Page 13 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

INTRODUCTION

range of institutions, artefacts and practices which make up our symbolic
universe. The term thus embraces art and religion, science and sport,
education and leisure, and so on. By convention, however, it does not
similarly embrace that range of activities normally deemed “economic”
or “political”. This threefold distinction between the economics of
the market, the politics of the state and the culture of what is sometimes
referred to as civil society, is a recurrent motif in modern social theory:
it occurs, for example, in Marx as the distinction between mode of
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production, political superstructure and social consciousness, and
in Weber as that between class, party and status. But it is clear that
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in each case, as in a whole range of parallel instances drawn from a
wide range of discourses, consciousness/status/culture (ideology/
discourse etc.) are largely residual categories, defined as much as
anything by the negative property of not being economics or politics.
In this very negativity we find the trace of the inherently problematic
status of all modern concepts of culture.
Premodern societies, such as the feudalisms of medieval Europe or
the hunting and gathering communities of tribalism, clearly exhibit
behaviours that we would easily recognize as “cultural”, whether
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religious or artistic, “scientific” or educational. But this is our
retrospective understanding, not their own. Precisely because culture,
and perhaps especially religion, is indeed central to the life of most
types of society other than that of the modern Occident, those societies
typically possess no sense of the cultural as “different” and “residual”,
such as is conveyed by our modern Western usages. In short, culture
has become a theoretical problem for us only because it is already
socially problematic. It is because culture is not similarly central to
our lives, or at least to the institutionally received accounts of our
lives, that culture becomes so “theoretical” a concept. Cultural theory
is not, then, simply a particular, specialist academic discourse, the
guiding hand behind a particular set of empirical, substantive research
problems; it is also, and more interestingly, itself the repressed “other”
of a society the official rhetoric of which is provided almost entirely
by what was once known as “political economy”, and what are now
the separate disciplines of economics and political science. Cultural
theory is, in fact, one of the central discontents of our civilization.
But if culture has indeed become so problematic, then why has this
been so? The short answer lies in the nature of socio-cultural
modernization itself, and in particular in the rise to dominance of

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