Society v. Culture

Chris Jenks argues in Subculture that “postmodernism’s critical imperative recommending the end of grand narratives is an invitation to dispense with the power/knowledge, truth and authority on which society, and, in many senses, the social bond, of yesterday were established” (3).

One of the key theoretical tools has been an expansive concept of culture, developed within cultural theory. The concept of culture does much of the work of the earlier concepts of “society,” but without the causal claims inherent in sociology – the causal potency of “social” factors.” Jenks summarizes the notion of culture in cultural studies under several headings:

“1 Cultural studies operates with an expanded concept of culture. It rejects the assumptions behind the ‘culture debate’ and thus rejects the high/low culture binary or, indeed, any attempt to re-establish the grounds for any cultural stratification. It adheres more closely to the anthropological view of culture as being ‘the whole way of life of a people,’ though it does not subscribe to the view of culture as a totality. 

2 Following on from the above, cultural studies legitimates, justifies, celebrates and politicizes all aspects of popular culture. It regards popular culture as valuable in its own right and not a ‘shadow phenomenon’, nor simply a vehicle for ideological mystification. 

3 The proponents of cultural studies, as representative of their age, recognize the socialization of their own identities through the processes of mass media and communication that they seek to understand. 

4 Culture is not viewed in stasis, as fixed or as a closed system. Cultural studies regards culture as emergent, as dynamic and as continual renewal. Culture is not a series of artefacts or frozen symbols but is rather a process. 

5 Cultural studies is predicated upon conflict rather than order. It investigates, and anticipates, conflict, both at the level of face-to-face interaction but also, and more significantly, at the level of meaning. Culture cannot be viewed as a unifying principle, a source of shared understanding or a mechanism for legitimating the social bond. 

6 Cultural studies is ‘democratically’ imperialistic. As all aspects of social life are now ‘cultured’, then no part of social life is excluded from its interests – opera, fashion, gangland violence, pub talk, shopping, horror films, and so on … they are no longer colonized, canonized or zoned around a central meaning system. 

7 Cultural representations are viewed by cultural studies at all levels – inception, mediation and reception, or production, distribution and consumption. 

8 Cultural studies is interdisciplinary. It acknowledges no disciplinary origin, it encourages work on the interface of disciplinary concerns and it acknowledges a shifting and sprightly muse.

9 Cultural studies rejects absolute values – it does what it wants” (2-3).

Despite the negative cast of this summary, Jenks doesn’t reject cultural studies as such. Instead, by tracing the history of the concept of subculture through the early history of sociology, that is, by showing that the notion of subculture is a modern one, he aims to demonstrate that “the study of culture need not be exclusive, it does not demand the abandonment of the concepts of society and social structure” (4). He presents “a sociological argument for the place of an order of construct, like subculture, which retains the causal necessity of the social but overcomes the mysterious leap between, for example, Durkheim’s structural constraints (the outside) and an individual act of self-destruction (the inside). Such argument both retains the necessity of the social and relocates the subcultural” (8).

It’s a heroic, quixotic project. Once cultural studies takes hold, it is difficult, if not impossible, to even isolate social causes as causes of the social. Jenks knows that “Society . . . is essentially an analytical device both contrived and espoused by sociology in its earliest incarnations, to establish the specific and distinct ontology that all scientific paradigms require to announce their difference from all previous types of understanding.” It’s “a structuralist trope routinely employed to designate and summarize all of the universal, ideal, essential and peculiarly human dispositions that ensure their tendency to opt for clustering rather than isolation.” Society is a moral enterprise, even a soteriological one, one that “saves humankind from the sad and shallow reductions that are required through its explanation with reference to psychology’s ‘behaviour,’ ‘market forces’ in economics, and ‘the state’ in politics.” Jenks knows that “Society must remain an ideal conceptualization of a collective consciousness which exerts constraint upon individual action with the function of sustaining groups, formations and networks of interaction” (11-12).

That sociology is a kind of shadow-theology becomes clear, perhaps even clearer than it was in Durkheim, as the aseity of the social is made explicit.