File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2002/bhaskar.0208, message 20


Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2002 12:02:10 -0500 (CDT)
From: viren viven murthy <vvmurthy-AT-midway.uchicago.edu>
Subject: Re: BHA: Culture as structure


Hi Tobin,

I think I am finally beginning to understand the stakes in the
Sewell-Archer "debate" (actually Sewell has yet to respond in
print).  However, I
sometimes wonder whether the difference between their ideas is mostly
semantic.  As you suggest, Archer accuses Sewell of central conflation
of the Giddensian variety and claims that his inability to separate
culture from structure is related to this.  In class, Sewell claimed that
he affirms Archer's critique of Giddens, which he understands as
highlighting the ontological hiatus between structure and
agency.  Archer's main criticism of Giddens is that he tends to conflate
structure and agency.

However, according to Sewell, Archer's critique of central conflation does
not imply a rejection of his view of culture as system and
practice;  after all he would claim that there is an ontological hiatus
between system and practice.

It seems like you go along with Sewell, in so far, as you affirm that
there are cultural structures.  You also seem to agree with Sewell that
"the entire field of human practices is characterized by. . .semiotic
heterogeneity, in the double sense that human practices are always
semiotic but also manifest diverse forms of semiotic logic (linguistic,
iconic. . ., performative ect.)(Review of Roger Chartier in French
Historical Studies, Vol 21.2, 249)  He would also agree with you that we
must distinguish between cultural and other structures.  I think the very
use of the term culture presupposes some such distinction.

Sewell has not yet explicitly written about his view of the relationship
between culture and society, but I suspect that he wants the term culture
do more work than you want it too. He would definitely
agree with your critique of the linguistic falacy--in other words, he
does not want to reduce to world and the social to the textual.  However,
he also claims that the cultural exceeds the textual and hence part of the
social is made up by cultural structures.  In fact, he would say that
since the cultural pervades the social, one cannot subordinate it to
"the social."  This does not mean that some structures are not subordinate
to others, it just means that the satement "cultural structures are
subordinate to social structures" is not helpful. The differences
betweeen your respective descriptions of
capitalism helps clarify this point.  Sewell would claim that capitalism
concerns much more
than property relations and even property relations as legal relations
involve cultural structures. ( He claims that the core cultural schemas of
capitalism are "those governing the conversion of use value into exchange
value.")  Nonetheless, he does suggest separating
semiotic logic from mechanistic logic.  For example, he claims that the
idea that if, in an agricultural country, population rises, then other
things being equal, wages will fall is an example of mechanistic
explanation.  Semiotic explanation, on the other hand, concerns supplying
the paradigm that explains the logic of a certain practice, which he
believes works for language but also other semiotic practices.

Now there are two obvious questions that emerge in light of your post.
 First, is the distinction between mechanical and semiotic modes
of explanation sufficient to ward off the problem of conflating say
homelessness and signs.  Secondly, is the distinction between semiotic and
mechanistic explanation, just another way of making the distinction
between social and cultural structures that you and Archer make.  Sewell
would definitely answer yes to the first question;  he would just say that
a phenemena such as homelessness requires us to investigate it on both
 mechanical and semiotic levels.  After all, linking it to capitalism
would already involve culture according to Sewell. With respect to the
second, he might say that the different lies in rhetorical force.  He
wants to give more importance to culture than does Archer.

Best,

Viren

 On Thu,
29 Aug 2002, Tobin Nellhaus wrote:

> Hi Viren--
> 
> Thanks for the comments.  A couple of resposes:
> 
> >                    [Sewell] basically
> > says that we should think of culture as both system and practice.
> 
> Well, yes, just as economic activity involves both system and practice.  The
> reservation I have here is that this statement *could* be taken as akin to
> Giddens' notion that structures only exist as instanciated in practice.  I
> think Archer's critique of this view -- which belongs to what she calls
> "central conflation" -- is pretty solid.
> 
> >                He would not recognize your distinction between cultural
> > structures and social structures, since in his view, cultural structures
> > are always also social structures.
> 
> There are some serious ambiguities here, which I'll get to in a second, but
> this sounds much like a slide into central conflation.  (To be sure, I may
> be mistaken, since I'm relying only on your brief comments.)
> 
> >                Hence he does want to affirm the
> > primacy of the social, but this does not imply necessarily subordinating
> > culture to some other structure.
> 
> How can something have primacy yet not subordinate other structures?  Or
> does he mean that other structures have a greater or lesser degree of
> partial autonomy (i.e., he's simply warding off determinism)?
> 
> > Your comments seem to be more in line with people like Adam Kuper, who
> > tries to argue that we should get rid of the concept of culture, because
> > it really refers to a number of different things.  Sewell's article was
> > written in response to this trend and tries to clearly demarcate the
> > contours of the concept of culture.
> 
> I'm certainly not interested in getting rid of the concept of culture, but
> it's true that it refers to a number of different (but overlapping) things.
> In defining culture, however, one must also define what a social structure
> is.  The fact that something is social may or may not mean it is a social
> structure, depending on how one defines the latter.  For example, a car is
> obviously a social product, but I don't think I'd consider it a social
> structure as such, since as I understand it (and I think this concurs with
> RB's view), social structures are *relationships*.  Thus a car is produced
> through a system of social relationships (commodity production, wage labor,
> private property, etc), and people have social relationships with cars (such
> as ownership, need, affection), but these social qualities attaching to (or
> invested in) cars does not mean cars are of themselves social relationships.
> Cars are not capitalism.  Cars are physical structures produced by and
> utilized within societies.
> 
> Similarly for culture, I think.  Clearly, societies and social groups
> produce culture.  But what makes something cultural is not the sole fact
> that is socially produced -- all sorts of things are socially produced.  As
> I see it, what makes something cultural is its investment or expression of
> *meaning*.  A cultural structure, then, is a structure of meaning (strictly
> speaking, semioses).  So a car is also a cultural object, insofar as it is
> meaningful to people (for example, it can be a status symbol, a sex symbol,
> a sign of independence, etc).  But being a cultural object is not the same
> as being a cultural structure: a particular object is an element (a sign)
> within a cultural structure (or several cultural structures), where
> "structure" refers once more to a system of relationships.
> 
> All social activities and products involve meanings.  All meanings are
> produced socially.  But I think it's important to distinguish what we might
> call the "weight" of meaning within any particular activity or relationship.
> That's the basis on which I think one must distinguish -- analytically --
> between social structures and cultural structures.  (Archer also argues for
> this distinction, though on somewhat different terms.)  That's an analytical
> distinction, not an existential one (I think that's the right word), since
> everything in society has both material and meaningful aspects.  But without
> the analytical distinction, one risks conflating social and cultural
> structures.  That has led to treating social relationships as simply
> semiotic (so that wage labor, exploitation, imperialism, slavery,
> homelessness etc are just sign systems), or to treating meanings as wholly
> under the control of politics (if the ruler says 2+2=91, then it does, the
> logic of number systems be damned), and so forth.
> 
> In short, as I see it, cultural structures pertain to meanings; social
> structures are materially-oriented relationships.  Capitalism concerns
> property, that is, the ownership of physical objects (and lately, ideas
> treated as objects); Urdu is a language, a system of meanings.  Cars are
> made by people, but they fit within social structures insofar as they belong
> to people's relationships to material entities, and they belong to cultural
> structures insofar as people make them meaningful.  Cultural structures are
> not social structures: they are social products (necessarily marked by the
> social structures which produced them), but also -- and more crucially --
> they are meaning structures and the product of semiotic activities (logic,
> analogy, etc), and would not be cultural otherwise.  Finally, it is only by
> making an analytical distinction between social and cultural structures that
> we are able to understand how the two interact.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> T.
> 
> ---
> Tobin Nellhaus
> nellhaus-AT-mail.com
> "Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce
> 
> 
> 
> 
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