, than state
sources of funding.
Several strategies of work on culture and society are being pursued against
ephemeral research issues and the dominant genre of social commentary. Some
of these bear traces of the reformulating that we advocate. Within sociology,
we propose, the most significant current example is the work of Bourdieu
(1977; 1984a; 1991). Bourdieu's cultural sociology provides a comprehensive
and systematic approach to the study of culture in contemporary societies. His
social theory is grounded in fundamental field work and empirical investigation, and offers a comprehensive theoretical framework for the analysis of
cultural fields, their intermediaries and their class locations. His application of
concepts of `field', `cultural capital', `situation', `position' and `production=
reception', provide models of the engaged detachment to which we aspire. His
theory of distinction provides a method of connecting taste, the body (in terms
of both hexis and habitus), and class positions (Jenkins, 1992; Robbins, 2000).
In addition, through the concept of practice, he attempts to go beyond the
conventional dichotomies of action and structure by developing notions of
accomplishment, strategy and rules; he has transformed many of the
traditional assumptions about power, culture and class (Bourdieu, 1990a).
Further, in Bourdieu's cultural sociology questions of methodology are a
practical component of the research process. Indeed, his preoccupation with
methodological issues prevents his work from assuming the abstraction of
grand theory.
However, Bourdieu's work, despite its many achievements, also has a strong
legacy of traditional Marxist class analysis which is often rigidly reductionist in
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its treatment of cultural phenomena. The obvious illustration is in his study of
distinction (Bourdieu, 1984). His study of taste produces, somewhat
paradoxically, rigid structuralist conclusions in which a hierarchy of taste
preferences is mapped onto the hierarchy of class positions, as measured by
occupational status and formal educational achievement, in a manner which
may be methodologically alive, but is theoretically deterministic. There is little
sense of effective social struggles or competitions over consumption, no sense
of regional variation in tastes and no sense of process or change. Consumer
tastes all too neatly and unambiguously slot into their appropriate class
positions and practices. In addition, class, as occupational grouping, is also
neatly and definitely determined by the level of educational attainment.
Despite these limitations, Bourdieu has a very clear conception of the
importance of culture, but this concept never obliterates the social, which
constantly emerges in his notions of field, power and hierarchy. Instead, as
with the different research tradition that has grown up around Elias's (1978a;
1978b; 1982) sociology, Bourdieu conceptualizes human life in terms of
interaction, process and interdependency.
Similarly, like Elias, Bourdieu's method is based in historical-comparative
analysis. It is definitely focused on culture, but stops well short of regarding all
human problems as matters of cultural encoding and decoding. It therefore
avoids the cultural relativism which, we argue mars the contribution of
decorative sociology. Bourdieu's relation to Durkheim and the tradition of
anthropology has left his approach with a clear recognition of the social and
the economic as categories which are interlinked with, but not reducible to, the
cultural. Bourdieu's work pursues a critical agenda which engages with the
public sphere. The analysis of distinction (1984) leaves the reader in no doubt
about the perceived deformations in personality and collectivity caused by
status orders and economic inequality. His critique of Heidegger reclaims
notions of humanism and reflexivity which are useful counterweights to the
posthumanism of postmodernism.
Sennett also provides a potent alternative to the decorative study of politics
and culture. His work is grounded in the nature of public life in (Sennett, 1977)
and the importance of aesthetics and community politics in achieving vital spaces
in urban civilizations. However, aesthetic questions are never divorced from
issues of community politics. Overarching his whole approach to culture is the
problem of how we can better live together in a world in which interdependence,
sensuality and frailty are often brutally curtailed or deformed by technology,
economics and politics. His work is driven by a strong sense of the ethical, if not
religious, responsibilities of the public intellectual. His (1972, 1998) work is
thoroughly grounded in empirical research and comparative=historical analysis.
His (1994, 1998) recent studies of the character of work and identity in late
Modernity has the necessary components of an adequate type of engaged
detachment. The underlying theme of these works is a Foucaultian concern for
the connections between the ethical and the political. The sensuality and frailty
of the human body is studied historically in its physical, architectural, aesthetic,
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economic and political settings. The poverty of managerialist approaches to
human interaction which ignore the responsibilities to collective life in favour of
economic appropriation or technological innovation.
Sennett's work as a whole expresses a commitment to ethical and political
debate on the basis of a critique of capitalism ± a critique whose foundations
are the empirical data of his historical and sociological investigations. It refuses
the temptation to treat the personal as an end of study. Instead it consistently
relates the personal to the wider categories of political economy, but without
producing a determinist reading of action.
Finally, Elias's work has features that satisfy the criteria we have attempted
to indicate as conditions for an adequate sociology. Elias is concerned with the
interrelationship between theoretical and empirical investigation. He always
retained a major commitment to understanding the social world as process
and, he maintained a clear interest in the role played by conflicts and power in
the dynamics of societies. As a result his study of cultural institutions in
relation to the state had a dynamic focus on how the figuration of the court
had long-term consequences for etiquette (Goudsblom, 1987).
Elias's treatment of methodological questions is problematic. He (1956) held
that perspectives on human life could be arranged along a continuum between
involvement and detachment. Involved positions eschew reflexivity and
comparative and historical enquiry, in favour of an excessive, concrete sense
of subjective or group worth and truth. He intended figurational sociology to
be a contribution towards the development of more detached, and more
`objectively-adequate' ways of understanding human life. Comparative and
historical analysis are advocated as instruments for achieving greater
detachment because they inevitably expose the limitations of perspectives
attached to situated space and time. A weakness of Elias's work is that the
precise methods for attaining greater detachment through sociological study
are not clearly stated (Rojek, 1986). Similarly, despite some under-theorized
references to the necessity for world government which he made towards the
end of his life, he provided no indication of how his case for the moral and
social value of detachment could be politically or institutionally accomplished.
Conclusion: engaged detachment
This programme for rebuilding contemporary sociology has to promote a
particular view of the role of the intellectual in society. Following Foucault,
Said recognizes that the notion of intellectual neutrality is a myth. He argues
that intellectuals occupy `strategic locations' both to the object of study and the
discursive formations which address the field, including the discursive
formation to which they belong. In Orientalism (1978: 246) he noted the drift
from `an academic to an instrumental attitude' to social analysis. He
(1978: 328) associates this with what he terms `the seductive degradation of
knowledge'. We make the same charge of decorative sociology and the cultural
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turn. We hold that the concept of the organic intellectual prejudges the relation
of the intellectual to the object of study because it connects the ultimate goal of
study with emancipatory politics. We argue for a more reflexive intellectual
engagement with politics, which engages with embodiment and emplacement as
the fundamental categories of action.
Interestingly, Said (1993a; 1993b) presents distance as an essential requisite
of intellectual labour. He does not use the term `detachment', but prefers the
more emotive term, `exile'. In the context of the postcolonial debate, Said's
understanding of exile is that intellectuals must be both inside and outside the
cultures in which they are located. Metaphorically, Said uses the concept to
propose a preferred attitude in intellectual labour both to the object of study
and the traditions in which one is situated.
For us, `detachment' is too remote a term for the kind of methodological
attitude we wish to propose, and `exile' is too loaded. We recognize the
requirement for a degree of emotional distance from the object of enquiry in
academic work and we also condone the recent defence that reflexivity is a
proper aspiration for relevant sociology (Beck, Giddens and Lash, 1994). The
reformulated type of action theory that we are interested in, defends the
researchers political engagement with the object of enquiry while placing the
responsibility for reflexivity on the researchers shoulders and, of course, on the
shoulders of the wider research community in which the researcher is located.
The term that best captures this for us is `engaged detachment'. By this we
mean an attitude to research which recognizes that intellectuals are citizens of
societies and therefore have conscious and unconscious attachments to the
human formations which they study. In addition, these attachments should be
no less the subject of critical, detached scrutiny than the relations and processes
that constitute the object of study.
Our position is clearly a further reflection on Weber's notion of `vocation'
While the value-neutrality argument is typically misunderstood to indicate that
academics should remain remote from political involvement, we argue that his
concepts of value-relevance and value-analysis described engaged detachment.
Sociologists must exercise responsibility in public life, but their ability to
contribute to public debate requires value-neutral analysis of major values in
society.
The purpose of engaged detachment is to make sociology more sensitive to
the imperative to analyze cultural objects and to make cultural studies more
sociological. We do not wish to discount the cultural turn as a blind alley. On
the contrary, cultural studies did much to unearth the academicism of
traditional sociology. On the debit side, we submit that cultural studies has
contributed to the general exaggeration of the ephemeral and fragmented
attributes of human life. Perhaps unintentionally, it has weakened the historical
and comparative perspective in social research; and it has fomented
politicization without an agenda, apart from some nostalgia about the social
movements of the 1960s. The co-optation of sociology by cultural studies is
unsatisfactory because `reading' all social relations as cultural relations, apart
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from its other difficulties, leaves out the tensions between the material basis of
power and the social organization of culture as the intellectual terrain within
which the social sciences function. The anti-essentialist criticism against
privileging the economic base in the analysis of culture arguably results in too
much autonomy being awarded to culture.
We maintain that there is a case for defending the legacy of Marx and
Weber in sociology and for advocating the importance of theoretical
cumulation. The principal political component of cultural studies is the idea
of difference, which is partly borrowed from poststructuralism and postmodernism. Because in modern societies, culture is diversified through
multiculturalism, there is a greater sense of the hybridity of modern cultural
forms. Since there cannot be an authoritative or unified culture, we need to
protect and celebrate different cultures. This argument in its way is perfectly
valid, but by implication it also suggests that morality is also fragmented and
relativized. In short, cultural relativism is equated with moral relativism.
Because postmodern cultural studies assumes moral relativism, it cannot
produce, let alone accept, a unified moral criticism of modern societies. As a
result it is intellectually unlikely that cultural studies would develop an
equivalent to Weber's notion of rationalization or Marx's concept of
alienation. Postmodern cultural studies finds it difficult to promote a political
vision of the modern world apart from an implicit injunction to enjoy diversity
and resist commercialization of popular culture.
As a response to the `cultural turn', we recognise the cumulative achievements
of substantial research on cultural history from Elias on the civilizing process,
Bourdieu on the cultural field and Sennett on public space and community
politics. For us, the attempt to secure the social also requires a particular political
orientation, which we have termed `engaged detachment'. This paper has argued
that, if sociology is to survive as a viable discipline it must abandon its decorative
orientation to politics and society in order to provide public intellectuals with a
detached perspective and engaged practices towards the social.
Nottingham Trent University
University of Cambridge
Received 23 March 1999
Finally accepted 30 May 2000
Notes
1 It was in Birmingham that he taught the young Bryan Turner.
2 Leicester and the LSE were perhaps the main training centre for sociologists in the 1960s.
3 Eric Dunning used to circulate a copy of his own, hand-written translation to interested students.
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