A Cultural Sociology of Populism

Marcus Morgan1

# The Author(s) 2020

AbstractThis article interrogates dominant definitions of “populism” found in the socialsciences, focusing on the term’s conceptual utility in understanding recent changesin Western polities. Though populism is typically treated as a deviant form ofpolitics, this article finds that it in fact holds remarkable continuities with conven-tional politics, and indeed culture more generally. It argues that these more generalcultural processes can be illuminated by cultural sociology, just as the more specificbut still routine political processes can be illuminated by Civil Sphere Theory(CST). The article goes on to argue that when populism is understood as a formalmode of public signification, rather than a substantive ideology, the substance itsignifies becomes crucial to determining its civility. It suggests that while populismcan certainly have anti-civil effects, there is nothing inherent in it that precludes itfrom also acting to promote civil repair.

Keywords Populism . Cultural sociology . Civil Sphere Theory . Political sociology . Leftpopulism . Post-democracy

Populism: Politics as Usual

One way of characterizing “culture” is as an ever-evolving repository of effortstowards meaning-making. Meaning-making reduces complexi ty so tha tcommunication—and if successful, understanding—can take place. Politics likewiseaims towards reducing complexity so as to legitimate efforts to shift, or maintain,power relations. This article will suggest that what has been called “populism” mayexaggerate these processes but does not break from them. The purpose is not to reduce

International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Societyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-020-09366-4

* Marcus Morganmarcus.morgan@bristol.ac.uk

1 University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

politics to culture, but to show how culture is necessarily “embedded” (to borrow aterm from science and technology studies) in culture, and how political action isobliged to conducted itself through culture. Civil Sphere Theory teaches us how thisreduction of complexity typically takes place through organizing meaning around abinary structure of motives, relationships, and institutions (Alexander 2006: pp. 53–67).1 This article will argue that populism is unique only in its accentuation of thesebinaries, its drawing of an explicit frontier between a construction of the “people”—inprogressive populism one that is inclusively defined, in regressive populism, exclu-sively so (Judis 2016)—and an “elite” (Laclau 2005; Mouffe 2018; Mouffe and Errejón2016), its development of polarization, its provocation to an audience to decide onwhich side of the boundary it chooses to stand, and its invitation towards this audienceto actively participate in the unfolding political drama, typically through direct, ratherthan representative, democratic mechanisms.

While the article agrees that useful definitions exclude as much as possible to increasetheir conceptual grasp, it argues that the difficulty of coming up with a tight, restrictivedefinition of “populism” is that it is not as tight, restrictive, or discrete a phenomenon asmost academic or journalistic accounts present it as being. Rather, populism is bestunderstood as an intensification of routine political dynamics, which are themselvesconducted through more generalized cultural mechanisms that allow social significationto take place, group identities to be forged in relation to those they oppose, and collectiveagency to be mobilized in the process. Populism can therefore be understood withinCST, which can itself be understood as following the structures and dynamics ofmeaning-making illuminated by cultural sociology. From this perspective, differentexamples of political behaviour come to be seen as more or less populist by degree,rather than populist or not by categorization.

The paper reviews five key features shared across dominant definitions: populism’sbinary logic, its ideological nature, its moralism, its anti-rationalism, and its anti-plural-ism. It both critiques each feature’s definitional centrality and stresses each feature’scontinuities with “conventional” politics, demonstrating how populism functions in waysthat CST, and cultural sociology, would expect it to. The paper concludes that populismis compatible with both progressive and regressive political programs, and indeedsuggests that if certain criteria are met, there is nothing precluding it from playing asimilar role to the social movements described in part III of The Civil Sphere (Alexander

1 Civil Sphere Theory—most comprehensively outlined in Alexander (2006)—provides a novel account of civilsociety that defines itself in distinction on the one hand, to earlier classical liberal understandings found inthinkers such as Locke and Tocqueville, and on the other hand, to more radical conceptions, associated with thezone in which Gramsci’s “war of position” unfolds. It is neo-Durkheimian in its elaboration of the sacred-profanedistinction found in The Elementary Forms, seeing similar coding processes as constituting much of the activitythat occurs in civil society, the goal of which is understood to ultimately be the moral regulation of society. Sincethe civil sphere provides the moral regulation of society, this new conception of civil society thereforesimultaneously allows for the “autonomy of culture” by showing how culture acts upon other non-culturalspheres of social life. Whilst civil sphere theory focusses on the appeal to ideal notions of solidarity and justice, itacknowledges that such appeals can in reality turn out to be highly contradictory, resulting in the barring ofcertain groups from civil solidarity through coding them in anti-civil terms that justify their exclusion. Never-theless, there is an emphasis that appeal to these same cultural codes—which taken as a whole, form the“discourse of civil society” (Alexander and Smith 1993)—can and are used as routes back into civil inclusion.Civil Sphere Theory has been adopted in this article on the basis that its focus on binary coding illuminates manyof the operations of populist politics, providing a way of showing how populism, far from being an aberration ofdemocratic processes, is in many ways a predictable feature of them.

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2006) in translating restricted political grievances into more universal civil issues, in theprocess initiating civil repair. Overall, the paper argues against the independence notonly of populism but also of politics more generally, from culture. It suggests thatbeyond violence and coercion, though frequently even within these, power, and thestruggles that take place over it, must be seen as operating always and everywherethrough culture.

Populism as a Binary

Attempts to define populism have a long, fraught, and inconclusive history (e.g.Berlin et al. 1968; Ionescu and Gellner 1969). So much so, many sociologists havedeemed it wisest to set the ill-defined term aside (Jansen 2011). Events over the pastfew years have, however, predictably propelled the concept back into academic andpublic prominence. Though the phenomenon is arguably ancient, the term itself wasfirst used to describe two political movements that appeared at the end of thenineteenth century: in Tsarist Russia, a largely unsuccessful effort at mobilizingpeasants against feudal exploitation, and in the USA, the movement of mainlyfarmworkers who rose up to challenge, via the People’s Party, what they conceivedof as an elite of bankers, railway owners, and the two-party system of government. Ina similar sequence of events to that witnessed with the term more recently, it was firstused as a pejorative in the US context, but then quickly re-appropriated by those itwas intended to deride. Although some prominent observers argue that the movementaround the American People’s Party fails the test of a genuine populism (Müller2016: p. 88), there is fairly broad consensus that one feature it illustrates—a politicsbuilt around a dualistic opposition between an “elite” and some conception of a“people”, with whom legitimate democratic power belongs—is the basis on which aminimal definition might be agreed upon (e.g. Kreisi 2014; Bonikowski and Gidron2016; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017; Eatwell and Goodwin 2018).

However, while the basic notion that “the binary structure of populist claims is largelyinvariant” (Bonikowski and Gidron 2016: p. 7) may apply to left-wing populisms, it is not soclear that it holds for right-wing variants. Judis describes how while left-wing populismconforms to dominant definitions in its “dyadic” structure, consisting of “a vertical politicsof the bottom and middle arrayed against the top”, right-wing populism, by contrast, is“triadic”, in that such “populists champion the people against an elite that they accuse ofcoddling a third group” (Judis 2016: p. 15).2 This third group is typically a minority, often animmigrant group or some other relatively powerless scapegoat, revealing an exclusivist—i.e.non-universalizing and therefore non-civil—deployment of the “people” in such types ofpopulism.

Definitions based upon the binary criterion also assume there is such a thing as alarge-scale politics attempting to win the electoral consent of a polity that does not relyupon some construction of the “people”. This assumption is questionable. Democracy is,after all, supposed to be a system in which a people rule (demos-kratos), and even in

2 Making the same point in a slightly different way, Brubaker (2017: p. 362) describes this in terms of a “verticalopposition between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’”, as distinct from a “horizontal opposition between ‘the people’and outside groups and forces”.

A Cultural Sociology of Populism

non-democratic or “formally democratic” systems, lip service is usually paid to this ideato ensure legitimation (Habermas 1976: pp. 36–37). To operate effectively, such asystem must therefore presumably decide who this “people” are. Laclau (2005, 2006)has famously argued that constructing a people constitutes the essence of what politics is.Others have suggested that state-formation itself was only possible through determining a“people” (Skinner 2009: p. 328; Peel 2018). In republics, “the people” is typically socentral to grounding democracy that it becomes the cornerstone of constitutions, as in“we, the people”. In exclusionary right-wing manifestations, “naming the people” is alsoused, but in this instance, as a means of excluding the “third group” that Judis identifies,justifying the conviction that this group, which is not part of the essentialized “people”,is therefore undeserving of political representation. In technocracies, the “people” arealso implicitly constructed, but in this iteration, often as in need of the enlightenedguidance of experts, on the assumption that the people are unqualified to governthemselves.

Liberal politics is hardly immune, although it typically conceives itself as being so.This can be illustrated by the recent calls for a “People’s Vote” on Brexit in the UK. Theuse of the term “people” here, as in the slogan of the largest march—“Put it to thePeople”—and in the frequent reference to the number of people on street demonstrations,is unmistakably populist. However, it is arguably a populism against populism; apopulism that emerged when a mechanism of direct democracy—a people’s referendumon leaving the EU—failed to go the way that liberal anti-populists, who generally defenda more representative notion of democracy, had proposed, a matter that was in partblamed on the populist mould in which organized Euroscepticism took shape. Moredirect democracy was the liberal answer to direct democracy gone awry; we need tolisten more to the people—another referendum is required to establish what the peoplereally think.3

Whether or not there is a paradoxical tension between democracy and populism, as sometheorists claim (Urbinati 2017), there is perhaps a simple cultural reason why it is so hard toimagine a politics that does not construct a people. This is that political life, like cultural lifemore generally, tends to organize itself around symbolic boundaries (Lamont and Molnàr2002) that function on the basis of either/or distinctions, which, when it comes to issues oflarge-scale group identity, translate into distinguishing between an “us” and a “them”. Indemocratic systems (or as mentioned above, often in non-democratic ones too) since the“people” is the chief democratic category, who is, and who is not, part of the people becomesparamount. Awareness of the social organization of the cosmos around binaries, the corre-sponding poles of which can be aligned with one another through analogy, synonym,metaphor, and allusion, has been a mainstay of cultural analysis in the social sciences (deSaussure 1893[1915]; Levi-Strauss 1967: pp. 29–54; Barthes 1977; Durkheim 1995: pp. 33–39), and one that has been productively developed in The Civil Sphere (Alexander 2006: pp.

3 In this example, we witness a divide between liberal politics in theory and liberal politics in practice. In theory,rather than deriving its legitimacy from a ‘people’, as populism is said to do, liberalism claims to root itslegitimacy in a “population” whose preferences are expressed through voting or polling, and in neoliberalaccounts, also through consumption, understood as a proxy for demand. Foucault (2007) adds a critical note tothis story, by associating the biopolitical management of “populations” with the emergence of liberalgovernmentality. In practice, liberalism not only defends itself through its occasional suspension, as Schmittpointed out, but when politically necessary, also engages in non-liberal appeals to a morally defined “people”, incontrast to a “population”, as this example illustrates.

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53–67).4 One need not advocate a Schmittian (2007[1932]) account of radical friend-enemydivisions to acknowledge that the discourse of civil society (Alexander and Smith 1993)cleaves the world into who or what “is” and who or what “is not”.5 These binaries are ofcourse a simplification of the way things really are but this does not make them any lesspresent within, or functional for, political or other group identity processes.

Populism as an Ideology

There has long been a social scientific perspective that considers populism to be an ideology(e.g. MacRae 1969), providing an overarching normative worldview. Recent mainstreamdefinitions, however, have watered down this position by tending to agree with Mudde’s(2004) view of it being only a “thin-centred” ideology, which contrasts to “thick-centred”ideologies (such as liberalism, socialism, or fascism) in that it has “a restricted morphology,which necessarily appears attached to—and sometimes even assimilated into—other ideolo-gies” (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017: p. 6; see also Albertazzi and McDonnel 2007; Stanley2008; Ruzza and Fella 2009).

This conception can serve a functional role for those who see themselves as occupying ananti-populist centre-ground in allowing them to critique both an insurgent left and an insurgentright simultaneously, encouraging a horseshoe theory of politics in which the further onetravels in either direction on the political spectrum, the more the two extremes begin toresemble one another. As well as damning the left by association, an effect of this has beenallowing movements on the far-right to cloak themselves in a more respectable vocabularythan might otherwise have been attached to them, since despite “its ambiguous connotations,the word populism has always been more acceptable than labels like racist or extreme right”(Jäger 2018). However, not only does this lend such tendencies a legitimacy they typically donot deserve but also in defining it as an ideology, populism is asked to carry a weight it cannotbear, resulting in formulations—analyzing the substance of Fidesz’s politics alongsideSyriza’s; Trump’s alongside Corbyn’s (e.g. Wolf 2017)—that obscure far more than theyilluminate. Surely the most salient ideological feature of a politician like Marine le Pen is hernativism and authoritarianism, not her populism, just as the most significant attribute of a

4 Not all traditions of cultural analysis of course subscribe to this notion that our cultural metalanguages areorganized around binaries, although many implicitly do. Post-structuralist accounts claimed to reveal the“instability” of binary oppositions, especially as they had been marshalled in philosophy (e.g. Derrida 1981:pp. 41–42), other critiques focus on the eurocentrism of the notion (e.g. Herdin 2012), whilst others prefer to mapmultidimensional “fields” of cultural distinction (e.g. Bourdieu 1984). Whilst here is not the place to elaborate anadequate defence of the use of binaries in cultural analysis, it is worth noting a few observations beyond thecheap point that many such critiques—Derrida’s included—are themselves delivered and made sense of throughmedia that rely upon tacit opposition to generate their meanings. First, positing the binary structure of culturalforms is not of course the same as making an ontological claim about the world itself being thus organized, oreven, for that matter, our cognitions or feelings. It is instead making a claim about the publicly available sharedsymbols through which sense is made. Second, arguments for binary understandings of culture originally arrivedin the social sciences through anthropological fieldwork in non-Western societies, albeit typically conducted byWestern anthropologists. Third, “fields”, as they are conventionally mapped through techniques such as multiplecorrespondence analysis, rely upon the assumption of binary poles, even if complexity is introduced throughbinding one opposition orthogonally to another. Such practices do not sit uneasily alongside the proposition ofthe binary organization of meaning; they simply track the multiplicity and empirical intertwinement of thoseoppositions.5 This explains why civil incorporation, for instance, is not a process that comes about spontaneously, but is hardwon through symbolically oriented political struggle (Alexander 2006: pp. 425–457).

A Cultural Sociology of Populism

politician like Sanders is his democratic socialism. If populism is just a byword for beingagainst the status quo, then it functions to permit groups to frame themselves as defenders ofanti-populism rather than defenders of the status quo. Conceiving populism as an ideologyforfeits its analytic utility by failing to mark out anything useful.

These kind of difficulties have led some to jettison the notion of populism as ideology—beit thin- or thick-centred—entirely, and argue that it is not an “actor-level” phenomenon, but a“speech-level” one, revealing how “politicians often rely on populist language selectively,presenting the same political claims in either populist or non-populist terms depending on theaudience and broader social context” (Bonikowski 2016: p. 13). Whether this involves arguingthat populism is more akin to a “discourse” (Aslanidis 2016), a “rhetorical strategy”(Bonikowski 2016), a “style” (Ekström et al. 2018), a “stylistic repertoire” (Brubaker 2017),or a “frame” (Aslanidis 2018), this alternative perspective recognizes that populism refersmore to the form through which politics is done, than to any specific ideological content.Seeing populism in this way ties it to appearance; impression; aesthetics; and, importantly,performance (Moffitt 2016). Adopting this alternative understanding is therefore attractive to acultural sociological approach, for it allows populism to be set free from debates oversubstantial content, and yoked instead to the symbolic struggles of civil spheres, and themeta-discourse of civil society through which they occur.

When we understand populism in this performance-based way, we again detect it in placeswhere those who use the term as simply a shorthand for politics they disagree with might notexpect to find it. Tony Blair, for instance, whose Institute claims to work to “push back”against the “threat from a rising tide of populism”6 relied extensively on populist significationwhile leader of the Labour Party, to the extent that one initially enthusiastic (though quicklycritical) cultural theorist, Stuart Hall, came to recognize him as epitomizing populism (1998: p.13). The following flourishes from Blair’s 1999 Conference Speech might be given as typicalexamples:

The future is people. … The national creative genius of the British people. But wasted.The country run for far too long on the talents of the few, when the genius of the manylies uncared for, and ignored …. The old elites, establishments that have run ourprofessions and our country too long …. the elite have held us back for too long …New Labour, confident at having modernised itself, now the new progressive force inBritish politics… can modernise the nation, sweep away those forces of conservatism toset the people free. (Blair 1999)

The eminently populist slogan “For the Many, Not the Few,” now associated with Corbyn’s“populist rebranding” of the Labour Party (Stewart and Elgot 2016) also found its initial airingduring Blair’s controversial redrafting of Clause IV (the clause in the Labour Party Constitu-tion that prior to Blair’s amendments referred explicitly to the socialistic aim of securing“common ownership of the means of production”).7

Obama likewise deployed populist language in his various campaigns, and on occasionexplicitly identified himself with the term (Obama 2016). The “We” in the slogan “Yes We

6 See Tony Blair Institute for Social Change, “Our Mission: Renewing the Centre”, at https://institute.global/renewing-centre.7 Corbyn has explicitly connected the theme in various public rallies to the final line of Shelley’s famous poemon passive resistance during the Peterloo Massacre, The Masque of Anarchy: “Rise like Lions after slumber, Inunvanquishable number—Shake your chains to earth like dew, Which in sleep had fallen on you—Ye aremany—they are few.”

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Can”, for instance, evoked a constructively ambiguous “people”. Originally, a slogan of CesarChavez’s United Farm Workers (“Sí, se puede”), the phrase was most famously used byObama in the rousing 2008 speech he delivered in Chicago’s Grant Park upon winning thepresidency. After telling the assembled crowd that this is “your victory”, he concluded hisrhetorical tour de force by making the connection explicit: “[W]here we are met with cynicismand doubts and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed thatsums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can”. Eight years later, the phrase provided the name forthe archetypal left populist party that grew out of the indignados movement in Spain,Podemos.

Mudde and Kaltwasser at moments recognize such continuities between the publicperformances of populist and (apparently) non-populist leaders, but since their understandingof populism is rooted in a substantial conception of ideology, they dismiss them as simplyattempts by non-populists “to set themselves apart from other mainstream politicians and (tryto) look authentic” (2017: p. 76). From a cultural sociological perspective, in which politicsin mass societies is performance (Alexander 2010, 2011; Mast 2012), this distinction makeslittle sense. Viewing populism as a mode of public signification rather than a thin-centredideology not only reveals its continuity with other forms of politics but also allows us to seepopulism as a form of cultural work, a way of narrating “brute facts” and making themmeaningful. Its efficacy (or lack thereof) can then be explained through its success inmobilizing the binaries of the civil sphere, attempting to align its own motivations, relation-ships, and institutions to the positive poles of civil codes and polluting those of itsadversaries.

Populism as Moral

A third common theme in recent influential definitions has been to emphasize morality asexisting at the core of populism. Mudde and Kaltwasser claim that “the key distinction inpopulism is moral” (2017: p. 35), Bonikowski (2016) argues that “populism is based on arudimentary moral logic”, and Müller suggests that the term should only be used to identify “aparticular moralistic imagination of politics” in which the “people” are conceived as morallyuntainted, whereas the “elites” are understood as morally corrupt (2016: p. 20). In this manner,populism’s tendency to divide the world into “good” and “evil” is deemed to be bothreductive, in that it eschews nuance in favour of Manichaeism, and dangerous, in that itexcites collective anxieties and resentments rather than providing discursive space for dispas-sionate assessments of competing courses of action, meaning that “the likelihood of productivedialogue and compromise is reduced” (Bonikowski 2016: p. 22).

From a cultural sociological perspective, however, using morality as populism’s differentiaspecifica is again unsatisfactory. This is because not only are moral ideas themselves seen to bealways and everywhere culturally formed (Durkheim 1973; Geertz 1968; Douglas 1983;Morgan 2014) but also are morals recognized as animating almost all other instances of socialclassification (Durkheim and Mauss 2009[1903]: pp. 48–52). Processes of moral idealizationare, as Stavrakakis and Jäger (2018: p. 13) point out, “present in nearly all identifications, in allpassionate attachments, from love to religion and from cultural taste (distinction) to football”;therefore, they ask, “How could power relations be exempt? Especially since identity anddifference, love and hate, play such a significant role in all political identification?”While thispoint is occasionally acknowledged (e.g. Müller 2016: p. 38), its consequences fail to be.

A Cultural Sociology of Populism

Political philosophy, including most of the classical cannon—Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Mill,etc.—has long been characterized by an extension of moral philosophy into the public sphere,since both ultimately deal with normative matters of “what should be” rather than “what is”.There is no need to agree with Crick’s interest-based account of politics (Alexander 2006: p.111) to accept his contention that “conflicts, when personal, create the activity we call ‘ethics’… and such conflicts, when public, create political activity” (Crick 1962: p. 20).

This continuity between individual, social, and political life, of which populism is a part,can be made sense of through the resources offered by a social science that places symbolismat its centre. Once contemporary societies are recognized as alive with the sacred (Durkheim1995[1912]: pp. 418–448; Lynch 2012), processes of public symbolization can no longer bepresented as supplying flat cognitive maps of the world—a mere semiotic metaphysics—butmust instead be seen as “suffused with an aura of deep moral seriousness” (Geertz 1957: p.421). Populism’s attempt to associate the sacred with a construction of “the people”, in whichdemocratic legitimacy rests, and the profane with a construction of “the elite”, of coursereduces the complexity of the actual world, but the “nuance and ambiguity of empirical actionsdoes not often make an appearance in the public language of civil society” (Alexander 2010:pp. 10–11). Civil society’s dichotomies not only organize meaning made elsewhere but alsothrough their relative autonomy as culture structures in fact partially generate this meaning(Alexander and Smith 1993). The struggles that take place around identifying good and eviland the arraying of events, issues, and figures on either side of this binary, constitutes much ofwhat goes on in the civil sphere, and just as populism is said to connect an idealization of the“people” to a vilification of the “elite”, so The Civil Sphere (Alexander 2006: pp. 193–209)shows how the discourse of liberty and the production of civic virtue is internally connected tothe discourse of repression and the production of civic vice. Since this is an empirical and not anormative claim, it is also resistant to the charge that it falls victim to the fallacy of theexcluded middle: the question of whether or not binary moral distinctions are nuanced orcorrect is irrelevant to the recognition that they hold social force.

Indeed, it is clear that the symbolic work involved in the very attribution of “populism” tocertain forms of politics, and not to others, is typically itself accompanied by a heavy dose ofmoralism (Taguieff 1995), to the extent that we may wish to ask “whether or not havingbecome an accusation, it can remain an analytic concept” (Geertz 1973: p. 194). There is morethan a little truth in Francis Fukuyama’s (2016) claim that “populism is the label that politicalelites attach to policies supported by ordinary citizens that they don’t like”. Others have gonefurther, arguing that liberal anti-populism in fact hinges upon a substitution of broader politicaldiscourse for a narrower moral one. Mouffe (2002: p. 1), for instance, in an extension ofSchmitt’s argument that liberalism rests upon an impossible attempt to evacuate the categoryof the “political”, has argued that such approaches mean that ethical deliberation is asked to fillthe role of political struggle: “we are now urged to think not in terms of right and left, but ofright and wrong”.

There are also good reasons morality in political affairs ought to be welcomed. First, thenotion that collective moral resentments are automatically unacceptable in political life and thatreaching a compromise that is pre-written into institutions that already exist is desirable, rulesout many of the most valuable political advances—including those discussed at length at theend of The Civil SphereAlexander (2006)—as beyond the pale. It threatens to imply the notionthat “politics as usual” should form the horizon of politics in general. In apartheid South Africa,rational dialogue with an unjust system was impotent at tackling the predicament that Blacksfaced. Legitimation of collective moral grievances with domestic and international audiences,

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the association of the state with evil, and the association of the freedom struggle with good wasfar more crucial to winning civil incorporation than processes of public deliberation (Morgan2018, 2020).

Second, politics without a moral element risks transmuting into managerialism, and it is infact the insistence upon this failed conception of what politics involves—what Michael Sandel(2018) calls “technocratic liberalism”—that helps in part explain the collapse of so manyliberal democratic parties in recent years at the expense of populism. Sandel argues that afteryears of a predominantly neoliberal form of globalization— in which moral and culturalinjustices, tied to economic inequalities, have been typically experienced by political subjectsas a denial of social esteem—it is important that a clear and progressive moral voice returns topolitical life. Indeed, he sees such a return as doubly necessary, in that strident moral voicesalready exist in right-authoritarian populist movements, the seductions of which can only becountered by an equally robust justification of the moral imperative of progressive politics.Denying this imperative in the name of a fictitious liberal neutrality not only, by default, cedesmoral questions to the sphere of private deliberation but also feeds the very forces it claims tooppose.

Once again, a feature purported to be unique to populism turns out to in fact be acharacteristic of politics more broadly conceived, revealing more universal features of thecivil sphere, and in fact cultural life more generally. Not only is morality inadequate as adistinguishing feature of populism but its conscious re-introduction back into politics mightalso be treated as a welcome development.

Populism as Irrational

Classical social theory was preoccupied with the shift from traditional to modern societies,accompanied by a corresponding shift from myth to reason as the predominant organizationalprinciple of social life. Whether through a movement away from the “theological” through the“metaphysical” towards the “positive” stage, or through processes of “disenchantment” or“bureaucratization”, or even “the rational development of productive forces”, the classicalprogressivist assumption was that modernity was defined by a process that—albeit typicallywith internal contradictions—unleashed and expressed rationality. Although Durkheim(1984[1912]) was not himself immune to this assumption, as can be seen especially in hisearly doctoral dissertation on the shifts in the division of labour in society, he neverthelesscame to recognize, and especially so in his late work, that “there is something eternal inreligion”, and that “common sentiments” conveyed through symbols, and sustained throughrituals, infused modern life far more profoundly than the modernization stories had allowed for(Durkheim 1995[1912]: p. 429).

As the previous section argued, categorical symbolization is rarely a neutral process, andthe terms “rational” and “irrational” typically carry moral evaluations. Establishing theirrationality of those with whom one disagrees has proven a time-honoured means of pollution.From Arnold’s (1993[1869]: p. 79) description of the “anarchy” of the “raw and unkindledmasses” or Le Bon’s (2006[1896]: p. 10) account of the crowd as characterized by “impul-siveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, absence of judgement and critical spirit, andexaggeration of the sentiments”, which he noted were “almost always observed in beingsbelonging to inferior forms of evolution—in women, savages, and children”, the charge ofirrationality has long functioned as a powerful means of exclusion (Foucault 1988).

A Cultural Sociology of Populism

Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, populism is often described as an irrational tempest in thecalm waters of rational politics (Goodhart 2017: p. 57). In the UK, the Brexit vote was widelytreated as an accidental outburst of xenophobic irrationalism, just as Corbyn’s initial supportwas initially explained away as “summer madness” (Toynbee 2015), and later diagnosed as“Corbynmania”. As Müller (2016: p. 1) notes, typically “populists are ‘angry’; their voters are‘frustrated’ or suffer from ‘resentment’”. While Müller (2016: p. 101) himself avoids suchassociations, other influential accounts oppose the populist idea of a “general will” to the more“rational process” of political deliberation “constructed via the public sphere” (Mudde andKaltwasser 2017: p. 18), characterize populists as specializing “in action” but “rarelyattempting deep thought” (Canovan 1999: p. 15), or else locate the dangers of populism inits tendency “to encourage politics based on fear and resentment rather than informed policydebate” (Bonikowski 2016: p. 22; Rico et al. 2017). Even cultural sociological accounts havelocated populist motivation in the “allure” of the “irrational” (Wagner-Pacifici and Tavory2017: p. 319), though others have correctly recognized that we need not agree with the reasonsbehind populism to acknowledge that such reasons exist (Gorski 2017: p. 348).

Relying as it does upon the civil structure that sacralizes reason and profanes its opposites(Alexander 2006: p. 57), othering populists as irrational helps simultaneously reassure anti-populists of their own reasonability. It also helps avoid uncomfortable questions concerningthe links between anti-populist politics and the recent rise of passionate populism they so fear.The discourse of “populism”, when used in this undeniably moral way, likely entails theunintended consequence of encouraging the very phenomenon it condemns, since populistsentiments rely upon an image of a distant elite, always ready to counter reports of livedexperience with carefully reasoned arguments. We therefore see a “working of the binaries”(Alexander 2010: pp. 89–110) in the very identification of populism as irrational: because“liberal-democratic capitalism has imposed itself as the only rational solution to the problem oforganising modern societies; its legitimacy could be put into question only by an ‘unreason-able’ element” (Mouffe 1999: p. 3).

The apparently less-excitable politics to which populism is typically contrasted features inpolitical theory in the contention that fundamental questions and antagonisms can be rationallyanswered and overcome by public reasoning. This approach is associated most famously withKant, and later developed in different ways by Rawls and Habermas. It is also an approach thatis critiqued in The Civil Sphere (Alexander 2006: pp. 13–17). Turner (2015) defends againstthis critique, contrasting a broken American political sphere in which “politics as performancehave so far blocked the emergence of a rational policy of economic and financial reform”, witha more rationalistic British one, in which the emotivism of Thatcher is presented as anaberration—“the only example of a recent British prime minister who walked the boundariesand talked the binaries” (Turner 2015: p. 69). Churchill, who we are told was “undoubtedly thetwentieth-century hero of British political life” was apparently “not inclined to conductdomestic political elections on the basis of a moral binary” (Turner 2015: p. 70). Turnerneglects to mention Churchill’s record in domestic elections, never having won the nationalpopular vote, and having been voted out of office as soon as the deeply polarized andemotionally charged atmosphere of World War II – which Turner (2015: 70) concedes oughtto be seen “as a titanic struggle between the noble virtues of liberalism and the craven values offascism” – concluded. Since not long after Turner’s piece was published, and certainly sincethe EU referendum, it has become almost a cliché to suggest that British parliamentary andextra-parliamentary politics have become increasingly emotional. Commentaries on the rise ofpopulism in the UK typically point out the deepening and sharpening of the binaries of

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political life, the failure of “phlegmatic” and “lugubrious” characters, and the rise of charismaand emotion as core to political success. As Davies 2019: p. 15) puts it in a recent book on thephenomenon: “Democracies are being transformed by the power of feeling in ways that cannotbe ignored or reversed”. Increasingly, social scientific studies have identified the impossibilityof an emotionless politics, whatever one’s substantive political orientation (Loseke 1993;Marcus 2000; Weber 2012).

By drawing on Durkheim’s insights, one thing that CST offers in making sense of thedebate over whether populism ought to be characterized as rational or emotional, is away to transcend the opposition itself. It does this through a focus on symbolics, ritual,and performance. Sign systems are rationally ordered in structured ways that dependupon distinction, difference, and opposition to generate meaning. What society decides tomake sacred, for instance, it does so by ensuring that it is “set apart” from the profane(Durkheim 1995[1912]: p. 44). In generating such meaning, these categories movebeyond being merely analytic codes and begin to acquire moral and emotionally ladensocial significance. While others have convincingly demonstrated how emotion andreason are almost always mutually embedded within the “alchemies of the mind” (Firth1958: pp. 150–183; Elster 1998; Goodwin et al. 2001), focusing upon symbolism, andthe ritual processes that take place around it, has the added advantage of again revealingthe continuities between apparently highly variable cultural practices. In this case, itallows us to see populism as consistent with other forms of politics, and indeed publicculture more generally, since all are compelled to operate through the same symbolicchannels.

The Civil Sphere (Alexander 2006) stands in opposition to two influential politicalmodels: interest-based and deliberative democratic. In place of these models, it offers anapproach in which successful performance is capable of redrawing the boundaries ofsolidarity and moral cohesion. Performance trumps realism and ontology, since it is theperformed appearance of sound judgement, fairness, integrity, or truth that matters, notthe ontological presence or absence of such things.8 Politics, like culture more generally,works through persuasion, not rational accomplishment, enlightened revelation, or therealist resolution of some conjunctural balance of forces.9 While symbolization (themedium of performance) takes place within a rationally ordered (and therefore rationallyaccessible) set of binaries, these binaries do not remain mere cold logical distinctions.Moreover, the claims that are made for where particular events, relationships, or figuresare to fit within this logical structure succeed or fail on the basis of their appeal to anaudience’s feelings. This means that the same rules of performative success applywhether one’s cause is in fact worthy or not. Since political struggle is, at its heart“moral and emotional” (Alexander 2010: p. xii), this paper will later argue that sup-pressing these elements in an effort to achieve some pristine reasonability simply yieldsthese potent motivational resources to whatever other political forces are prepared to usethem.

8 This account of politics resonates with humanistic accounts of knowledge, in which “truth” is a compliment weascribe to knowledge that seems to be “paying its way” or managing to convince a relevant community on thebasis of that community’s standards of justification (James 1981[1907]; Rorty 1982: p. xxv; Morgan 2016).9 This point has been forcefully made in an astute study of social movement success byWoodly (2015), in whichshe argues that political victory depends upon “political acceptance”, which is distinct from “political agree-ment”. Whereas the latter involves acceptance of a movement’s policy goals, the former is simply an acceptanceof the cultural relevance of a movement’s concerns to public discourse.

A Cultural Sociology of Populism

Populism as Anti-Pluralist

A final definitional criterion that dominant accounts of populism tend to reach consensusaround is the notion that populism is a way of conducting politics that is by its nature “anti-pluralist” (Galston 2018). Although it speaks “the language of democracy”, populism, so weare told, is in fact “always anti-pluralist” and therefore offers a “degraded form of democracy”(Müller 2016: pp. 3, 6; see also Mounk 2018).10 This is apparently linked to its Rousseauianclaim to represent the “will of the people”, but doing so in a non-institutionalized manner thattreats the categories of the “elite” and the “people” as “homogeneous wholes” (Müller 2016: p.6; see also pp. 7, 12, 18). This non-empirical “claim to exclusive representation” (Müller 2016:p. 6) is said to lead to a second danger with populism: an inability to recognize the legitimacyof its opponents (Bonikowski 2016: p. 22). This section will address these connected claims inturn, arguing that while they may provide an accurate account of certain varieties of populism,they by no means apply to all instances and, therefore, once again, fall short as definitionalcriteria.

Populists, we are told, consider “society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneousand antagonistic groups” (Mudde 2004: p. 543; Müller 2016: pp. 6, 18). This is said to derivefrom their sharing an understanding of “the political” with Schmitt, who believed that “theexistence of a homogeneous people is essential for the foundation of a democratic order”, andin listening to what Rousseau called the “general will” of this homogenous group, “those whodo not belong to the demos… consequently, are not treated as equals” (Mudde and Kaltwasser2017: p. 18). Populism is therefore said to be irredeemably anti-pluralist in its rejection of animage of “society as a heterogeneous collection of groups and individuals with often funda-mentally different views and wishes” (Mudde 2004: pp. 543–544).

Such charges may apply to nativist populisms, but there are good reasons to assume that itis the nativism, not the populism, that produces them. While inspired by Carl Schmitt (Mouffe1999), left populist theory departs from his thinking at various significant junctures. One suchjuncture is that neither the “elite” nor the “people” are considered homogenous wholes.Drawing on Gramsci, theorists of left populism have instead argued for the importance ofarticulating the fundamentally heterogeneous interests of segmented groups into a “people”.Gramsci (1971: p. 191) had argued that successful leaders and parties could articulatedisconnected groups, transforming them “from turbulent chaos into an organically preparedpolitical army”. If the “people” in left populism were conceived as a pre-existing homogenousunit, as the mainstream definitions suggest, such hegemonic articulation would clearly beunnecessary: articulation is required precisely because heterogeneity is acknowledged. Con-structing salient shared distinctions by drawing a political frontier is very different to claiminghomogeneity. The very power of the concept of “the people” to mobilize—which, if thearguments above are accepted, it must be acknowledged as a power it holds over liberaldemocracy as much as the radical democracy advocated by left populism—is its capacity to actas an “empty signifier” to be filled with whatever content political agents determine (Laclau

10 It should be noted that Mudde’s position, which draws upon Canovan’s earlier arguments (1999), is morenuanced, arguing that populism is in many ways more democratic (yet less liberal) than liberal democracy, whichis characterized as “a complex compromise of popular democracy and liberal elitism, which is therefore onlypartly democratic” (Mudde 2004: p. 561). Alexander (2010: pp. 278–279) also touches on this point in hisdiscussion of how the democratic resonances of the Preamble to the US Constitution’s reference to “We, thepeople” were tempered by the more liberal specifications of the Bill of Rights amendments.

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1996). This is also, of course, what allows it to lend itself to both right- and left-winginvocations (Badiou et al. 2016).

Due to its moralistic nature, populism is also charged with being “typically based on afundamental rejection of the political legitimacy of one’s opponent”, so that “the likelihood ofproductive dialogue and compromise is reduced” (Bonikowski 2016: p. 22).11 While thischarge no doubt applies to certain forms of what Stuart Hall (1979) called “authoritarianpopulism”, it again sits uneasily with theories of left populism, which have been at pains tostress that while politics will never be able to eradicate antagonism entirely, such conflicts can,and should, be transformed into “agonistic” relationships (Mouffe 2013). Whereas Schmitt(2007[1932]: p. 26) saw politics as in essence defined by an antagonistic, and ultimately lethal,struggle of friends against enemies, Mouffe (2013) both critiques the opposite rational-liberalview that a non-antagonistic consensus lies hidden, awaiting discovery through reasoneddebate, but also argues that antagonism can be transformed into agonism through appropriatedemocratic institutions; the very institutions that mainstream accounts would have it thatpopulists undermine. Whereas the Schmittian image is a war against enemies, the left populistimage represents a struggle against adversaries in which the viewpoints of one’s opponents aretaken seriously as authentic viewpoints. The adversary becomes “a legitimate enemy withwhom there exists a common ground”, and while adversaries might “fight against each other”,they nevertheless—in stark contrast to what populism’s critics charge—“share commonallegiance to the ethico-political principles of liberal-democracy” (Mouffe 1999: p. 4).

This transformation of enemies into adversaries, antagonism into agonism, opens up thepossibility of a civil populist politics, in other words, a populism conducted within a broadershared civil solidarity, which makes reference to the same civil metalanguage as that of itsopponents. It is presumably for this reason that Alexander quotes Mouffe’s work apprecia-tively in The Civil Sphere, in its insistence that “‘the novelty of democratic politics is not theovercoming of this us/them opposition.’ The challenge, rather, ‘is to establish this us/themdiscrimination in a way that is compatible with pluralist democracy.’ … which ‘consists indomesticating hostility’” (Alexander 2006: p. 124). What Mouffe describes as the “conflictualconsensus that constitutes the basis of a pluralist democracy” (Mouffe 2018: pp. 91–92),Alexander would, I suspect, simply call the routine struggles that occur with reference to theshared “discourse of civil society”, in which neither the possibility of consensus nor progress isassumed, but the legitimacy of one’s opponent certainly is.

Interestingly, even within varieties of national populism (Eatwell and Goodwin 2018) thatendanger but fail to break civil autonomy, these conditions can hold to the extent that“enemies” can be refashioned into “frenemies” (Alexander 2019: p. 6). What is threateningabout such forms of populism, typified in figures like Trump, is less their delegitimizing ofopposition and more their direct assault upon civil institutions (the judiciary, the media, thescientific establishment, etc.) which can ideally act to ensure the autonomous functioning ofthe civil sphere (Alexander 2019: p. 8; Kivisto 2017). These conditions clearly do not hold inthe more extreme expressions of exclusionary populism that Trump routinely flirts with, andvarious European leaders have chosen to embrace. Such populist manifestations use an appealto “the people” as a way of injecting antagonism into areas of the state and civil society whichliberal democracies base their legitimacy on defending. If the perimeters of the judiciary, the

11 As argued in the section before last, an irony that is too often lost in such claims is that the moralizing rhetoricof liberal anti-populism can itself come across as anti-pluralist, not only through the ease with which it shadesinto elitism, but in its rejection of the legitimacy of what it conceives as populist voices by labelling them such.

A Cultural Sociology of Populism

civil service, the media, the scientific establishment, and so on (which may themselves ofcourse be distorted by other societal spheres) become penetrated by these forms of power, thenpopulism risks decomposing into authoritarianism. Moreover, these expressions of populismbar and expel on the primordial bases of blood or soil and in so doing attack the foundation ofthe shared togetherness that defines membership in the civil sphere. In such cases, agonisticstruggle slips into antagonistic battle, and what Victor Serge called “respect for the man in theenemy” (Serge 2012[1951]: p. 375) is indeed lost. However, this loss is not a function ofpopulism but of authoritarianism, nativist essentialism, and the quest for purity— politicaltendencies that appear both in the presence and absence of populist signification.

Populism as Civil Repair?

The focus of dominant definitions of populism has typically been upon its dangers, distortions,and reductions. The one consistent virtue identified in such accounts is its capacity to act as acanary in the coal mine for social grievances (Bonikowski 2016: p. 23; Mudde and Kaltwasser2017: p. 40). Here, I would like to argue that just as it can function as a threat to civil solidarity,populism also holds the potential to act as an agent of civil repair.

There are at least two ways of telling the story of the recent rise of populism. One is thathealthy, responsive, and pluralist liberal democratic systems were unexpectedly rocked by theeruption of irrational forces. This story posits populism as the cause of Western polities’current ills. There is, however, an alternative story, which casts populism as an effect as muchas a cause, and which can be told by drawing upon the ideal types of the civil sphere.

This story begins by decentering populism and instead bringing into focus the democraciesin which it has arisen. Although the civil sphere is analytically independent, actual civilspheres are “always deeply interpenetrated by the rest of society” (Alexander 2006: p. 194;also 2013: pp. 123–124). Non-civil spheres constantly edge into the civil sphere, threatening todistort its priorities. Such spheres aim towards more restrictive goals, employ variant standardsof justice, and exchange information through alternative media. The economic sphere poses aparticular threat to civil imperatives in its pursuit of profit above justice and efficiency abovesolidarity, and its communication through the reductive medium of price rather than the richsymbolics of performance. While Alexander (2006: pp. 206–208) recounts the beneficialinputs of the economic into the civil sphere, he also notes the obvious risks it poses to thesolidarities of civil life.

The alternative story of the rise of populism identifies how, from the late 1970s onwards,Western liberal democracies progressively submitted to a narrow set of economic priorities,allowing the market to structure sectors—education, utilities, healthcare, social care, transpor-tation, etc.—in which civil imperatives had previously governed during the post-war consen-sus period. Many of the Western leaders that rose to power in the wake of this Reagan/Thatcher revolution not only continued to welcome market forces into the civil domain butalso attempted to evacuate not only antagonism but also agonism from politics too. Throughpolitical triangulation, the arbitration of competing demands, and the technical administrationof the economy, initially highly popular leaders such as Blair, Schröder, and Clinton attemptedto forge a consensus politics “beyond left and right” (Giddens 1994) in which “debate on thesensible givens of a situation” (Rancière 2003: p. 4) became stifled. This did not of coursemean that fundamental social conflict disappeared—social movements in the global Northblossomed during this period—but this conflict struggled to find adequate expression in

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institutionalized democratic channels. While all the traditional institutions of democracyremained intact, an increasing proportion of the imperatives driving decision-making becameoutsourced to experts (Crouch 2004), and the role of the demos, upon which democracyapparently rested, became more and more circumscribed (Rancière 1998). When democraticprocesses were required, marketing and public relations mechanisms—such as focus-groupsand professional communications strategies—increasingly stepped in to devise or defend“policy” in a manner that fundamentally divorced it from “politics” (Schmidt 2006). Gover-nance began to resemble management, the revolving-doors between political assemblies andelite private sector organizations began to spin ever-faster, apathy increased, party membershipand voter turnout dropped (Mair 2013), and democratic societies entered their “post-demo-cratic” phase (Crouch 2000).

At no time was this more apparent than following the 2007–2008 economic crisis. A globalevent caused by elite economic mismanagement was met with a political response thatprotected this elite, on their own advice, at the expense of broader populations. The choiceto pursue austerity policies was of course felt materially, but their effects were also experiencedsymbolically, in ways that solidified public distrust in politico-economic elites. Across Europe,but especially so in Southern European countries like Spain and Greece, “necessary” economicimperatives further colonized areas in which civil solidarity had once held sway.

Social democratic parties founded in the nineteenth or the early twentieth centuries inan attempt to provide representation to workers and offer institutional barricades againstthe anti-civil incursions of the economic sphere detached themselves from their traditionalelectoral base by failing to shield them against swingeing public service cuts, or evenpioneering their implementation. Such parties are now paying the electoral price(Bickerton 2018). While centre-right parties had long been comfortable with marketpriorities driving public policy, this unholy pact between social democratic organs andthe market, combined with the associated evacuation of agonism from politics, provides analternative account of where the populist “backlash” (Alexander 2019), in both its regres-sive and progressive manifestations, originated.

All this is not to say that the recent wave of what has been labelled “populism” can bereduced to an epiphenomenal effect of a post-democratic political culture meeting its post-crisis moment. The evident success of populism as a mode of doing politics has led to itbecoming an effective and autonomous culture structure in its own right, and one that has beenself-consciously drawn upon and implemented by politicians eager to win votes. Moreover,cultural work invariably mediates between the reality and the perception of public issues, andthe populisms that have sprung from this neoliberal postpolitical landscape have worked awayat making these material and political realities meaningful. It is hardly a great surprise that anti-elitism has characterized many of them. Some have made austerity meaningful through a focuson ethnically or racially marked “enemies within”, who they identify as really to blame for thelack of opportunities and declining public services, and in the process have degraded civilsolidarity even further.

Other populisms, however, have kept open the possibility, though by no means theguarantee, of civil repair. This is especially the case where populist signification has beencombined with substantive policy to address those grievances—both moral and material—thatnativist populism feeds upon. Such populisms promise a return of the political by drawingexcluded groups into the democratic orbit in ways that can “translate” their sectoral grievancesinto universal civil issues of concern to societies at large (Alexander 2006: pp. 231–232).Populism, conceived in the weak, formal manner argued for in this paper, has not been the

A Cultural Sociology of Populism

primary cause of the current crisis of Western politics, though certain of its expressions can nodoubt be seen to have hastened this crisis. The challenge for progressives is to resist treating itas some easy solution. Nevertheless, drawing upon the preceding discussion, we mightidentify certain conditions that would enhance its viability, when combined with appropriatesubstantive policy, to act in the interests of civil repair.

First, in the discussion of the binary feature of populist politics and the critique of thetendency to treat populism as an ideology, it was argued that we need to challenge the notionthat contention is alien to democracy and that the solution to populism is a return to aconsensus style of public administration. Friend-enemy, us-them, and pure-polluted distinc-tions, which are often presented as unique to populism, cultural sociology teaches us, are infact expressions of more universal culture structures, which when evoked in an agonisticmanner can be understood as homologous with the binaries that compose the “discourse ofcivil society”. As the three examples that form part III of The Civil Sphere illustrate, it has beenprecisely the construction of political frontiers around pressing issues that has historically ledto civil expansion.12 If movements had not convincingly used the discourse of civil society tosimplify reality into good and evil, coding those forces pushing for civil repair as pure andthose acting against it as polluted, the success of these movements would have been far lesscertain. However, if populism is understood as a formal mode of political signification, ratherthan a substantive ideology, the substance with which it works is clearly critical. Polarizationneeds to occur around the right issues, and issues that social movements have brought to thefore in recent years, and populist politics may be well placed to carry forward, include thosearound inequality and climate degradation. Compelling arguments exist that such issuesdeserve to be made subject to the binary treatment of the discourse of civil society, since theyhave been inadequately addressed by the routine functioning of civil sphere institutions,especially under the distorting influence of market-oriented imperatives.

Since civil repair will emphatically not be brought about by a triadic populism thatscapegoats social ills on communities that were neither responsible nor hold the power todefend themselves against such charges, it is also key that such frontiers be open and inclusive.This inclusivity must involve a willingness to hear the grievances of those seduced byexclusivist populism, and a preparedness to invest in the cultural work necessary to reframetheir concerns in universalizing, civil terms. Whether it comes from the left or the right, anypopulism that defines the frontiers of political life in essentialized and closed, and primordialterms is, by its very nature, non-universalizing and anti-civil.

Second, it was suggested that treating morality and emotion as automatic threats todemocratic politics is likewise problematic. Not only does this position too often fall backupon the flawed alternative assumption that political contention is settled only throughratiocinative modes of public discourse, drained of values or feelings, but it also cedes thesepowerful motivating forces to those anti-civil tendencies currently using them to such greateffect. Just like civil restriction, the success of civil translation depends upon its appeal tofeelings, beliefs, and ideals as much as cognition. Neglecting moral language and emotiveperformance in the public signification of politics is not only foolhardy in an environment inwhich anti-civil forces readily make use of it, it can also be experienced as an affront by groupswhose exclusion is experienced in moral terms, and whose anger at such exclusion is felt invisceral ways. A populism capable of civil repair would therefore need to be culturally creative

12 It is worth noting how many of the new populist parties and their leaders have emerged from what The CivilSphere identifies as the primary agents of civil repair: social movements.

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and dramatically astute in its telling moral tales, harnessing public feeling and constructingshared affect. This would involve engaging not only in the statics but also in the dynamics ofthe civil sphere (Alexander 2006: pp. 60–62), fashioning compelling narratives capable ofsupplanting those of restrictive, anti-civil populism. Feelings mustered in support of civilrestriction will not be conquered simply by reasoned arguments, but by evoking morepowerful feelings in support of civil expansion. Compelling exclusionary narratives will notbe displaced simply by a presentation of facts, but by crafting even more compellinguniversalizing stories.13

Thirdly, populism must be both agonistic and pluralistic if it is to function as a force forcivil repair. Working within the shared semantic coding of the civil sphere and elaboratingdynamic narratives capable of inspiring hearts as well as minds, such a populism would needto treat its opponents as adversaries to be struggled with and ultimately persuaded, rather thanenemies to be silenced and ultimately eradicated. Its pluralism would derive from its creationof a “people” composed of coalitions articulated across difference. Such difference would needto be conceived not as a problem to be overcome, as in völkisch conceptions of a “people”, butas a resource to be celebrated or a productive tension capable of promoting civility byoccasionally testing it. Such articulations will fail if they are conceived as rooted within thespontaneous alignment of pre-determined “interests”. Instead, they must be understood as theoutcome of ongoing cultural work aimed at tying together segmented grievances into hege-monic civil solidarities. In this sense, a progressive appeal to the “people” would need to beseen as a forever unfinished project.

Conclusion

The preceding section has suggested that like the social movements described in the final partof The Civil Sphere (Alexander 2006), populism can promote civil repair by translatingrestricted sectoral grievances into universal civil concerns, with the goal of incorporatingpreviously excluded groups into the fold of social solidarity. Such processes are neitherguaranteed nor often complete, however. Populisms can either fail in their efforts at represen-tation, faltering in their capacity to successfully mobilize the metalanguage of civil society, orthey can push—consciously or not—in the opposite direction, asserting particularistic claimsand promoting forms of civil exclusion rather than incorporation.

These qualifications stem from the weaker, non-substantive definition of populism that thispaper has proposed: if populism is taken to be a formal mode of doing politics, rather than asubstantive set of political ideas, whether it promotes civil restriction or repair, or both, is notsomething that can be settled in the abstract. The main purpose of this paper has been tosuggest that many of populism’s formal dynamics can be connected, via CST, to what isusually considered to be non-populist politics, and, via cultural sociology, to the routine waysin which culture operates in most other spheres of social life.

Just as routine processes of group identity formation structure their meaning around either/or oppositions, so too does populism work the binaries of the civil sphere, cementing unitywith those it defines as a “people”, and breaking ties with those it does not. Understandingpopulism as a mode of public signification rather than an ideology (thin-centred or otherwise)

13 For an illustration of the fundamental inadequacies of fact-based politics in shaping perceptions, feelings, andmotivations, see Smith and Howe’s (2015) analysis of climate consciousness.

A Cultural Sociology of Populism

allows us to recognize it as a form of cultural work that codes its own motivations, relation-ships, and institutions in civil terms, and those of its adversaries in terms of the opposite. Justas in other spheres of cultural distinction, moral judgements of good and evil animate theseclassifications, so that populism’s efficacy is determined as much, and often more so, by itspersuasive power in appealing to an audience’s values and feelings, as by its ability torationally demonstrate its propositions. Finally, this paper has defended against the view thatpopulism is inherently anti-pluralist, suggesting that populist signification can, and often does,operate within a broader acknowledgement of civil togetherness.

Since politics—and populism as a specific mode of doing politics—is obligated to operatethrough culture (which is of course different to the reductive claim of saying it simply isculture), effective social scientific tools for analyzing culture are, unsurprisingly, also effectivetools for analyzing populism. Moreover, populism paints boldly what more routine politicstends to sketch more faintly: its categorizations are clear-cut, its public significations sharp, itsbinaries transparent, and its moral and emotional resonances distinct. Within it, we can discernclearly the structured ways in which culture reduces complexity, allowing information to beconveyed and meaning organized. Focusing our attention on such pronounced modes ofpolitical expression promises therefore to strengthen our understanding of the civil sphere.

Acknowledgements This paper was originally presented at the Civil Sphere and Populism Conference inJune 2019 at Yale University. This event was sponsored by the Edward J. & Dorothy Clarke Kempf MemorialFund, the Yale Macmillan Centre for International and Area Studies, the International Migration Laboratory ofUniversity of Trento, and the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. Thank you especially to theorganisers of that conference—Jeffrey Alexander, Peter Kivisto, and Giuseppe Sciortino—for their advice inrevising the paper. Thank you also for the generous feedback from all the conference participants, and theanonymous IJPCS reviewers.

Compliance and Ethical Standards

Conflict of Interest The author declares that he has no conflicts of interest. This research did not involve humanparticipants and/or animals. Informed consent was therefore unnecessary.

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, whichpermits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you giveappropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, andindicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article'sCreative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not includedin the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation orexceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copyof this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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A Cultural Sociology of Populism

CultureUta Karstein and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr

Abstract:This article discusses themajor currents in the analysis of culture in German-language sociology. First, it sheds light on the role of culture in the history of soci-ology. Second, it reconstructs the main fields of research in the last 20 years. Theauthors employ the distinction between sociology of culture and cultural sociology.With regard to the first, the article addresses new types of work in the creative sphere,the changing role of the public, as well as the relation between class and culture.Withregard to the second,with its focus on social meaning, the article presents theoreticalcontributions as well as research from different fields in sociology, in which a culturalsociological perspective has proven to be illuminating.

Keywords: Cultural sociology, sociology of culture, social meaning

1 Cultural Sociology as a Sociology of Meaning

Writing about cultural sociology in German-speaking countries has long meant writ-ing about sociology as such. The founding fathers of sociology were at the same timethe classics of cultural sociology, and teaching cultural sociology means teachingsociological theory still today. Another characteristic of German-language sociology isthat there has not been a sociological “family drama” comparable to the one thatJeffrey Alexander and his colleagues determined within US-American sociology(Alexander, Jacobs, and Smith, 2012: 6), a rift that was triggered in the US by the re-bellion against Parsons’ sociology. An effect of this rebellion was that culture as areference of sociological explanation largely disappeared. In Germany, by contrast,none other than Max Weber prominently addressed the “cultural significance” ofsocial and historical phenomena, and Georg Simmel focused on the tension betweensubjective and objective culture. The legacy carried over to the next generation ofsociologists: Karl Mannheim addressed the relationship between styles of thought andsocio-cultural milieus (Endreß, 2019a; Corsten, 2010); Alfred Schütz laid the theo-retical and methodological foundations of a phenomenological theory of culture(Endreß, 2019b);¹ Norbert Elias closely intertwined social analysis and culturalanalysis in his works on the theory of civilization; and within the framework of thephilosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen (Delitz, 2011),

Both Mannheim and Schütz are usually associated with the sociology of knowledge rather thanwith the sociology of culture. For reasons of space, we unfortunately cannot further illuminate theconnections between the two here. The sociology of knowledge has established itself institutionallyindependently in German-speaking countries, but the connections to cultural sociology are obvious.Below, we will consider some publications as examples.

OpenAccess. © 2021 Uta Karstein and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, published by De Gruyter. This work islicensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110627275-002

culture became the constitutional foundation of humans and their sociality. Eventoday, this starting point distinguishes German-language sociology from that of othercountries (Moebius, 2019: 64).

However, the history of German cultural sociology is not without ruptures. After1945, cultural sociology led a shadowy existence in Germany up until the 1980s—a result of the dominant reception of structural functionalism and the resurgence ofhistorical materialism. At times, cultural sociology was only mentioned within theframework of philosophical anthropology (cf. Fischer and Moebius, 2014: 12).

As elsewhere, the 1980s saw a radical change with the rise of the cultural turn,which again paved the way for cultural sociological perspectives in Germany.With thefoundation of the Cultural Sociology section in the German Sociological Association inthe mid-1980s, cultural sociology was able to establish itself in Germany. This “revi-talization of cultural sociology” (Gebhardt, 2005: 23pp) took on a characteristic formin that founding figures such as Friedrich H.Tenbruck,Wolfgang Lipp, and Hans PeterThurn deliberately tied in with “Max Weber and a decidedly historical view of thesocial and cultural” (Moebius, 2019: 74; our translation). The works presented in moredetail in the following sections explicitly stand in this tradition.

Cultural sociologists such as Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, Joachim Fischer, Heike Delitz,and Robert Seyfert continued the tradition of philosophical anthropology. Since then,other scholars have proposed conflict-theoretical (Rehberg, 2014), affect-theoretical(Seyfert, 2011), life-sociological (Fischer, 2015; Delitz, 2011), and historical-genetic(Dux, 2000) reformulations. They have given a specific character to research fieldssuch as the sociology of architecture as well as the sociology of the body and thesociology of the senses and affects. The major work of Günter Dux (2000), who hasbrought together natural science (especially brain research) and sociology in a newway, is worthy of special mention here. In Dux’s work, biological anthropology replacesphilosophical anthropology as the basic science of the humanities and social sci-ences.

Moreover, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School has remained an importantpoint of reference in cultural sociology. It was above all Hartmut Rosa (2013) whoadopted the critical impetus of the Frankfurt School. In his work, acceleration be-comes the central concept of a theory of modernity and is cast as a form of alienation.In his works, which are in essence diagnoses of the contemporary period, Rosa pur-sues a normative theory of modernity, deliberately crossing the boundaries of aca-demic sociology. In particular, his more recent work on resonance (Rosa, 2016) dealswith the question of global relations in a society that moves beyond the growth im-perative.

Cultural sociology in Germany has long been a sociology thoroughly orientedtowards theory and its history. It was successful in this regard, especially after thereturn of Jewish exiles or the delayed reintegration of their work into German-lan-guage sociology. There was enough material to preoccupy the discipline with dealingwith Germany’s own history and heritage (Gebhardt, 2005; Adloff et al., 2014; Moebiusand Albrecht, 2014; Schmidt-Lux et al., 2016; Moebius, HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY, this

10 Uta Karstein and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr

volume).² However, there have also been movements away from this heritage. NiklasLuhmann (1995), for example, referred to “culture” as a semantics born from com-parison and dealt with it from the perspective of a theory of second-order observation.

Hartmut Esser (2001) has also presented an original approach. The last volume ofhis six-volume textbook is dedicated to culture. There he aims to develop a unifiedtheory of action in which he integrates the “normative” and the “interactionist par-adigm,” which he rephrases as “interactionist-rational.” From a background of ra-tional-choice theory, he approaches his goal through an extension of this theory. Hethereby focuses on cultural frames, which, in Esser’s analysis, establish the code ofsubjectively and socially meaningful action.The essential place of acquisition of theseframes, according to him, are various social groups in which people participate.Through this he intends to show that his model of sociological explanation is alsosuitable for “explaining the interactive genesis of commonly shared patterns andmodels of orientation and action—and thus the emergence of culture and socialmeaning as collective phenomena” (ibid.: XIV; our translation).

Over the last 20 years, the perspective of German-language cultural sociology hasbeen increasingly broadened (cf. Wohlrab-Sahr, 2010). Scholars in this field haveshown growing interest in both the French discussion and the Anglo-Saxon debates.Recent handbooks document this broadening of perspective but also the lasting in-fluence of the German sociological tradition. One of them is the two-volume handbookby Stephan Moebius, Frithjof Nungesser, and Katharina Scherke (2019). It adopts abroad understanding of cultural sociology. Noteworthy is the view beyond the‘Western’ context when, for example, contributions deal with cultural sociology inJapan (Morikawa), Latin America (da Mota), or in South Asia (Rehbein). In addition tothe ongoing exchange with history (Scherke),what is evident is also a strong interest inthe dialogue with philosophy, ethnology, and (social) anthropology, sparked by theinterest in the relationship between nature and culture (Laux, Bogusz, Schützeichel).

Parallel to the re-establishment of cultural sociology as an academic discipline,qualitative methodology was elaborated as well—driven, for example, by authors suchas Ulrich Oevermann, Fritz Schütze, and Hans-Georg Soeffner, who have also drawnheavily on sociology’s interpretive tradition (Hollstein/Kumkar, QUALITATIVEMETHODS, this volume). However, an integration of these two perspectives in a de-cidedly empirical turn in cultural sociology was still to come. Recently, a push in thisdirection has come from the “Empirical Sociology of Culture Network” (Böcker et al.,2018).

The definition of the relationship between cultural sociology and cultural studies was also dis-cussed (Albrecht, 2009; Moebius, 2010).

Culture 11

2 Cultural Sociology versus Sociology of Culture

Jeffrey Alexander and his colleagues (Alexander et al., 2013) have—while promotingtheir “strong program”—distinguished between the sociology of culture and culturalsociology. Whereas the former sees culture as a subject area—such as art, popularculture, youth culture, and so on—that needs to be explained, cultural sociologyrepresents an approach that addresses all social phenomena with regard to theirmeaning and significance and considers ‘culture’ as an explanatory factor. In thecontext of American sociology, this has been promoted as a fundamental change ofdirection. Against the backdrop of the German history of sociology (Moebius, HISTORYOF SOCIOLOGY, this volume), however, there was no need for such a fundamentalreorientation. Nevertheless, the distinction proposed by our American colleagues isalso suitable for the German context and will be applied in the following.

Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive. A sociology of art, for example, canalso address the cultural significance of the phenomena and objects under investi-gation, as Rehberg did with his analysis of the conflict between East andWest Germanart, which he interprets as a representative social discourse on German reunification(cf. Rehberg and Kaiser, 2014). A similar perspective can be found in the study byDominik Schrage, Holger Schwetter, and Ann-Kathrin Hoklas, who interpreted thepopular music of the 1960s and 1970s―and thus its cultural significance―as amedium for the social-transformation processes of this period (Schrage et al., 2019).

In general, however, both perspectives are aligned with different sociologicalapproaches and mostly with different methodologies as well. The sociology of cultureoften—though not always—relies on quantitative methods. Cultural sociology, on theother hand, has a certain affinity for qualitative approaches.

2.1 The current field (1): Sociology of culture

In the German-language sociology of culture, one primary interest lies in the condi-tions of the production and reception of culture, especially in aesthetic works andproducts.³ With regard to production, interesting contributions have come from thesociology of professions and the sociology of work. In recent years, the conditions ofwork in the cultural and creative professions have repeatedly been the subject of re-search (Schnell, 2007; Henning et al., 2019). The respective studies, often influencedby the works of Boltanski and Chiapello (2005 [1999]), Bröckling (2016 [2007]), andReckwitz (2017 [2012]), stressed the adaptability of capitalism. The latter has recentlyadopted the working principles of artists and creative people in particular, who nowfunction as role models for large parts of business and working world. Occupations in

There are also sociological views in this field that explicitly position themselves against the cultur-al turn (Gerhards, 2010).

12 Uta Karstein and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr

the cultural and creative industries are situated between the professions and de-pendent labor.We often find deregulated employment combined with a high degree ofpersonal responsibility (Manske and Schnell, 2018: 435). Particularly in fields of workthat are still relatively new, such as design or cultural education, one finds hybridforms of employment that continuously alternate between dependent and self-em-ployed work.

Contributions that are of relevance to the sociology of culture also came fromdifferentiation theory. The basic assumption is that social spheres can also be deter-mined by the relationship between experts as service providers and the public as theirservice consumers. Against this backdrop, Jürgen Gerhards (2001) has reconstructed ageneral trend of growing demands for inclusion on the part of the public since the1960s. This becomes visible through the ongoing criticism of established cultural in-stitutions that are perceived as elitist and the associated demands for cultural par-ticipation as well as through the revaluation of cultural practices beyond high culture.Nicole Burzan et al. (2008) have also examined the relationship of different socialspheres with their publics. They are interested in what they call different “inclusionprofiles.” Accordingly, art belongs to those social spheres in which the public is ratherweakly included through active (amateur art) or passive (art reception) participation(Burzan et al., 2008: 95). Furthermore, it has been shown that those people who ex-perience above-average inclusion in the sphere of art generally also do so in othersocial spheres such as religion, politics, science, and education and that this cannotbe causally attributed to socio-structural characteristics alone (ibid.: 94). People whofit this inclusion profile are generally characterized by a strong interest in what ishappening in the world and how these events can be explained.

These studies indicate the strength of a sociology of culture, as it allows for thecomparison of the cultural field with other areas of society by applying general so-ciological concepts such as profession, public, or inclusion.

Another focus of the sociology of culture is the analysis of social stratification andlifestyle (Otte/Boehle/Kunißen, SOCIAL INEQUALITIES—EMPIRICAL FOCUS, thisvolume; Schwinn, SOCIAL INEQUALITIES—THEORETICAL FOCUS, this volume). Here,two competing currents have developed in recent years. On the one hand is a type ofresearch that primarily follows Pierre Bourdieu and perceives cultural preferences asan expression of social stratification and habitus (Otte, 2008; Rössel, 2005; Vesteret al., 2001). On the other hand is a type of research that argues in terms of individ-ualization theory. It emphasizes the choices and willful constructions of the subjects(Hitzler, Bucher, and Niederbacher, 2001). In addition, there have been ambitiousattempts to mediate between these two poles (Otte, 2007; Gebesmair, 2001; Berli,2014). In so doing, these endeavors seek to take the intrinsic logic of the cultural fieldinto account, with its distinct discourses, structures of recognition, and economiesaccording to the specific areas or scenes within the larger field of art.

Rainer Diaz-Bone (2002) and Nina Tessa Zahner (2006), among others, have dealtwith the inner logic of artistic fields. They have also worked with, and expanded on,Bourdieu’s conceptual toolbox. Zahner reconstructed the field of the visual arts in the

Culture 13

20th century and its transformation through the emergence of Pop Art,which could beclassified neither in terms of a pure autonomous aesthetic nor as blatantly commercialart. The economic rise of the American middle classes and their resulting access to theart scene led to the two dominant sub-fields described in Bourdieu’s The Rules of Art—that of pure production and that of mass production—being supplemented in the1960s, as Zahner argues, by a “sub-field of expanded production” (Zahner 2006: 310;our translation). This sub-field incorporates mechanisms—innovation orientation,uniqueness of the work, and originality of the artists—from the other two sub-fieldsbut also has mass-cultural characteristics such as low barriers to reception.

Diaz-Bone expands Bourdieu’s “distinction” in terms of discourse theory. Hiscentral thesis is that “only the discursification of cultural objects and practices (ofgenres) creates a complete, lifestyle-related content so that genres as orders of dis-course can have meaningful implications for the conduct of life” (Diaz-Bone, 2002: 17;our translation). Since the social significance of cultural objects cannot be determinedeither by their material constitution or by the socio-economic position of the socialgroups that appropriate them, the knowledge order of cultural fields must be givengreater consideration. Against this backdrop, Diaz-Bone reconstructs the mechanismsof distinction, inherent to the field, of two music scenes by analyzing their most im-portant magazines.

The problems of the autonomy of art and the epistemological significance of theconcept of autonomy raised by these works were later examined both in terms of basictheory (Zahner and Karstein, 2014) and empirically for various subject areas (e.g., film,architecture) (Karstein and Zahner, 2017).

Finally, Anja Frank (Frank, 2018) has dealt with the collective orientations ofvolunteers in associations that support operas and theaters. In her aptly titled studyGroße Gesellschaft in kleiner Gruppe (Society at Large in Small Groups; our translation),she shows that these groups’ specific understanding of the artistic work of the re-spective institution and their related engagement reflects the members’ differentconcepts of self and society and thus infuses their work with a perspective attuned tothe “larger society.”

2.2 The current field (2): Cultural sociology

The theoretical contributions discussed in the following are only a small selection ofwhat can currently be found in German-language cultural sociology.We have chosenthem primarily because they contribute to a theory of culture in a more specific sense.However, there are also other theoretical contributions that are worth exploring. Theworks on urban sociology and space by Martina Löw (2001; 2010; Berking and Löw,2008) and Markus Schroer (2005), which are dealt with in a separate article in thisissue (Löw, SPACE. URBAN, RURAL, TERRITORIAL, this volume), are particularlyworthy of mention. Impressive works can also be found in the field of architecturalsociology. While Heike Delitz (2009) in her sociology of architecture brings philo-

14 Uta Karstein and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr

sophical anthropology into dialogue with the French sociology and philosophy of lifeof Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and others, Silke Steets (2015) has extended Peter L.Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s sociology of knowledge to the subject of architecture.

2.2.1 Recent explorations in cultural sociological theory

In addition to the continuation of existing theoretical traditions, the last two decadeshave also seen the emergence of new outlines of cultural-sociological theory, withAndreas Reckwitz’s contribution certainly being one of the most highly regarded(Schneider, SOCIAL THEORY, this volume; Schimank, SOCIETY, this volume; Löw,SPACE. URBAN, RURAL, TERRITORIAL, this volume). His book on the transformationof cultural theories (Reckwitz, 2000) notes increasing convergences in this field. Inthese convergences, he sees the potential for the development of an integrated pa-radigm that should be grounded in practice theory (ibid.).

In recent years, Reckwitz has gained attention for his thesis of a comprehensiveaestheticization of our society, including a specific culture of subjectivity (Reckwitz,2006). According to this thesis, three essential thrusts in the direction of aestheti-cization since the 18th century have led to the implementation of the so-called cre-ativity dispositive,which has affectedmore andmore social strata and areas (Reckwitz,2007). For Reckwitz, the typical phenomena of this development include the re-placement of the work of art by the art event, the aestheticization of the economic, theculturalization of the city, and the aestheticization of lifestyle. The creative practiceinvolved therein is an end in itself for the expressive subject and a means to an end forprofessional as well as private success. Reckwitz has further condensed this inter-pretation of modernity in his later publications, most recently The Society of Singu-larities (Reckwitz, 2020). Not only individuals but also larger social formations arethus under pressure to present themselves as something special, unique. Here we findparallels to Martina Löw’s research program on the Intrinsic Logics of Cities (Berkingand Löw, 2008). On the whole, Reckwitz wants to draw attention to the fact thatmodernity is not adequately understood as a “structural context of formal-rationalobjectification” (Reckwitz, 2015: 16). From its very beginnings, modernity also had acultural-aesthetic side, without the energies of which it would not be viable becauseonly the “expansion of aesthetic practices provides modernity with cultural legiti-mation and affective sources of motivation” (ibid: 32; our translation). That this is aspecific, albeit increasingly dominant form of middle-class culture, against whichother cultural orientations position themselves in a mode of protest, is an issue thatwe will return to later.

Dirk Baecker takes a different approach to the concept of culture in his two vol-umes of essays, Why Culture? (Baecker, 2001; our translation) and Cultural Calculus(Baecker, 2014; our translation). He follows on directly from Niklas Luhmann’s con-cept of culture within a theory of observation. In this perspective, culture is not the“sum of the values […] with which a society is endowed but […] an ongoing obser-

Culture 15

vation that keeps present the potential alternative to each value” (Baecker, 2001: 9; ourtranslation). Following Luhmann, Baecker derives this concept of ‘culture’ from theexperience of cultural contact and the resulting comparative perspective. In this view,culture is always both unity and duality at the same time. It identifies differences butrelates what is different to what is common and gains its identity only from its com-parison with other possibilities. In the context of a world society, culture becomes the“formula for the observation of possible differences” (our translation) and thus asecond-order concept. This perspective proves to be particularly instructive for theinterpretation of current phenomena in the context of globalization and migrationprocesses and the resistance to them, which is becoming increasingly identitarian.Identitarian self-assertion, however, cannot escape the experience of the contingencyof the cultural that arises from comparison.⁴

The analytical framework developed by Stefan Hirschauer (2014; 2017) for com-parative research on the construction, intersection, and neutralization of culturaldifferentiations of people―on the ‘doing’ and ‘undoing’ of social affiliations―is alsobased on a theory of observation. This framework ties in with the internationallydiscussed concept of “boundary making” (Lamont) and with approaches in whichmultiple affiliations are discussed. At the center of his work is the contingency ofsocial affiliations and thus also the competition and temporality of such categoriza-tions. They are contingent not only because they are socially constructed but alsobecause they can be used as well as ignored and dismantled. Each act of ‘doing dif-ference’ is thus a meaningful selection from a set of competing categorizations thateither creates a relevant difference in the first place or—as an act of ‘undoing’—neutralizes it again.

Finally, we present a more recent contribution to the sociology of knowledge,which is documented in Hubert Knoblauch’s work The Communicative Construction ofReality (Knoblauch, 2020). Even if the concept of culture is not at the forefront of thisapproach, it is nevertheless of interest, since the approach deals with the commu-nicative generation of meaning—and in this sense with the “culture of communica-tion.”

In a certain way, this contribution must be seen as the result of both a collectivereflection on the reformulation of communication theory and the empirical turn of thesociology of knowledge initiated by Schütz as well as by Berger and Luckmann. Inaddition to the works by Knoblauch, this includes those of Gabriela Christmann(2015), Reiner Keller (2005) and co-authors (Keller et al., 2013), Jo Reichertz (2010),and Regine Herbrik (2011). The turn from the ‘social’ to the ‘communicative’ con-struction of reality is revealing and at the same time establishes a connection betweensociological theory and empirical communication research. This connection is basedon a theory of action, yet one that leaves behind the narrow confines of Habermas’

From a different perspective, Friedrich Tenbruck (1992) pointed out that cultural comparison wasnot a sociological invention but rather emerged from comparisons within the lifeworld.

16 Uta Karstein and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr

theory of communicative action. The ‘communicative construction’ approach con-ceptualizes communicative action not as free of domination and oriented toward[reaching] a common understanding but instead as embodied and reciprocal actionthat may also contain strategic moments. Communicative action extends to the mesolevels of social order as well. This approach views institutions or organizations asgenerated and legitimized by specific forms of communicative action, which aremediated and objectified in various ways. This reconceptualization of communicativeaction has thus made it possible to include the changes observed in society over recentdecades that have been caused by the emergence of certain objects, technologies, andmedia that were necessarily omitted from the early writings in the sociology ofknowledge, which, before the onset of digitization, were inevitably rooted in ananalogous understanding of the lifeworld.

The concept of the communicative construction of reality also contains—like theworks of Reckwitz and Rosa—an element of a diagnosis of the contemporary period,inasmuch as a communicative liquefaction of knowledge and action is understood asan increase in discursivity. In this respect, the turn to communicative construction ispart of a social transformation in which communicative action gains in importance.

2.2.2 Cultural sociology as a sociological approach

In addition to these fundamental theoretical works, there are plenty of publications inwhich the cultural-sociological perspective provides orientation for interpreting themost diverse social phenomena, in line with cultural sociology as a “strong program.”This naturally brings a broad spectrum of social phenomena into view, only a smallselection of which can be presented here. We have deliberately chosen areas thatwould not be considered genuine subjects of “cultural sociology” at first glance.

a) Economy as cultureOne of the most interesting areas to which cultural sociology can turn is the economy.It reveals its potential primarily as a corrective to the often narrow economic per-spective. Interesting interpretations can be found here, for instance, in relation to thefinancial crisis of 2008.

Claudia Honegger, Sighard Neckel, and Chantal Magnin used biographical casestudies to examine the practices and styles of thought of bankers (i.e., their productionof meaning) shortly after the crisis and attempted to “reconstruct the fatal develop-ments in the financial sector through the looking glass of the perceptions and expe-riences of the actors involved” (Honegger et al., 2010: 26; our translation). The focushere is on the practical interpretations and everyday knowledge of the experts in thefield of banking and the “‘fit’ between habitus, worldview, and professional practice”(ibid.; our translation). The authors reconstruct the inner logic of the “switchyard ofresponsibility” that characterizes the banking milieu (ibid: 305). However, despite all

Culture 17

the mutual recrimination, the latter’s ideological glue was a culture of success thatmade the creation of profits at any price socially acceptable (Honegger et al., 2010: 74).

The counterpart to this inner view is provided by Oliver Kuhn (2014) with hissociological analysis of lay discussions in Internet forums where responsibility for thefinancial crisis was debated. He shows that common-sense theories about the fi-nancial crisis participate in the same political and economic discourse that also or-ganizes professional knowledge. What is different is the degree of complexity andmorality with which the events are judged. The dominant perspective is overall onethat turns on an “explanation of the crisis oriented towards the central political au-thority as the protagonist of the solution,” is “critical of the elites and tends to bestatist” (Kuhn, 2014: 393; our translation). Kuhn’s analysis shows that the discursiveorder of the debates is structured along basic core values like productivity, order,freedom, and equality. One can easily imagine that his reconstructions of everydaytheories conceived for the explanation of events might stimulate comparative researchon the common-sensical interpretations of other social crises.

Birenheide et al. (2005) proposed an interesting cultural sociological explanationfor changes in the savings behavior of ordinary people. Drawing on a qualitativesurvey of small shareholders, they argue that financial saving has broken away fromthe classical pattern of deferred gratification: “Saving as such has not disappeared,but it has lost its primary significance as a future-oriented delay in consumption. Ithas been replaced by the immediacy of credit-financed consumption on the one handand by a speculative increase in financial resources on the other” (Birenheide et al.,2005; our translation). The authors see this change as being linked to the socialprocess of individualization, accompanied by a “responsibilization” as a form ofdisciplining through freedom. The investors see themselves as subjects who fulfil thesocietal demand for self-responsibility (cf. Deutschmann, 2010: 646).

More fundamentally, Jens Beckert has analyzed economic processes such as valueand price formation (Beckert, 2020) in specific markets, where prices are onlymarginally based on qualities inherent in the product and largely of a symbolic nature.The art market is a case in point. In other markets, product quality depends on futuredevelopments,which are chronically uncertain. Beckert looks at both of these cases toshow that assessments of quality in markets are not primarily an information problembut are based on intersubjective processes of mutual observation “that unfold be-tweenmarket participants and are anchored in evolving institutions” (ibid.: 289).Withreference to notions of “collective belief” (Durkheim) and “thought collectives”(L. Fleck), Beckert coins the term “valuation collectives.” The consensus regarding theappropriate price that emerges in these collectives can be seen as a “meso-level socialorder in which actors (who can be individual or collective) are attuned to and interactwith one another on the basis of shared […] understandings about the purposes of thefield, relationships to others in the field […], and the rules governing legitimate actionin the field” (ibid.: 289). He calls this the “markets from meaning” model.

18 Uta Karstein and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr

In this respect, the field of economics, as it is examined in these studies, is a goodexample of what Jeffrey Alexander has called the “autonomy” of culture, which cancertainly be used here to explain social facts.

b) Religion as cultureThe sociological analyses of religion by the first generation of sociologists like MaxWeber or Emile Durkheim could certainly be regarded as standard works in the senseof a“strong program” of cultural sociology since the cultural significance of religion isat the heart of their work.

At present there are also a number of works in the German-language sociology ofreligion that are characterized by a tight interweaving of perspectives from the soci-ology of religion and cultural sociology. These include the extensive work of WolfgangEßbach (2014, 2019).⁵ His systematizing interpretation of European religious historyaims to break up what he considers the currently prevailing “bipolarity of Christianityand secularism” (Eßbach, 2014: 14; our translation). The starting point for his analysesis the assumption that there have been four dominant experiential periods since theReformation: the post-Reformation religious wars, the revolutions of 1789 and there-after, the establishment of the market society in the 19th century, and the increasingmechanization and aestheticization of the lifeworld since then. The collective expe-riences associated with these periods challenged the religious interpretative frame-works and led to their transformation. To show this, Eßbach reconstructs intellectualdiscourses and develops a typology of European religions,which by no means simplymerge into denominational-ecclesiastical varieties thereof but also revolve aroundhuman reason, art, or science. This sociological-historical contribution need not fearcomparison with Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age.

Also clearly inspired by cultural sociology are the works of Monika Wohlrab-SahrandMarian Burchardt on the sociology of religion (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt, 2012;Burchardt and Wohlrab-Sahr, 2013). Engaging with the international debate on sec-ularization, inspired by Shmuel Eisenstadt’s concept of “multiple modernities,” andinformed by differentiation theory, the authors distinguish between different idealtypes of secularity (“multiple secularities”), which are understood as forms of sym-bolic distinction and institutional differentiation between religion and other socialspheres and practices. These ideal types are conceived as solutions to social problemsthat become virulent in social conflicts. Each corresponds to a dominant guiding ideathat represents the vanishing point of the respective response, lends it legitimacy, andplays a key role in shaping the dynamics of social conflicts. The authors speak of“cultures of secularity” (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt, 2012: 905). This perspective has

Cf. Koenig, RELIGION, this volume.

Culture 19

become the basis of an international interdisciplinary research network (Kleine andWohlrab-Sahr, 2016).⁶

The proximity of the sociology of religion and sociology of culture is also evidentwhen one looks at the sociological strand of cultural sociology in the tradition ofAlfred Schütz. Its distinction between different degrees of transcendence was laterfruitfully applied to the sociology of religion by Thomas Luckmann.⁷ In the German-language sociology of religion, it is primarily Hubert Knoblauch (2009) who has takenup this idea. While distancing himself from Luckmann’s anthropological concept oftranscendence and basing it on communication instead, he follows him in the as-sumption that religion is undergoing a transformation, for which he proposes the term“popular religion.” By that he means a cultural form that is produced and propagatedby the market and the media. The dissolution of boundaries between religion andpopular culture becomes visible in formats inwhich religious issues are addressed butthat are borrowed from secular popular culture as well as in communication that bearsthe marks of religion while being adopted by popular culture (ibid: 196). Such popularreligion is the cultural expression of a new spirituality, the characteristics of whichinclude a pronounced anti-dogmatism, holism, and an anchorage in subjectivity, aswell as a low degree of institutionalization.

c) Social inequalities as cultural differences and distinctionsAt first glance, diagnoses of social inequality might not necessarily be the subjectmatter of cultural sociology but rather that of the sociology of social stratification.Nevertheless, cultural sociology’s interest in issues of social inequality has—probablynot by chance—a long tradition especially in the US-American context. One need onlythink of Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, Park’s and Stonequist’s works on “the marginalman,” or Sennett’s The Hidden Injuries of Class and The Corrosion of Character.

In recent years, interesting books and essays have been published in the German-speaking context that focus on new lines of tension in which different socio-structuralinequalities intertwine with conflicting mentalities. Some of these writings have an-alyzed a constellation that is currently becoming apparent on a global level in the newpopulist and identitarian movements, and in which precarious class positions (orthose perceived as precarious) are intertwined with anti-migrant and increasingly alsoanti-Islamic positions.The background of this constellation is examined in analyses ofthe conflicts over upwardly mobile migrants and the negative classifications that areassociated with them (Sutterlüty and Walter, 2005; Neckel and Soeffner, 2008). JörgHüttermann (2006) ethnographically examined the disputes over Islamic symbols and—following Norbert Elias—interpreted them as conflicts of hierarchy between estab-

www.multiple-secularities.de Silke Gülker (2019) follows this distinction in her work on Transcendence in Science (our transla-tion).

20 Uta Karstein and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr

lished actors in urban society and Muslim immigrants. At that time, these disputescould still be interpreted as forms of a modern incorporation ritual and thus as a modeof integration through conflict. Since then, however, they have become increasinglyoverlaid by other dynamics. One of these is of a global nature and is articulated in theprotest movements occurring around the world, especially the populist movements, inwhich socio-structural situations and threats amalgamate with cultural preferencesand defensive attitudes.

On the basis of comparative ethnographic research of German and US-Americanprotest movements, Nils Kumkar (2018) examined the Tea Party and Occupy WallStreet as symptoms of the structural crisis of US capitalism and its class structure, asbecame evident in the financial crisis of 2008. The author argued that the protestswere rooted in the crisis experience of the American petty bourgeoisie and that thisdiscontent later played a crucial role in Trump’s successful bid for the presidency. Alsorelevant here are the frames of interpretation that emerged during the crisis and werecommunicatively condensed, for example, into the trope of the constantly strugglingindividual who plays by the rules and patiently stands in line,while others,who do notcare about the rules, come from behind and cut in line without having done anythingto deserve it. This work relates to Arlie Hochschild’s study on the American Right(Hochschild, 2016). Cornelia Koppetsch (2018) has also examined the connectionbetween social and cultural declassification and political mobilization using the ex-ample of the supporters of the far-right political party Alternative für Deutschland(AfD).

A second dynamic that overlaps with and exacerbates this first one reflects theGerman situation in a specific way. It is nurtured by the ongoing dislocations thatfollowed German reunification. Against the backdrop of different socio-structuralsituations in the GDR and the Federal Republic, these dislocations provoke constantEast–West comparisons. In these comparative assessments, the East German popu-lation gets chronically short-changed. A significant number of East Germans are thosewhom Reckwitz in his book The Society of Singularities (2020) had attested to be on thedefensive against the new, highly qualified middle class with its urban lifestyle (whatthis middle class views as “the good life”) as the leading social group. The cultural-ization of the social and the appreciation of the creative and unique thus produce—according to his thesis—new forms of social inequality.

The “Lütten Klein” study by Steffen Mau (2019) on life in the East Germantransformation society provides a very interesting insider’s view. Impelled by socialistequality imperatives, the GDR sought to equalize social stratification at a relatively lowlevel of income. After 1989, this came into conflict with cultural developments, the“singularization” in West German society, which, to quote Ulrich Beck, had experi-enced an ascendant “elevator effect.” Coupled with the upheavals of the transfor-mation period, which again closed off the channels of ascent already blocked in GDRsociety, additionally devalued the lifestyles and cultural patterns developed there,and were often experienced as cultural colonization, this resulted in an explosivemixture that has found an outlet in, among other things, the resentments of right-wing

Culture 21

populist movements and parties. Mau concludes: “In this sense, the East–West dis-course can also be interpreted as a cultural conflict in which a more traditional milieushields itself against changes perceived as threatening” (Mau, 2019: 231; our trans-lation).

This conflict situation takes on a special dramatic character because it is com-municatively linked to the memory of the 1989 protests and thus becomes part of aresistance narrative (Hartmann and Leistner, 2019).

3 Conclusion

The sociological analysis of culture—in its two different strands as an analysis of thecultural field and a cultural-sociological approach to social phenomena of differentkinds—has proved to be an extremely fruitful field of theory-building and empiricalresearch over the last 20 years. It is not only the paths laid by the sociological classicsof the first and second generation that have proven to be stimulating. So too have theapproaches based on differentiation theory and a theory of observation, on praxeol-ogy, a sociology of knowledge enriched with communication theory, as well as anextended version of rational-choice theory.

The strength of cultural sociology, however, is not least demonstrated by itscompetence in providing insightful diagnoses of the nature of the times, both his-torically and in view of current developments. Across different areas of research, newtypes of production and subjectivity, new forms of evaluation and normativity, as wellas new social divisions along cultural lines have been fruitful areas of study in culturalsociology. The current research connects with and contributes to international trendsbut also addresses specific German constellations related to the ongoing unificationprocess.

Much of this research in German-language cultural sociology could contribute agreat deal to the international academic discourse had it been translated into English.Here, we find a clear generational divide. Whereas the younger generation is muchmore present in the international sociology arena, authors of earlier generations haveoften largely remained within the German-language debate. This is not a matter ofquality but rather one of academic tradition and heritage. Honoring this heritage andits academic language should not prevent these works from becoming better knownoutside of Germany. These exciting books should be translated.

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26 Uta Karstein and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr

https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975520969603

Cultural Sociology 1 –19

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Of Sound and Flavour – Revisiting the Notion of Material for the Cultural Sociological Analysis of Art Domains

Isabelle DarmonUniversity of Edinburgh, UK

AbstractThis article proposes a possible path for a materialist cultural sociology of art, focusing on the dynamics of art(s) domains and harnessing Adorno’s dialectical notion of material anew. I seek to establish links between dynamics of the arts domains and the fostering of specific modes of engagement with them – and, potentially, stances in other domains of life. I argue that a return to Adorno’s notion of (musical) material allows for such connections to be made: the ‘material’ is where the dynamics of the specific arts domains are inscribed; but it is also what is engaged with – by composers and artists as well as by interpreters, performers and publics. A dialectical material lens seems well suited for the critical study of the dynamic of arts domains in the 20th and 21st centuries, given the multiple artistic ‘breaks’ proclaimed. Focusing on some well-known movements in music and cuisine which sought to ‘emancipate’, ‘democratise’, and ‘diversify’ sounds and flavours, I analyse the processes through which they produced sound and flavour anew. I suggest that sounds and flavours themselves have become the carriers of logics relevant to music and cuisine, and that they have come to imperiously command modes of commitment (from composers and chefs, performers, listeners and diners alike) that evince specific stances. Through this necessarily sketchy survey, I provide indications that broader, cross-cutting cultural dynamics may be at stake. Overall, I seek to make clear what theoretical steps are afforded by the joint attention to materiality and the dynamic of art domains.

KeywordsAdorno, art domains, cuisine, cultural sociology of art, flavour, material, music, sound, Weber

Corresponding author:Isabelle Darmon, Sociology, School of Social and Political Science, The University of Edinburgh, 6.27 Chrystal Macmillan building, 15a George square, Edinburgh, Midlothian EH8 9LD, UK. Email: Isabelle.Darmon@ed.ac.uk

969603 CUS0010.1177/1749975520969603Cultural SociologyDarmonresearch-article2020

Article

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Social scientific studies of art are difficult – always having to circumspectly steer between the Scylla of over-sociologising and the Charibdis of ‘internal analysis’, whilst neverthe-less attempting to engage sociologically with art objects, art and the artistic encounter. There is a furious desire, on the part of cultural sociologists, to attend to ‘the operations and logics of the inner workings of cultural objects’ in order to explore how ‘human expe-rience of art affects human experience of the world’ (Wagner-Pacifici, 2010: 109). Various paths have been explored in these treacherous waters, from new emphases on the material dimension of the relation to art, on the micro-sociological and empirical analyses of its social affordances and power, to the analysis of large corpora of aesthetic data (sensory elements of the works of art), in search of aesthetic patterns of sociological relevance. In this article I suggest that the analysis of the dynamics of art and cultural domains can be a fruitful route to respond to the call made by Wagner-Pacifici, and by others (e.g. Marshall, 2011). The comparison of dynamics of cultural domains1 is undoubtedly a fundamental sociological task, and the present inquiry, into key directions in the dynamics of music and cuisine in the 20th and 21st centuries, could have attempted to be a contribution to such endeavour. Yet my purpose is different here, as I am seeking to establish links between dynamics of the music and culinary domains and modes of engagement with sounds and flavours – and, potentially, stances in other domains of life. I will suggest that a return to Adorno’s notion of (musical) material allows for these connections to be made: the ‘mate-rial’ is where the dynamics of the specific arts domains are inscribed; but it is also what is engaged with – by composers and artists as well as by interpreters, performers and pub-lics. Inspired by recent materialist musicology, I hope to show how recovering the dialec-tical character of Adorno’s notion of the material could also help foster a more dynamic materialism than the ‘new materialist’ approaches to art and the arts.

‘Putting art back into social sciences of the arts’ has been a consistent endeavour of cultural sociology of the arts over the last 30 years, to remedy what were perceived to be blind spots on the part of the sociological approach to art – and this move, informed by various ‘turns’, very much came to mean claiming the art object, its material qualities and agency for social scientific purposes (De La Fuente, 2007, 2010). Approaches sub-sumed under the banner of the ‘new sociology of art’ have privileged the minute descrip-tion of art ‘always in the making’ (Hennion, 2016a: 290), and both the artistic encounter and the account of it require that we should make ourselves available, ‘pay attention’, to the art-object’s ‘presence’ (Hennion, 2019: 51). Studies inspired by the strong pro-gramme in cultural sociology have also turned to the ‘material’, and are not less prodigal of sensually rich descriptions of ‘surfaces’ (e.g. Alexander, 2008), but this is done in order to bring out their semiotic significance for deeper social processes, rather than with a view to analysing their organisation. The power of art objects lies in their stillness (Wagner-Pacifici, 2010), in the ‘social-psychological compression of sensualities’ they effectuate, as De La Fuente suggests, drawing on Harvey Molotch (De La Fuente, 2007). Indeed, in these approaches, any study of art domains and their dynamics is forsaken in the name of the agency of the art-objects themselves, whose properties emerge in ever-renewed encounters and cannot be decided before they happen, as Zizek puts it in rela-tion to ‘new materialisms’ (Zizek, 2018: 48).

Conversely, the explosion of computational or digital humanities has led to new studies into the patterning of art and cultural domains, which have not hesitated in advocating a

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return to the question of ‘aesthetic logics’ – defined as the relatively autonomous ‘sensory appeal in cultural systems’ (Van der Laan and Kuipers, 2016: 64). Here, access to the structure of the sensory properties of art objects does not come about by tuning oneself to them, but by harnessing the power of machine-processing for ‘seeing precisely that which we don’t see’ (Wagner-Pacifici et al., 2015: 3). Work now subsumed under the banner of ‘formal studies of culture’ (Edelmann and Mohr, 2018) has been looking for ways of unveiling cultural patterns and of approaching the broader organisation of cultural and art material through cultural codings lending themselves to the interpretation of social mean-ings and to a new ‘computational hermeneutics’ (Mohr et al., 2015). Yet the suspicion may always sneak in that ‘external grammars’ are projected on to art objects, ‘reducing art to an enquiry into signifying and communicative acts’ (Hennion, 2014: 172).2

In both the new sociology of art and computational hermeneutics, materiality thus appears as that which humans can only approach through intense self-tuning or surrender to the machine, and yet as that which reveals ourselves to ourselves, as the truth of social and human life. The ‘surface’ of the art-object points us to the ‘depths’ of social life,3 and ‘inhuman’ machine-processing thwarts social interpretations limited by human rational-ity to better uncover the cultural material patterning of human life and culture. Through a sort of inverted commodity fetishism, as if the arts hosted potential for salvation from the petrifications of the economy, a hope already entertained by Simmel in The View of Life (2010), art-objects appear as very complex things at first, but when their materiality (and ‘sensuousness’) is restored through our acute tuning to them or through the power of the machine, they are expected to reflect back the truth of social relations of which they are themselves part, absolving the social scientist from any undue over-sociologis-ing or over-aestheticising.

Yet, even views sympathetic to their takes on materiality and aesthetic patterns criti-cise the new sociology of art for lack of a broader sense of the historical dynamics of art domains, and the formal studies of culture for the risk of sociological thwarting of inter-nal grammars. The notion of mediation, elaborated from Adorno in different ways by Antoine Hennion (who recently abandoned it),4 Tia DeNora, and Georgina Born, had been meant to tackle such disjuncture. Born and Barry (2018) took the mediation frame-work further in their recent collection on Music, Mediation Theories and Actor-Network Theory, in particular to explore anew the articulation of music mediations with other social, material and infrastructural ‘forces’; and to reinscribe ‘subjectivity’ ‘at the heart of theories of mediation’ (Born and Barry, 2018: 477) as the way to attend to the material specificity of the artistic encounter. The explorations encouraged in this third current are informed, albeit critically, by Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and new materialist approaches, in which any notion of dynamic comes from matter itself, from its becoming and temporalities, thus presenting a radically different connection between mediation and materialism from Adorno’s. Nonetheless the task to jointly attend to the broad dynamics of music as well as to the specificity of the musical encounter, which the edi-tors of the collection stimulatingly put forward, could, in my view, benefit from a return to Adorno’s dialectical and agonistic notion of ‘material’ – and, perhaps from a re-dialec-ticalisation of the notion of mediation. I will only touch on the latter hypothesis in this article, focusing, rather, on the former, and spurred by recent music scholarship (Kane, 2007, 2014; Saladin, 2012; Wilson, 2018).

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Indeed, Adorno’s notion of the material, that is, ‘the sum of sound properties and sonic relations pre-formed by history’ (Dahlhaus, 1974: 10) condenses and conveys the dynamic of the music domain: ‘It is the material which provides the stage for progress in art, not individual works’ (Adorno, ‘Reaktion und Fortschritt’, quoted in Paddison, 1993: 88). ‘Progress’ of course does not refer to any superiority of the latest music production, but rather to a sense of where the dialectical dynamic of music is at, that is to say, a sense of the tensions that come to define it. The idea of tension is both abso-lutely crucial to Adorno’s dialectical materialism and difficult to grasp as it is endlessly replayed on different levels. Samuel Wilson, in a remarkable recent piece on Adorno and new materialisms, convincingly argues that there has been too much literal inter-pretation of Adorno, conveniently leading to dismissals of his overall approach as overly general, metaphysical – in short, empirically ungrounded; and that it is much more productive to follow the ‘spirit’ rather than the ‘letter’ of his thought – to ‘deter-ritorialize’ him (Wilson, 2018). In that light, I would argue that Adorno’s notion of tension of the musical material demands renewed sociological attention, both in order to avoid views of materiality as ‘stuff which is “simply there”’, and thus ‘inert’ (Wilson, 2018: 263), but also where one wishes to oppose views of sound as continuous flux, animated through its own agency (Cox 2011). As Wilson has put it, ‘past thinking and practices exert historical pressures upon the present’ and these tensions ‘cannot simply be ignored or dismissed, at risk of their unacknowledged continuance’: they need to be ‘worked through’ (2018: 268).

A dialectical material lens seems well suited for the critical study of the dynamic of arts domains in the 20th and 21st centuries, given the multiple artistic ‘breaks’ pro-claimed. Indeed, the dynamic of the music domain in the long 20th century can be said to be one of ‘breaking free’ of sound, as musicologist Makis Solomos has masterfully shown (2013). Artistic breaks were declared by some 20th-century movements across many art domains – e.g. Futurism and the movements drawing the consequences of post-humanism, and some of the directions of ‘emancipation’ of sounds can be found in other art domains: thus Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter associated their quest to ‘emancipate colour’ from the domination of form to Schoenberg’s emancipation of dissonance in musical composition (Jay, 2020). However improbable this might read, I will argue here that the case can be made of a parallel ‘breaking free’ of flavour from cuisine.5 Intense musical and culinary research did take place over the last century, propped up by shared interests in undoing what were perceived as formal, abstract, hierarchical, exclusionary musical and culinary straitjackets and, as per Edgard Varèse’s formula, allegedly ‘liberat-ing sound’ (and flavour) from these (Varèse and Wen-Chung, 1966). Seeking to ‘eman-cipate’ or ‘democratise’ and diversify sounds and flavours implied a conflictual process at the same time as it signalled a belief in the possibility of clean rupture. These breaks thus lend themselves well to a dialectical materialist analysis, that is to say to an analysis of the tensions at play, and how these were stretched to the utmost, suppressed, or diluted in the process of producing sounds and flavours anew. Furthermore, whereas these artis-tic breaks often associated themselves (or were associated with) philosophical ones (Husserl’s phenomenology and Derrida’s deconstruction, for instance), I will shift the attention to their ethical implications, and argue that they themselves fostered disposi-tions and stances, modes of engagement with and commitment to ‘sound’ and ‘flavour’

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in various guises. Overall I will suggest that sounds and flavours themselves have become the carriers of music- and cuisine-relevant logics, and that they have come to imperiously command modes of commitment from composers and chefs, performers, listeners and diners alike that evince stances with, possibly, more general bearing, across but also beyond art domains.

In what follows, I refer to well-known music research and ‘creativity’ programmes, carriers of each of these directions of ‘breaking free’, and propose an analysis of the processes through which they produced sound anew and demanded specific forms of engagement with sound, pointing out how the elision of tensions (in the material, for composition) went together with the cultivation of specific stances. I explore parallel dynamics in 20th-century and 21st-century cuisine and how these in turn have shaped contemporary flavours. This cannot be an exhaustive survey: the comparison is here more taken as providing cues, indications that broader, cross-cutting cultural dynamics may be at stake. Yet such a sketch will hopefully make clear what theoretical steps are afforded by the joint attention to materiality and the dynamic of art domains.

Acousmatic Sounds and Intense Dematerialised Flavours

Early 20th century musical ruptures brought about new conceptions of sound and the sound material - Schoenberg’s Klangfarbenmelodien (melodies of tone-colours, i.e. of timbres), Futurism and Russolo’s Art of Noises, and Edgard Varèse’s widely com-mented visions for music as ‘organised sound’. Yet it is the rupture declared and enacted by Pierre Schaeffer and the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) after the Second World War that is particularly significant for my account. Schaeffer material-ised the break from the parametrical sound of the classical order (defined by its pitch, duration, timbre etc.) by cutting sounds from their ‘source’. Through tape editing and sound manipulation, he created ‘acousmatic’ sounds, both ‘real’ and ‘concrete’ (e.g. train noises in Étude aux chemins de fer, piano noises in Étude violette - piano), but to be listened to for their morphological qualities rather than for their ‘anecdotal’ sug-gestiveness (Kane 2014: 28). Sound became the starting and end point, an event and a process. Brian Kane has highlighted the deliberately a-historical, ontological concep-tion of sound that is thereby developed, through an ‘essentialist’ conception of technol-ogy – rather than technology as bearer of ‘historically unique affordances’ – and thus the refusal, or rather the denial and suppression of any musical material in the Adornian sense (Kane, 2007: 22).

Such suppression of the tensions also happens at the compositional level: Schaeffer’s compositions with sounds were aimed to bring out their singular morphology, to ‘assem-ble [sounds] according to [their] family resemblances and concordance of characters’ (quoted in Kane, 2014: 120, my emphases), where character means global singularity, rather than specific, isolated sound parameters. Affinity between morphological qualities of sound both relates sounds through families of similar sounds and highlights their indi-viduality. This fosters a new form of acute, focused listening, aimed at ‘un-conditioning’ listening, opening it to each sound. Schaeffer’s demand upon the listener for a mode of listening that did away with prior conditioning as to the meanings of sounds, is meant to foster ‘an intimacy with matter’ (quoted in Solomos, 2013: 241); or, as Pierre Henry,

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another GRM composer, said, the listener should dive into the ‘interiority of sound’ (Solomos, 2013). Composition is thus at the service of the ‘disclosure’ (Kane, 2014) of the essence of sounds.

Brian Kane has demonstrated the importance of Husserl’s phenomenology for Schaeffer’s ontological conception of sound, whereby sound is posited as always prior to the experience of it, and:

experience becomes secondary to its role of providing evidence for disclosing essences. Through a sleight of hand, phenomenology covertly places its ontology prior to experience, and then subsequently discloses the ontological horizon as if it were always already present—as if its ontology made experience possible in the first place. (Kane, 2014: 36)

This ‘sleight of hand’ very well captures the kind of elision processes at play. As shown by Kane, these amount to the negation of the (Adornian) historical sedimentation of sound and suggests that both composition and listening become operations of revelation.

Alongside such philosophical rooting however, these elisions spur specific modes of engagement with, and indeed, commitment to, sound: ethical stances, demanded of both the composer and the listener. Ascetic exertion and mastery is required from the com-poser: whereas Schaeffer often worked with social sounds and noises, whose origin is even more immediately perceptible than the musical instrumental origin of sounds used in non-electronic music, compositions, as ‘montages’ of recorded sounds, must evict all traces of social reality and transform everyday concreteness into concreteness of sound for itself. Ascetic exertion is also expected from the listener, who should tune their own listening through a new sonic solfège, that is to say a new music theory for the organisa-tion of sounds, classed according to their morphological qualities, and refrain from lis-tening indexically (to sounds as signs of social activity or physical tools), as would habitually be the case. Schaeffer himself referred to the asceticism of his Études, but he meant this in the common sense of sobriety and simplicity – opposing them to the ‘tor-ture’ inflicted to the sound objects by ‘preconceived considerations’ (e.g. in dodeca-phonic music) (Kane, 2014: 120). I understand asceticism here in the much stronger sense of exertion and work upon oneself and the world (to make them more worthy of God). Indeed, the mutual reluctance felt by Schaeffer and John Cage towards each oth-er’s music (Saladin, 2012), despite their common aim of ‘letting sounds be themselves’ (as per Cage’s well known plea), may have stemmed from this opposition between the ascetic stance demanded by Schaeffer, and Cage’s well-known self-professed contem-plative and mystical attitude of ‘letting go’.

In what sense can it be ventured that flavour ‘broke free’ from cuisine in the 20th century, echoing the flight of sound? Like sound for music, flavour was always very much what cuisines were about. Indeed traditional cuisines are characterised by typical flavour combinations (and their endless, elaborate, variations – see Rozin and Rozin, 1981) in the same way as the timbre of a specific instrument, such as the bagpipe, or koto, are associated with, and carry, Gaelic or Japanese music. As was the case for the ‘breaking free’ of sound, technological, market and societal developments supported the breaking free of flavour, which nevertheless was channelled through wide artistic as well as more specifically culinary movements. Futurism, to start with, embarked on a

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ferocious (and fascistoid) crusade against pasta and ‘all traditional combinations’ (Birnbaum, 2015: 86). The development of synthetic flavour, of technologies and proce-dures of ‘flavour design’, the recent glamourisation of the profession of flavourist and the increasing social science interest in flavour composition in the industry and by chefs, have all contributed to forwarding flavour as starting and end point, as process and as event – to echo my earlier characterisation of this transformation for sound.

The advent of gas chromatography, a technology that allowed for the identification of the various volatile aroma compounds in a given ingredient, facilitated the development of what could be called the physical-chemical breaking free of flavour, and eventually the emergence of a ‘molecular cuisine’. This process bears resemblance to the first attempts at electronic synthesis of sound from the combination of single sine-waves, pure pitches without harmonics, first carried out by Karlheinz Stockhausen, and, like Musique Concrète, purports to cut taste from its source ingredients. Whatever the techniques and processes used for this, and whatever the closeness or distance from science manifested in the names adopted (modernist cuisine, molecular cuisine, molecular gastronomy, experi-mental cuisine etc.), the unity of this movement resides in the separation of flavour (and more specifically ‘flavour molecules’ or ‘odorant compounds’) from its source ingredi-ents, and the associated processes of flavour de-construction and reconstruction.

Thus, for chef Ferran Adrià, the hero and herald of ‘modernist cuisine’ at the turn of this century, the emancipation of cuisine implied ‘deconstructing’ and questioning ‘tra-ditional meanings’ of dishes (Parasecoli, 2001).6 This led him to works of ‘disembodi-ment’ and ‘dematerialization’, in which what remained of food was, in Isabelle de Solier’s felicitous expression, ‘intense flavoured nothings’: mousses, foams, airs (de Solier, 2010: 163–164). In such cuisine, food ingredients almost vanish, sublimated into their flavour ‘spirit’:

A deconstructed dish protects the ‘spirit’ of each product it employs, and preserves (even enhances) the intensity of its flavor. Still, it presents a totally transformed combination of textures. The results are such that the patrons, when consuming this dish, can relate the final flavor to the classic recipe. (quoted in Parasecoli, 2001: 67)

Adrià sought to provoke a different kind of savouring, which, beyond the ironies and plays of deconstruction, beyond the highly technologised processes, directed eaters both to the intensity of flavours and to their ‘purity’ (Adrià’s word, quoted in Parasecoli, 2001: 68; see also Abend, 2011: 184). Yet Adrià claims that there is a something, an excess in every foodstuff, that escapes him, their ‘gen’, or spirit – the paradox is here complete as the apex of artificiality only seems to have been conjured up for the sake of directing the eater to the mysterious essence of each food, the ‘somewhat objective [but always elu-sive] reality’ of taste (Parasecoli, 2001: 71). The chasm between suggesting foods’ ‘gen’ and the technological sophistication and slave work7 this requires is left gaping – no ‘working through’ of the tensions is to be expected there, rather ultimately there is only one possible reconciliation between ‘gen’ and work, Adrià’s own ‘genius’. Adrià’s cui-sine echoes Schaeffer’s Études in some striking respects – as the truth of the sounds or flavours is aimed at through the technological device and composition, and there is a shared intent to foster a form of direct connection to sound or flavour, and to engage the

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eater and listener in a mode of eating and listening experience that is allegedly purified from its habitual (whether traditional or intellectualised) associations. Indeed Schaeffer’s ‘reduced listening’ seems echoed by what could be called ‘reduced tasting’ in Adrià’s cuisine, in the dining experience itself. And in both cases a short-circuit is taken through technology to a ‘quasi-metaphysical’ essence of sound and flavour (Parasecoli, 2001: 70), and listeners/savourers are expected to be touched by such grace. A dinner at El Bulli, as per a foodie couple’s blog,8 involved ‘extreme lighting’ (with ‘a spotlight aimed over each table’), fingers were used more often than cutlery, eating directions were pro-vided by busy service staff, excluding any possibility of mundane digressions in the interaction with them, and above all courses – some a mouthful, some full dishes – suc-ceeded each other at quick pace (dinner consisted of 40 courses, the first 20 of which were absorbed in 1 hour and 15 minutes!). All of this made for focused and close ‘involvement’ with the food, and with the food only, with no energy wasted on anything else. The couple, torn between giggling from pleasure and panting from the hard work, between bliss and ascetic striving, were left doubting what to make of this experience. The conclusion of their long documented piece therefore turns to the only certainty: an acknowledgement of Adrià’s ‘genius’, per se, and detached from its specific culinary content (‘The bottom line is that if you ever get a chance to spend up close time with a genius take it, for that’s a moment you’ll remember for the rest of your life’), thus com-ing round to Adrià’s own conclusion. After El Bulli, he turned to generic ‘creativity’ in his new Foundation, supported by La Caixa and Telefonica, coaching ‘innovation pro-cesses’ beyond gastronomy (Conde, 2017), and thus drawing, in a way, the logical con-clusions of his demateralisation of flavour.

Sound and Flavour Combinatorics

The breaking free of sounds and flavours has also meant breaking with rules for the sound and flavour combinations in musical and culinary systems, viewed as hierarchical and thus anti-democratic, or as undue restrictions on the immensity and diversity of possible combi-nations of all with all (sounds/flavours). Composer and music philosopher François Nicolas attributes the coining of the democratic strand of this move to musique sérielle, which abolished the hierarchies of tonal music; and extended the equalisation of notes thus afforded to timbre and rhythm, multiplying potential combinations between the various parameters of sound (Nicolas, 2010: 188).

Combinatory possibilities have been pursued in research on sounds both at the micro and macro levels. The principle is always some form of equalisation, as a basis for the potential combination of all with all, only curbed by local, specific rules. Equalisation can come very close to extreme calculative rationalisation, when ‘acoustic events’ are divided into temporal micro-slices (or ‘grains’) which will then be recombined in changed ways through ‘granular synthesis’ (Roads, 2004: 86). It can also be achieved through stochastic processes, whereby sequences of music, or even a whole musical piece, are produced through an algorithm which synthesises sounds undergoing aleatory variations (as in Xenakis’ GENDYN programme, a reference for contemporary com-puter music, including glitch, noise and ‘extreme’ computer music – see Haworth, 2015). Echoing Nicolas’ argument of an increased dependency of contemporary music on

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mathematics, Paul Théberge has suggested that music has been transformed ‘from an art of instrumental sound, performance and compositional technique to one of mathematics, digital technologies and algorithmic operations’ (Théberge, 2015: 330).

The breaking free of sounds here stumbles upon the challenge of offering musical consistency whilst breaking with the constraints of musical hierarchies. Whilst ‘new music’ had, according to Adorno, stretched this tension to the utmost, since each compo-sition had to construct its own rules for the combination of notes which had been eman-cipated from their scales, the so-to-speak democratist breaking free of sound went in the opposite direction and sought to unbend the tension through some form of coding or stamping of sounds in expanded sound universes.9 In biologically-inspired programmes for genetic algorithmic composition, for example, sound is apprehended through its ‘behaviour’, and consistency is assessed through ‘fitness’ scores for these behaviours (Eldridge and Bown, 2018). Relying on ‘fitness’ criteria implies drawing on known rep-ertoires of rules for selection. In the Vox Populi programme studied by DeLanda (2008), for example, sounds are defined through the classical parameters of pitch, timbre, loud-ness and duration, and sound ‘behaviour’ is assessed against rather conformist criteria of harmonic and melodic fitness. Precisely the kind of harmonic hierarchies that new music had brought down are here brought back through the back door of physical consonance (overlap of harmonic profile of sounds), equated with the alleged objectivity of ‘what is pleasing to the ear’ (Moroni et al., 2002: 212), despite the eminently cultural dependency of such pleasure, as noted by DeLanda. Indeed, the possibilities bred by combinatorics there seem to stem more from the ever-expanding population of sounds generated by the programme, than from any emancipation of composition principles.

The other possibility for ensuring some consistency of the pieces produced is to act upon the universe of sounds concerned by giving it a particular colour or style. Thus Brian Eno’s and Peter Chilvers’ generative programme Scape, which makes it possible for listeners to never listen twice to the same piece through a touchscreen interface with visual shapes, relies on the particular identity and quality of Eno’s sounds (Steadman, 2012). Interestingly and conversely, the indeterminacy of potential combinations shapes the kind of sounds that Eno works with, as Chilvers and Eno explain in an interview with Wired, so that any combination can ‘work well’:

Chilvers: A lot of the sounds came out of a mixture of existing pieces by Brian, so there was already an existing combination that would sit well together. I think it’s partly down to the nature of the kind of music that Brian has been creating that they actually sit well with most sounds in this universe.

Eno: That’s right, it’s a kind of universe of sounds that work well together, and they can have quite ambiguous tonal relations with each other . . . this music was made from the beginning in that way. It was made on the idea that the elements within it were not in a fixed relationship to each other, they didn’t have to be in just one relationship. The discovery that we made was that you could take three or four of those elements from one piece and three or four from another piece and – ah! – they can work together. It’s been treated like a composition process from the beginning really. (Steadman, 2012)

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Thus, consistency comes from the fact that it is Eno’s sound universe, Eno’s brand of sound, that is being endlessly explored, composed and recomposed. Immersion in that sound prevails over the play with its different possible versions and makes that play pos-sible. In both of these polarised cases (Vox Populi, Scape), the alleged infinity of possi-bilities, through an ever-expanding sound universe or through ever-renewed possibilities of combinations, is curbed for the sake of instilling consistency, but this is achieved through sound-breeding formulas or the use of an exclusive ‘set of [sound] seeds’, in Chilvers’ astute words, which prolong the genetic metaphor. The tensions of the material, between the combinatory drive and the demands of composition, are not so much sup-pressed, as in Musique Concrète and the ontologisation of sound, rather they are loos-ened through what could be called a process of geneticisation of sound.

These processes of sound geneticisation fare very well in the new platform economy. For, as Paul Rekret has shown, even though sonic content might appear irrelevant where platforms seek to keep the listener engaged, such persistence of experience is neverthe-less well served by ‘sound that takes its audience neither too high nor too low’, for the ‘continual production of audience data with minimal friction’ (2019: 59, 69). In pop music, this perfectly matches ‘chill’ music, and the definition of ambient by Brian Eno (Rekret, 2019). All tensions are diluted in such sound material, as it itself becomes a ‘sonic flux’ (Cox, 2011: 155) and the composer becomes, as per John Cage’s vision, a ‘curator’ of ‘sonic matter’ (Cox, 2011).

Not unlike Schaeffer, Eno seeks to ‘deepen listening’, but this is through the very different means of ambient music, which, according to François Bonnet, functions as ‘an “ecological” device, an environmental expressive apparatus’ (explicitly claimed in the name ‘Scape’), which ‘reaffirms the multitude of sound in its oceanic continuity’ (Bonnet, 2016: 278). This fleeting character of ambient and other deep listening music has also been described by David Toop, echoing Eno, as ‘aspiring to the condition of perfume’ (Toop, 2001: 21). Such music, then, impregnates and intoxicates both the music maker and the listener, leading them into ‘a shifting zone’ (2018: 22), and thus into a typical mystical stance of ‘in-between’. Scape itself may be offering its users the kind of ‘space for meditative experimentalism’ that Toop had in mind for electronic music (Rekret, 2019: 60).

Combinatorics also underpins cuisine, of course. One of the first heroes of ‘modern’ cuisine, Antonin Carême, divided recipes into signifying units whose potential combina-tions and recombinations were ruled by the grammar he established (Ferguson, 2004). Molecular gastronomy, and more generally contemporary cuisine, is itself heavily inspired by a combinatory logic. Cuisine is also one of the fields in which ‘computational creativity systems’ are being developed and tested, with key input from computer scien-tists. IBM’s Chef Watson project, a programme for collaborative machine–human gen-eration of recipes, works through a dizzying corpus of recipes, ingredients, flavour compounds, cooking methods, tools and so on, applying specific principles to it for gen-erating and selecting new recipe ideas (Varshney et al., 2019).10 The IBM programme equates culinary composition and computational combinations, through the invocation of ‘creativity’ as frame, where creativity is defined as a non-domain specific, transferable procedure consisting of ‘a generative step to produce many ideas and a selective step to determine the ones that are the best’ (Varshney et al., 2019: 1). The generation of recipes

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can be done, as in computational programmes for musical composition, through genetic algorithms, stochastic sampling and associative generation (Varshney et al., 2019: 5). And again, consistency comes from the selection principles, and from the fitness of the recipes produced with criteria stemming from consumer research: ‘novelty’ and ‘pleas-antness’ (also called ‘deliciousness’).

Whilst novelty, in the Chef Watson software, is measured against the corpus of relat-able artefacts known by the programme user, ‘pleasantness’ is a calculated property of the generated artefacts and, in particular, of the flavours of the dish produced. The pro-gramme thus breeds the fittest flavours, as Vox Populi breeds the fittest sounds. This is based on neuroscientific and chemical research allegedly showing that a ‘hedonic quan-tity’ can be associated with individual flavour compounds, ‘regardless of culture or other subjectivity’; and that the pleasantness of a combination of flavour compounds ‘is approximately a linear combination of the pleasantness values of the individual com-pounds’! (Varshney et al., 2019: 9). Hence pleasure is predicted through a ‘data-driven model’ which relies on hedonic valences of individual flavours.11 Flavour has broken free from its traditional associations in existing recipes, only to be tied back to its natural physical properties, and to a scale of hedonic capacity. All tensions of the culinary mate-rial, all excess of the culinary over the combinatory logic, disappear, since cuisine is equated with combining the fittest flavours for maximising ‘hedonic value’.

As it turns out, combinatorics is also what has driven the creations of David Chang, the ‘post-gourmet’ chef, who, first with the Momofuku noodle bar (opened in 2004), brought a resolute and cheerful ‘Bastille day moment’ to the New York food scene and then to American dining more generally (Platt, 2014). Chang’s characteristically self-deriding ‘Unified Theory of Deliciousness’ (Chang, 2016) may well be a post-fact construction which barely explains his food and its success – yet, it does offer a way into Chang’s approach to the material, and it now forms the basis of the culinary lab which informs the cuisine in the restaurants of his quite extended business group. The core of this ‘theory’, inspired by Douglas Hofstadter’s isomorphisms and strange loops,12 is to unravel patterns of flavour combinations across culinary cultures, thus considerably widening the base of source ingredients for the individual flavour com-ponent of these patterns. Chang’s ‘cross-cultural blockbuster’ pattern equivalences reframe migrants’ constrained world of substitute ingredients, turning it into a power-ful vehicle for both ‘novelty’ and ‘pleasantness’. This is because, Chang tells us, whilst pleasure is fuelled by recognition, and thus by habit memory, this is redoubled by the distance created by the displacement of the source for it, the excitement at rediscover-ing this cherished taste or textures through the combination of unknown ingredients – there is pleasure and meta-pleasure at the same time (Chang, 2016). His combinatory and culinary paradoxes are meant to ‘unleash’ flavours. Contrary to Adria’s quest in the spiritualisation of chicken curry, Chang thus does not seek to sublimate perception towards a purity of flavour; his commitment is rather to the flavour multiple – ‘tons of’ flavour, with also maximum ‘deliciousness’ and hedonic value.13 However the equiva-lences between the taste functions and textures of his recurring patterns do not neces-sarily work: thus his Asian ‘ceci e pepe’ at Nishi, ‘Chang’s proto-Italian restaurant in Chelsea’ was received with sensory delight, yet with scepticism at the suggested paral-lel (Gold, 2018). In the end, recognisability may well be due more to a ‘Changian way’

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(Judkis, 2019), not unlike the fragrance of Eno’s music. There is definitely a ‘Momofuku flavour’, with bases in fermented pastes, and heightened, amplified, deepened and maximised through seasoned salts. Developed as the taste of down-town New York, giving ‘a sense, as you slurp your noodles and devour your pork buns, that you’re involved in the local culinary equivalent of a midnight rave’, as New York magazine food critic Adam Platt (2010) has suggestively put it, the Momofuku flavour then moved from that ‘terroir’ of his (Platt) to becoming a breeding device, both amplifying and yet stamping the Changian flavour universe: a geneticisation process that here, even more clearly than for Eno, comes close to branding.

Discussion and Conclusion

In this article, I have explored a possible way for holding together the analysis of broad dynamics of the arts domains and attention to the specificity of the artistic dispositions fostered through these dynamics. Looking at the ‘breaking free’ of sound in the 20th cen-tury, I focused on two key movements which can be seen as polar opposites, although they may jointly inspire musicians: on the one hand, a ‘breaking free’ of sound from its abstract parameters, a zooming into sound in itself, its acousmatic morphology and qualities; on the other hand, a ‘breaking free’ of sound from the hierarchies of music systems, a ‘democra-tisation’ of sound and equalisation as indifferent matter for infinite combinatorics.

I charted parallel moves in the culinary arts. Modernist cuisine sought to ‘free’ fla-vours from their traditional meanings, whilst computational gastronomy and the combi-natorics of fusion cuisine have promoted what could also be called the democratisation of flavour – as flavours are assessed individually and associated with individual hedonic valences in creativity programmes, or become permutable through cross-cultural equiva-lences. Although these breaks participated in driving the evolution of the music and culinary systems towards multiple, so to speak localised, orders of sounds and flavours, with each responding to one dominant, polarising logic, they have arguably had a broader imprint on musical and culinary practices from composition to listening and tasting, as they always represent a possible direction and exert pressure on the musical and culinary material at hand.

Analysing the dynamics of arts domains from the perspective of their vanishing lines may be a fruitful way of re-engaging dialectically with Adorno’s notion of material. Even though, for Adorno, the dialectical wrestling with the material takes place through and in the artwork, a conception of the musical material as pervaded by tensions also affords a relatively more open notion of the work, whereby not only composition but also interpre-tation, performance, and listening are located in a changing ‘force-field’ (Kraftfeld) (Paddison, 1993). It is thus possible to conceive of the historical dynamics of art domains as force-fields organised by the tensions pervading their material (enacted and re-enacted through works, performances and acts of listening and savouring). Even though Adorno refers to the tensions held on to (but also ‘congealed’) in the art work in ways that can appear highly abstract (for example the tension between construction and expression), it makes intuitive sense to understand why works of art endure and take on new meanings in different times and different interpretations if they are understood as a particular way of ‘working through’ forces at war with each other in the material at hand, which can thus

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be endlessly replayed, reworked in ways that bear on the present. The centrifugal, polar-ising logics affecting the musical and culinary material in the movements analysed here led to the disintegration of the material, in Adorno’s view. However he also recognised ‘the possibility of musically mastering the experience of a technologized world . . . to make room for the expression of just those kinds of tension that the aged New Music forfeits’, for example in Edgard Varèse’s work (Adorno, 2002: 194). This suggests how the dialectical notion of material can still be a relevant theoretical standpoint to assess the engagement with sounds (or flavours) fostered in artistic and arts movements embracing centrifugal logics. I only explored two of these here – one drawing on the physics of sounds/flavours, the other one on mathematics, arithmetics and combinatorics. I am cur-rently researching a third one, the logic of ecology, which underpins key movements both for sound (Murray Schafer’s Soundscape, its prolongations and the reactions to it) and flavour (e.g. initiatives such as the Ark of Taste set up by the Slow Food foundation), which will extend my argument. Comparison should also be widened to other art domains. Such an approach to art domains thus seeks to be materialist in a dialectical way, and to offer multiple points of entry for analysis, through the logics themselves and/or through their carriers.

Building on analyses by Brian Kane, Matthieu Saladin, Fabio Parasecoli, Manuel DeLanda and Paul Rekret, I argued that the ‘breaking free’ of sounds and flavours went along with processes of suppression, or loosening of tensions besetting composers’ and chefs’ musical or culinary material. The quest for disclosure of sounds and flavours ‘in themselves’ is at odds with and suppresses the mobilisation of technological work de facto required, in an ontologising move. On the other hand, ever-expanding universes of equal-sound and flavour individuals are a challenge for their organisation, unless this tension is loosened through what I have proposed to call their geneticisation – their breeding according to known parameters and patterns, or from a specific set of sound- and flavour-genes (though the ‘condition of perfume’ of ambient music, or the Momofuku fragrance could also be seen as ‘tags’, a form of external identity stamping rather than in genetic form). Compositions are thus more adequately conceived of as drawing on series or collections (the akin sounds of Schaeffer’s Études); as sequences of permutable ele-ments (each table at El Bulli was served a combination of 40 courses amongst the 50 available for the season); as universes of equally stamped, and thus compatible, and combinable, sounds and flavours; and as populations: all of which express a very differ-ent type of order from musical or culinary domains conceived as ‘force-fields’.

At the heart of series, collections, sequences, universes and populations is a principle of equivalence and exchangeability. Peter Szendy, drawing on Deleuze’s formula, in Time-Image, that ‘money is the reverse of all the images that the cinema shows and edits on the front’ (quoted in Szendy, 2019: 60), has suggested that ‘money . . . inhabits film even before it is distributed: it is lodged in its innermost texture’ (2019: 13). In other words, cinema is not only captured by a market logic, the market is already pervasive in its medium, and, as images reach beyond film and saturate the world, the world ‘turns into film’ (Deleuze’s formula). Szendy’s exploration of the ‘becoming cinema’ of the world (2019: 44) suggests that there may also have been an ‘iconomicisation’ of other arts. In any case, reflecting further on the specific pathways and principles of equivalence taken for sound and flavour seems a crucial task for a materialist cultural sociology of art and the

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arts. I have only sketched out some preliminary ideas of such paths, including affinity, permutability, equal valence, shared genetic patrimony and isomorphism. If, as Marx pro-posed, music constructs the ear, and if, according to Deleuze and Szendy’s elaboration of this Marxian insight, cinema constructs sight and visibility (Szendy, 2019: 6), it matters to unravel the dynamics of art domains and interrogate the construction of the contemporary modes of listening or savouring, the construction of the very senses involved.14

The other side of the principle of equivalence highlighted here is that sounds and flavours have taken over from musical works and culinary dishes and have themselves become the carriers of logics relevant to the music and culinary domains. As such, they demanded, as we have seen, commitment to their cause. The acousmatic sounds of Musique Concrète demanded ascetic commitment from composers and listeners alike, subordinating composition to bringing out their morphologies, and expecting exertion and training on the part of listeners – towards ‘reduced listening’. The dematerialised, ‘pure’ flavours of modernist cuisine commanded strenuous repetitive labour on the part of their makers, all geared to shining their ‘gen’, and a form of (perhaps paradoxically) ascetic ‘reduced tasting’ from diners. At the polar opposite to such ascetic orientation, the sounds and flavours of generative music and culinary creativity programmes and other breaks inspired by a combinatory logic, demanded another form of commitment and care, a belonging to an identifiable sonic and fragrant universe, one in which the crea-tors-cum-listeners/savourers may immerse themselves, and/or one which they may become addicted to.15

The emancipation of sounds and flavours, their ‘de-territorialization’ (Bonnet, 2016) may thus have paradoxically led them, or their outposts, to themselves become agents of re-territorialisation, under single jurisdictions, to continue with Deleuzian language. They become the aesthetic and moral carriers of authenticity, purity, fitness, fluidity, deliciousness, chill, cosmopolitanism or diversity, which listeners and eaters are sum-moned to take on (and may eagerly seek to do so), associate themselves with, identify themselves with, or surrender to. Some of these commitments take strenuous effort, oth-ers are more localised, momentary, fleeting, they become habits or addictions. In Benjamin’s words, some are ‘thicker’, and some ‘thinner’ (Benjamin, 1991, quoted in Szendy, 2019: 45), but all ultimately uphold the radical democratism and so to speak freedom of movement of sound and flavour matter.

In his essay ‘On the social situation of music’, Adorno had shown the purpose of the dialectical analysis of the musical material to be the understanding of the possibilities of music as cognition and, via such cognition, the potential for social praxis of emancipa-tion, ‘reaching out beyond current consciousness’ (2002). For Adorno, such praxis was necessarily predicated on the concrete tensions traversing each art work, and thus on the possibility for the subject to apprehend art (and especially music) as a dynamic process, never fully at peace with the world, with the given. The ‘authentic’ musical work had ‘maintain[ed] this tension [of the material] within its structure, and h[eld] the oppositions within itself unreconciled’ (Paddison, 1993: 191); it claimed that same stance (holding to the tension) from all those involved with it. But I have suggested that sound- and flavour-carriers of the breaks studied here turned their back, so to speak, on the tensions of the material: in summoning us to their single-purpose logics, they were and are all necessar-ily about some quest for reconciliation, with ourselves, with the world, or with some

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transcendental realm, as we tune ourselves to them, lose ourselves in them or let our-selves be enveloped by them.16 Overall it may be surmised that such stances may have come to colour listening and tasting more generally, outwith the specific movements studied, and that this is not without wider social and political significance. Exploring the implications of such dispositions for social praxis is not primarily a question of experi-ence, in my view,17 but rather demands the analysis and comparison of dynamics of art(s) – and more generally cultural – domains, and apprehending the modes of engagement they foster, as well as significant affinities between these. I have sought to show how the re-dialectisation of the ‘material’ may be a fruitful way to do so.

ORCID iD

Isabelle Darmon https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8498-0514

Notes

1. Putting forward the notion of ‘domain’ allows me to sidestep the Beckerian and Bourdieusian notions of world or field, and thus to open some space for examining the relation between the dynamics of the art material and social (and, to a lesser extent, political-economic) dynamics. Max Weber used the notion of domain of culture (Gebiet der Kultur), sparsely, but in a crucial reflection of the ‘development momentum’ of domains of art, and anticipating his study of music. He thus linked the notion of domain (which is admittedly vague) to a dynamic historical approach which he aimed to articulate to a more sociological approach (as he indeed started to do in his unfinished study of music) (Darmon, 2015). Etymologically, domain, in French and English, and Gebiet in German both suggest a bounded territory, a jurisdiction, and, by exten-sion, a bounded area of knowledge and/or action. In Weber’s notion however, the boundaries are an artefact of the dynamics of the domain and its relations to other domains.

2. Indeed the quest for ‘logics’ of meaning, in computational hermeneutics is not equal to explor-ing logics of organisation of the arts domains, though the sociological ambition is to unveil the logics ‘structuring the assemblage of aesthetic elements into coherent “styles” or “tastes”’ (Van der Laan and Kuipers, 2016: 66). In non-textual corpora of data, in particular, the choice of units of analysis and coding of ‘aesthetic elements’ matters. There are thus ample opportu-nities for sociological questions to frame the search for ‘partly autonomous’ aesthetic logics, as illustrated by the choice of the ‘person in an image’ as unit of analysis in the Van der Laan and Kuipers study.

3. The Simmelian overtones of Alexander’s approach to surface and depth are resounding. For example, see the study on Rembrandt, following the philosopher’s ‘plumb line [lowered] from the immediate singular, the simply given into the layer of the ultimate intellectual mean-ings’ (Simmel, 2005: 3 [translation altered]) as well as The Philosophy of Money following the ‘directing line [drawn] from the surface of economic processes leading into the last values and significance of all that is human’ (Simmel, 2004: 53 [translation altered]).

4. ‘The ambiguous relationship between sociology and its object is a topic that I have constantly revisited, with a parallel hope of drawing lessons from music that I might apply to sociol-ogy. Such was the case with the idea of mediation in The Passion for Music . . . I have since abandoned the term, without regret’ (Hennion, 2019: 42).

5. I take cuisine as an art, or arts domain, not wishing to enter here the discussion of the extent to which it is an art, but rather following Mary Douglas’ use of the term as a way to ask some research questions relevant to an art form, involving medium patterning (Douglas, 2011[1982]: 107). However the dissociation between the nutritious and the aesthetic carried

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out to this effect is only necessary for Douglas’ analysis because she deals with notions of medium and form, with patterns mobilised in rituals marking boundaries and exclusions, rather than with a notion of material in tension between different logics.

6. This quest has been compared to that of FT Marinetti and his ‘Manifesto of Futurist Cooking’ (Birnbaum, 2009).

7. Food journalist Lisa Abend documented the 2009 season at El Bulli where she accompanied the 32 stagiaires working alongside the 13 permanent staff in the restaurant’s kitchen and for service. Unpaid, working 14 hours a day for the whole season, they were employed on repetitive tasks as if on an assembly line – such as pushing 250 ‘drops of lentil batter through their syringes into ice water each day’ (Abend, 2011: 112). This, however, is what it takes to, perhaps, one day make it. One of the stagiaires provides the key: ‘A stage at El Bulli is like a baptism. Without it, you’re not really a Christian’ (Abend, 2011: 24).

8. See http://www.thecriticalcouple.com/el-bulli (accessed 21 October 2020). This is a wonder-ful four-part narrative (before, during – in two instalments, and after), which gives a vivid sense of the magic – and its construction.

9. Stamping vs construction is reminiscent of Max Weber’s contrast between external and inter-nal rationalisation.

10. The Volatile Compound Database, run by a Dutch team, compiles data on the compounds in food products (it is currently documenting more than 8900 compounds for 541 products), and is subscribed by large food companies, universities and government programmes. According to Wired, celebrity chefs are the latest subscribers (Airhart, 2018).

11. In psychology, ‘events, objects, and situations may possess positive or negative valence; that is, they may possess intrinsic attractiveness or aversiveness’ (Frijda, 1986: 207).

12. Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979) marked a generation of Americans, amongst whom was one of Chang’s teachers.

13. Platinum Transported (2017) Taste with David Chang, 24 July 2017, American Express Youtube channel, retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPzmllo0a2c (accessed 21 October 2020).

14. Strikingly, Szendy claims, with Walter Benjamin, that the tactile has irrupted in the sense of sight, whereby we are in contact with images rather than contemplating them, leading to an innervation of the world through images. For Benjamin, and Szendy, this has been conducive to an ‘habituated’, ‘distracted’ reception of images. The sense of touch is also mediating listening and savouring in the movements studied here. Apprehending the morphology of sounds, catching flavours through their ephemeral foams, or letting oneself be enveloped in the fragrant halo of Eno’s music or Chang’s cuisine, all these engagements with sound and flavour do suggest that such haptic mediation is at play. More analysis is required with regard to the haptic character of sounds and flavours, as it does seem to lend itself to very different modes of engagement. As I hinted at the beginning of this article, ‘surfaces’ and ‘touch’ are also claimed as vehicles for cultural sociological analysis, though following very different paradigms (Alexander, 2008; Hennion, 2016b).

15. The mysticism of much contemporary music had been noted by Makis Solomos (2013), especially in his analysis of the narrative of the quest for sonic immersion.

16. Tuning oneself to, losing oneself in, letting oneself be enveloped by sounds (or flavours) are part of the wonders of musical (or culinary) experience, of course. I am here not placing the discussion on the level of experience but on that of our orientation, disposition, stance towards sounds, flavours, and perhaps more generally toward the world.

17. This is why supplementing the notion of mediation to enlist it for empirically grounded analy-ses of music loving, as has been done through the notions of affordance, or those of attach-ment and affiliation (Benzecry, 2011; DeNora, 2000, 2003; Hennion, 2007) responds to very

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different research interests and has amounted to de-dialectalising mediation, which many will not feel as a problem. However, it is interesting to note that such has not been the fate of Adorno’s notion in musicology and music philosophy, where it is always to be rediscovered anew, and worked with.

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Author biography

Isabelle Darmon is a lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. Her interests are in the domains of cultural sociology, dynamics of capitalism, envi-ronmental sociology, the sociology of music and the sociology of food. Recent publications include articles in The British Journal of Sociology, Food, Culture and Society and Anthropology of Food (together with Alan Warde); as well as in Max Weber Studies and Cultural Sociology.

Sam Friedman, Mike Savage, Laurie Hanquinet, Andrew Miles

Cultural sociology and new forms of distinction Article (Accepted version) (Refereed)

Original citation: Friedman, Sam, Savage, Mike, Hanquinet, Laurie and Miles, Andre (2015) Cultural sociology and new forms of distinction. Poetics, 53 . pp. 1-8. ISSN 0304-422X DOI: 10.1016/j.poetic.2015.10.002 Reuse of this item is permitted through licensing under the Creative Commons:

© 2015 Elsevier B.V. CC BY-NC-ND This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/64962/ Available in LSE Research Online: Online: January 2016

LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website.

Cultural Sociology and New Forms of Distinction

Abstract

In recent years growing sociological interest in new forms of cultural distinction has led some to

argue that the advantages previously conveyed by the consumption of ‘high’ culture ‘ or

‘omnivorousness’ are being overwritten by the possession of what has been termed ‘emerging

cultural capital’. So far, though, this term has only been discussed in passing within empirical

work and remains in need of further analytical specification. This special issue seeks to both

critically interrogate and develop this concept by bringing together the work of leading cultural

sociologists around four key themes: the role of age and generation in the formation of cultural

capital; the power of visual display for distinction; the significance of new elite cultures; and the

need for methodological pluralism to apprehend the expressions and mechanisms of

distinction. This editorial introduction outlines the descriptive terrain on which the concept of

emerging cultural capital has rested until now before exploring the common themes that sit

across all five papers in the special issue.

Keywords: distinction, cultural capital, elites, age, Bourdieu

Introduction

Toward the end of his book, Sincerity (2013), the independent scholar and essayist R. Jay Magill,

Jr. describes an advert for the Berlin-based newspaper, Berlin Morgenpost:

The ad shows a hipster wearing a horribly colored pleather jacket walking past an

overweight working-class man watering the porch flowers outside his street-level

apartment wearing the exact same jacket. A caption accompanies the photograph,

reading ‘Berlin is where no one really knows whether you are in or out’. This cheeky

juxtaposition bespeaks a strange confluence: the proletariat – a word forbidden in

America – and the bourgeois hipster are becoming increasingly indiscernible.

Three years on, it seems Magill was the foreteller of a trend - in ‘Normcore’ style - that has

swept the global fashion world1 (Farrell, 2014; Cochrane, 2014; Nevins, 2015). Normcore

describes clothes that are anonymous, cheap, utilitarian, mass-produced and unremarkable;

think unbranded jeans, plain sportswear, chunky white socks. ‘Normcore is a desire to be 1 Normcore was the fashion world’s most Googled term in 2014 (Tsjeng, 2015)

blank’, argued the New York-based ‘trend-forecasting’ company K-HOLE, who coined the term

in early 2014. ‘It’s about welcoming the possibility of being recognizable, of looking like other

people and seeing that as an opportunity for connection, instead of as evidence that your

identity has dissolved’ (Duncan, 2014).

Thinking sociologically, it is tempting to see Normcore as representative of a wider

democratising shift toward cultural ‘omnivorousness’. This now well-worn thesis, originating in

work on American music taste (Peterson and Kern 1996) but subsequently supported by more

wide-ranging studies throughout the world (DiMaggio and Mukhtar 2004; van Eijck and Knulst

2005; Bennett et al. 2009; Emmison 2003; Sintas and Álvarez 2002) argues that the

contemporary privileged middle and upper classes no longer consume only legitimate culture

but are better characterised as ‘omnivores’, happy to graze on both high and low culture.

Attendant to this eclecticism is also, in some versions of the argument, a more general ethos of

cultural ‘openness’ and ‘tolerance’ that is seen to invalidate, or at least threaten, Bourdieusian

processes of cultural distinction and snobbery (Bennett et al. 2009; Erickson 1996; Warde

2011). In this way, Normcore appears to represent omnivorousness par excellence. By

embracing the fashion choices of the German working-classes, or America’s suburbanites, are

the tastemakers of the global fashion industry not providing a definitive rejection of the once-

cherished logic of form over function?

Well, on closer inspection, perhaps not. One need not delve too far into the principles of

Normcore to see that beneath the surface-level championing of ‘connection’ and ‘the

everyday’, the movement seems a long way from embracing a true spirit of openness. Indeed,

aesthetically, this is arguably form masquerading as function. There is a distinctly knowing and

self-conscious aura surrounding Normcore, which does not sit easily with claims that the

cultural omnivore is constitutive of a pluralist shift in cultural consumption (VICE, 2015). As

Lizardo and Skiles (2012) have forcefully argued, such expressions of omnivorousness are

actually entirely compatible with a Bourdieuisian framework, and simply represent the

transposability of the aesthetic disposition to cultural objects not originally produced with an

aesthetic intention. So while the young, fashionable Berliner and his working-class neighbour

may share the same objective ‘Normcore’ taste, their modes of consumption arguably remain

separated by a powerful aesthetic boundary. To borrow a phrase from Coulangeon (2005), the

hipster may be practising a distinctly ‘enlightened’ form of eclecticism.

We use the example of Normcore here simply to initiate the wider discussion that sits at the

heart of this Special Issue. Normcore may prove a fleeting trend but nonetheless it strikes us as

symptomatic of wider shifts in the expression of cultural distinction; shifts that, we believe,

demand new conceptual repertoires if they are to be properly recognised and understood. The

papers in this special issue explore the idea that there are new modes of distinction that, like

Normcore, do not necessarily fit either the highbrow model or that of the untheorised

omnivore. Instead, they reflect on, in different ways, the power and potency of new modes of

cultural display which might generate distinctive stakes and oppositions which we need to

understand in distinctive terms.

In assembling these contributions, we press further for the recognition of the role of the

aesthetic in contemporary studies of cultural consumption (see Hanquinet and Savage 2015).

Bourdieu has been read as being sceptical about the aesthetic possibilities of popular cultural

production and doubtful of any ‘paradigm change’ in relations between the sub fields of

restricted and mass production. Indeed, some have accused him of espousing a peculiarly static

and one-dimensional view of mass culture (Fowler 1997; Shusterman 2000).2 Yet it is important

to remember that, for Bourdieu, the pursuit of distinction was not just a matter of what objects

are consumed, but also the way they are consumed (Holt 1997; Coulangeon and Lemel 2007).

As he (1984: 40) famously outlined in Distinction:

Nothing more rigorously distinguishes the different classes than the disposition objectively

demanded by the legitimate consumption of legitimate works…and the even rarer capacity

to constitute, aesthetically, objects that are ordinary or even ‘common’…or to apply the

2 Certainly, during his career he afforded ‘low’ culture strikingly little empirical attention and in later work even deriding it as

alienating (Bourdieu, 1996). Theorists like Fowler (1997) and Shusterman (2000) have thus argued that while Bourdieu

brilliantly exposes the ‘veiled interests’ of high-art, his hostility to popular art demonstrates he was partially ‘captured’ by

dominant ideology himself.

principles of a pure aesthetic in the most everyday choices of everyday life (emphasis

added).

Bourdieu thus certainly saw the aesthetic disposition as potentially transferable to popular

culture, suggesting that, for him, the core tension wasn’t to be found so much in the opposition

between highbrow and lowbrow culture per se but between the possession or otherwise of

highbrow aesthetics, which constitute a very particular disposition towards the appreciation of

different cultural forms (on this see Lizardo and Skiles 2012). However, Bourdieu failed to

provide much empirical evidence as to how this aesthetic was practically applied to popular

realms3 (Prior 2005). In recent years, though, a number of researchers have sought to explore

aesthetic differentiation in previously unexplored fields - probing film, rock music, food,

humour, reality television and fashion (Regev 1994; Johnston and Baumann 2009; Entwistle and

Rocamora 2006; Skeggs, Thumim, and Wood 2008; Kuipers, 2015; Baumann 2007) as well as

more unlikely performances of distinction through ‘bad’ television watching (McCoy and

Scarborough 2014) and salsa music taste (Bachmayer, Wilterdink, and van Venrooij 2014).

We have also extensively explored emerging conceptions of cultural distinction in our own work

(Prieur and Savage 2013; Hanquinet 2014). Friedman (2014), for example, has demonstrated

that in Britain the field of comedy has become an increasingly fertile ground for younger

generations of the upper-middle class to express distinction. Here following the work of Holt (

(1998), he finds that the pursuit of distinction is less about consuming the ‘right’ comedians

(although this is still important) and more about the currency of cultivating a ‘good’ sense of

humour. In this distinct performance of embodied cultural capital, comedy should never be just

funny or centre purely on the creation of laughter. Instead, for those from culturally privileged

backgrounds, a good sense of humour pivots on the ability to employ rarefied readings of

comedy – readings that, decisively, foreground aesthetic elements these respondents feel are

missed by others. Moreover, armed with their distinctive style of appreciation, these consumers

believe they can always ‘get’ more from almost any comedy, whether it be externally legitimate

or not.

3 One area of popular culture Bourdieu (1984: 26) did examine in this way, however, was cinema.

Other work has explicitly questioned the Bourdieusian notion that Kantian disinterestedness

represents the sole logic of the dominant aesthetic. Hanquinet, Roose and Savage (Hanquinet,

Roose, and Savage 2014), for example, argue that Bourdieu’s notion of disinterestedness relies

on an implicitly modernist aesthetic which celebrates detachment and abstraction and is

premised on a notion of the avant-garde as drivers of change. Their analysis of museum visitors’

aesthetic preferences, however, demonstrates that the dominant aesthetic may have altered in

important ways that are historically grounded. Contemporary forms of highbrow distinction,

they argue, have integrated new aesthetic criteria (e.g. playfulness, eclecticism, social

reflexivity) which symbolize a shift from modernism to postmodernism. Another important

touchstone here is the work of Shamus Khan (2012). Examining the character of elite private

schooling in the US, Khan argues such institution’s aims are no longer concerned with imbuing a

Kantian aesthetic of learning and Bildung, but instead inculcate practices focusing on juggling,

getting by, game playing and being strategic. For Khan, learning how to master these practices

is central to the construction of cultures of ‘ease’ which mark contemporary elite formation.

Whilst, at one level these practices clearly exemplify a certain kind of cultural ‘mastery’, this

takes a different form to being steeped in an historical canon.

Over recent years, this growing interest in new forms and expressions of cultural distinction has

led to the claim that there is a distinct form of ‘emerging cultural capital’ (Prieur and Savage

2013; Savage et al2015). This has gained particular pertinence with the research originating out

of the Great British Class Survey (GBCS), where the authors (Savage et al, 2015) have deployed

the concept to categorise new objects and practices of cultural distinction, especially amongst

the younger well educated. However, while the term has a certain descriptive force, it has only

been discussed in passing within this GBCS work and remains a loose term; a provisional label in

need of further analytical specification (Savage et al. 2013).

The papers of this special issue therefore seek to substantially progress these concerns through

exploring three fundamental analytical issues, and one central methodological concern, which

underpin the interest in ‘emerging cultural capital’. These are, firstly, the role of age and

generation; secondly, the provenance of new modes of cultural distinction focusing on physical

appearance, and thirdly the significance of new elite cultures. Methodologically, the papers

argue for the need for more sophisticated and especially mixed methods research, repertoires

with which to gauge the complex inter-relationship between embodied, institutionalised and

objectified forms of cultural capital (Bourdieu 2002).

Before turning in detail to the questions probed by these five papers, it is worth briefly laying

out the descriptive terrain on which the concept of emerging cultural capital has rested until

now. Firstly, this idea foregrounds the centrality of age and generational divisions in structuring

cultural tastes and participation, in ways which indicate that younger people are less attracted

to traditional ‘highbrow’ culture. In many studies using multiple correspondence analysis, such

as those by Bennett et al (2009), or by Savage et al (2013), the second axis separating different

lifestyles does not distinguish between those with cultural and economic capital (‘the capital

composition axis’) but between older and younger groups, with the former more attracted to

highbrow culture, and the younger groups more oriented towards commercial forms of culture,

often in areas such as popular music, sport, and information technology. This distinction

between ‘older’ and ‘newer’ modes of appreciation is also explicated in many studies, including

those by Bellevance (2008) and Hanquinet (2015), and although Reeves (2014) reminds us of

the difficulty of differentiating age from cohort and period effects, the impact of the life course

- in conjunction with history and biography - appears central to the reshaping of cultural

capital over time.

Secondly, the concept of emerging cultural capital descriptively points to different modes of

distinction. Whereas the traditional aesthetic disposition – notably through the model of the

Kantian aesthetic - celebrates withdrawal, distance, and discernment, and classically places

audiences in a relatively passive and distant position, ‘emerging’ cultural capital seems to

incorporate a heterarchy of modes of cultural appreciation that jostle for widely-shared

legitimacy. While here the Kantian aesthetic undoubtedly remains powerful, particularly among

older generations, competition among different modes is now more salient. Some such

aesthetic challenges might be seen as coming from the ‘bottom up’, as in the case of Kitsch

(Holliday and Potts 2012), but in general we believe the hegemony of the traditional aesthetic

disposition is being questioned more laterally – by a more sensuous, performative, knowing and

socially-engaged aesthetic. But we need to build on descriptive observations – such as the GBCS

argument that sports, social media, and socialising are all practices central to ‘emerging cultural

capital’ (Savage et al 2013) – in order to better understand how such practices may be

implicated in forms of distinction. Are we actually moving away from the pursuit of distinction

as a separate and exclusive activity, as emphasised by Bourdieu in Distinction (1984), towards a

more openly ‘knowing’ expression of cultural aptitude - an aesthetic of engagement and

exhibition rather than absorption and introspection? If so, might this be associated with Skeggs’

(2003: 148) claim that a shift has occurred from ‘middle class formation reliant on achieving

status through hiding and restricting knowledge to one in which status is achieved through the

display of this knowledge and practice: exclusivity to transparency’?

Thirdly, there is the suggestion in the notion of emerging cultural capital that elite culture itself

is being remade, especially amongst younger groupings. Whereas Bourdieu was attentive to the

development of novel cultural repertoires associated with the ‘new petit bourgeoisie’, these

strategies involved taking relatively low status cultural forms and seeking to subject them to the

kind of cultivated and discerning set of judgements that echo those found in more consecrated

cultural forms. These arguments fed into the claims of Featherstone, Lash and Urry during the

1980s, that new kinds of consumer lifestyle, including those associated with post-modernism

could be associated with these trends. Thus Bourdieu’s focus here was on how such strategies

were associated with the upward social mobility strategies of aspirant groups, with the

implication that the dominant elite groups would continue to resist these incursions. However,

the descriptive claim made through the idea of emerging cultural capital is that actually the

content of elite culture is being remade, even if it might take many decades of generational

replacement for these new practices to become definitively dominant.

Finally, the recognition and specification of emerging cultural capital rests on the resolution of a

fundamental methodological issue. Quantitative studies by themselves usually lack the kind of

detailed questions and narrative formulations which allow an adequate teasing out of the

processes by which cultural objects might become consecrated as cultural capital. Both the

Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion study (see Bennett et al 2009) and the GBCS project

adopted a mixed methods strategy, deploying qualitative and descriptive approaches alongside

quantitative techniques. It is our contention that if cultural sociology is going to continue to

push forward in understanding contemporary developments in cultural taste and consumption

it must be more expansive and ambitious in its analytical scope.

We thus need to move on from the restricted agenda that has followed Peterson’s 1992

‘discovery’ of the cultural omnivore, which has focused unduly on the quantitative analysis of a

narrow and established set of art forms, genres and cultural objects (see for example, Chan and

Goldthorpe 2007). This pragmatic focus has revolved around the fact that these are the cultural

items which have, historically, tended to be included in most large-scale data sets. However,

while such an approach may be superficially understandable in these terms, it is,

simultaneously, one that is both intellectually restrictive and fundamentally revealing of the

system of distinction that it has helped to reinforce. Thus, the coding of ‘culture’ to a partial set

of indicators from a limited range of traditional, officially authorised or ‘legitimate’ forms reifies

the idea that everyday forms of participation (along with those who practice them) are, by

extension, not cultural at all (Miles and Sullivan, 2012).

Instead we need to place the formation of people’s cultural capital relationally, according to

their position in a larger network of cultural items and practices that provides them with

meaning (see more generally, Hanquinet and Savage 2015). In this respect, the domination of

survey-based approaches in cultural research has, as Miles (2013) shows, obscured the ways in

which the contest over cultural value is fundamentally rooted in the everyday realm. Here, it is

important to remember that, in Distinction, Bourdieu’s analysis ranged across seemingly

endless cultural fields, each of which were equally important to the arguments that he

eventually put forward. We believe this spirit of empirical and methodological ambition and

originality must be renewed if we are to continue to understand the relationship between

cultural taste and social stratification, and this requires us to move beyond safe and

conventional research methods to embrace more sophisticated and ambitious research

repertoires.

The papers of this issue thus seek to move beyond a descriptive account of certain cultural

activities as ‘emerging cultural capital’, towards a more extensive probing of the four key issues

outlined above, which will allow us to better elaborate debates about the remaking of cultural

capital. We therefore move the debate on from the view that simply describing differing

cultural preferences and orientations of younger respondents is enough to warrant defining a

form of emerging cultural capital. The three analytical issues we have identified – linked to the

call for a more embracing and ambitious methodological canvass - allow us to more adequately

reflect on whether new cultural orientations may be associated with wider forms of legitimacy

and symbolic power. We now turn to consider how the papers address this new formulation.

1. Age, generation and cultural capital

The power of age divisions has come to feature prominently in debates concerning cultural

capital and the development of possible ‘emerging’ forms. Three key themes have surfaced in

this literature. Firstly, it is argued that there is a notably different relationship to history and the

cultural canon. High culture is classically oriented towards iconic works from the past, even

when, as with the avant-garde, these are a platform to launch new and novel forms against.

The historical canon is thus a benchmark against which excellence is measured, even amongst

those who innovate. By contrast, it is argued that emerging cultural capital celebrates the new

and contemporary for their own sake, and has much less interest in past canonical objects. It is

thus the stakes tied up in new and emergent forms which excite and energise, and more

particularly the capacity to riff off a range of genres and reference points which is highly prized.

Secondly, there is an enduring awareness of how different age groups express different kinds of

cultural distinction – in terms of modus operandi and the legitimacy of objects – as new

generations of the culturally privileged eclipse their parental incumbents. A third related, but

less explored issue is how cultural distinction operates in a given society where there are

horizontal struggles between high-status groups belonging to different age groups.

These vital issues are each addressed in the collection here. Lizardo and Skiles in their paper

examining patterns of cultural disliking (what they call ‘symbolic exclusion’) between older and

younger ‘high-status Americans’ provide a very systematic account of the relationship between

age and cultural preferences, focusing on musical tastes recorded in the General Social Survey

of 1993 and again in 2012. What is especially important about this paper is their suggestion that

there is an age-specific dynamic at work in the formation of cultural capital, since newcomers

have to differentiate themselves from the cultural preferences of their elders. They thus point

to generational changes in the main objects of symbolic exclusion in the American music field,

most prominently highlighting the increasing acceptance of previously disliked genres such as

heavy metal and rap. The authors link this to a broader morphological trend towards a ‘refusal

to refuse’ among younger generations of the privileged who appear significantly more open to

musical diversity than older generations. However, significantly, the authors are hesitant about

conflating this finding with other assertions of greater overall cultural tolerance. Instead, they

note that it is as likely to indicate that the symbolic exclusion that does exist today – here they

highlight country and religious music, in particular - has simply ‘acquired more symbolic (and

substantial) value’.

We can also see powerful evidence in Lizardo and Skiles that the status of older forms of music

are declining, and that more contemporary forms are becoming dominant. Rap and hip hop,

which used to be shunned, are now more popular amongst young Americans than opera, blue

grass, country and gospel. Similarly, high status newcomers are more likely to refuse classical

and jazz. The same intensity of ‘new’ cultural forms is found in the other papers. Hedegard

shows how Brazillian elites are predisposed towards newer modes of musical taste and also

question European sources of high culture in favour of more Americanised modes.

Mears’ analysis of gender dynamics in elite parties shows powerfully how older men deploy

younger women as part of their positional strategies to show their prominence and dominance.

Very specific age differences amongst the women have considerable symbolic power for the

elite men she studies, with younger women being more prestigious than older ones. She thus

demonstrates how age divisions are not only descriptively significant but are themselves one of

the stakes around which battles for distinction amongst elite men form. The same point arises

from Kuipers account that the age of respondents affects preferences for male, as well as

female faces. The implication is that the stakes of age and generation may also be linked to the

more extrovert nature of ‘emerging cultural capital’, in which physical appearances may take on

a greater role than under the Kantian aesthetic, and in which bodily deportment associated

with youth counts for more.

2: The power of visual display and distinction

These reflections lead onto our second analytical focus on the possibly enhanced role of

external appearance in more ‘extrovert’ forms of cultural capital. We might think of this shift in

terms of Bourdieu’s discussion of ‘objectified’ cultural capital, in which it is the visual aesthetic

of people, objects, artefacts, rather than what is held to be their ‘inner meaning’ which

becomes more significant. Bourdieu, famously, noted that it was those with the highest levels

of cultural capital who were most likely to find superficially unattractive pictures (such as a car

crash) appealing. But the papers in this special issue suggest that this may be less the case with

‘emerging cultural capital’. This is certainly the claim of Kuipers’ paper, which is based upon a

major ERC-funded project on the cross-national ‘sociology of beauty’. Here she combines

innovative q-methodology and open interviews to examine both objective taste and wider

repertoires of evaluation of physical ‘looks’ in four European countries. Questioning the

common-sensical notion that conceptions of beauty are relatively homogenous, Kuipers finds a

clear relationship between social position and beauty tastes in all four countries. This

relationship is weakest in terms of male bodies and faces where, she notes, aestheticisation

remains a ‘relatively new and rare phenomenon’. In contrast, evaluations of female faces are

highly marked and may be an emerging field for younger generations of privileged men and

woman to communicate their cultural distinction. More specifically, she notes that ‘younger,

educated, metropolitan informants prefer a beauty that is ‘interesting or ‘original’, reflecting a

Bourdieusian ‘aesthetic disposition’’. While Kuipers acknowledges that these findings require

‘further research’, her analysis provides suggestive evidence that embodied cultural capital may

be increasingly transmissible. In particular, new generations may be transposing aesthetic styles

inculcated in relation to traditional legitimate culture onto to cultural fields previously ignored

by cultural sociology. The power of visual and aesthetic aspects is also evident in the papers by

Hedegard and Mears, as we have discussed above.

3: New elite tastes

Bourdieu saw elites as established and inheritor groups, not attracted to new and arriviste

forms of cultural practice. Recent research, most notably that of Piketty (2014), has emphasised

that global economic change and the accumulation of capital in the last 30 years has initiated a

dramatic reassertion of a wealth elite. While enquiry has mostly focused on the spiralling

economic resources of this new class formation, relatively little is known about the cultural

tastes and lifestyles that distinguish this group. While Bourdieu’s model of social space

presumes that the skewed nature of this group’s capital composition would lead to showy,

conspicuous cultural consumption, recent quantitative work on the British ‘elite’ (Savage et al,

2013) emphasises that this group tend to combine high levels of both economic and highbrow

cultural capital. The papers here suggest that economic elites have a more dynamic orientation

to cultural appreciation which appears not easily defined by the either the ‘Kantian aesthetic’

model, or that of ‘conspicuous and lavish display’.

Ashley Mears contribution to this Special Issue, ‘Distinction is Ridiculous’, is of particular value

here. Mears, a renowned ethnographer, gained unparalleled access to the ever-growing global

VIP party circuit for 18 months between 2011-2013. Her article draws on this rich ethnographic

data to highlight the intricate games of distinction within this exclusive VIP ‘scene’. Mears

begins by describing the conspicuous consumption that takes place within the exclusive

nightclubs which cater to this VIP elite. Tellingly, these modes of distinction are not on public

display, but operate within the exclusive confines of those who gain entry. In some respects, we

might see this as a return of a ‘court society’, dominated by the ritual interaction of those

privileged enough to gain access. But the interior world of the VIP club – superficially – is very

different to that of courtly ritual. The largely young male patrons, or ‘whales’ as the most

wealthy are known within the scene, display their status to one another via elaborate displays

of wealth (mainly through purchasing and often wasting expensive alcohol) and by surrounding

themselves with women rich in ‘bodily capital’. As Mears carefully points out, though, this

performance of distinction is highly orchestrated, with a whole party infrastructure devoted to

recruiting attractive ‘girls’ to the clubs, stage-managing the layout of the club, and publicly

celebrating the most lavish displays of wealth (at some clubs, Mears notes, DJs stop the music

to announce big purchases). However, interestingly, Mears goes on to explain that what

appears to be a purely economically-driven expression of cultural distinction is more complex in

reality. In particular, she explores how women and men profit unequally from the embodied

‘girl capital’ integral to generating a VIP environment. While women receive only modest and

short-term economic gains for cashing in their bodily capital, men are able to profit much more

effectively – appropriating women’s bodies to signal their elite distinction and using it to

generate further social and economic capital.

New elite cultures also break from national and Eurocentric tastes. Some have detected (Prieur

and Savage, 2013), for example, a ‘cosmopolitan cultural capital’ in many nations, whereby

cultural capital is intimately connected with a ‘cosmopolitan’ orientation that is outward-

looking and able to stand outside any one national frame, culturally. Prieur and Savage (2013)

show that this international vs national cultural orientation, which are associated with social

class cleavages, can be found in a number of European countries, including Serbia, Denmark

and Finland . However, the conception or application of ‘cosmopolitan cultural capital’ has also

been applied in subtly different ways in different national contexts. It is also notable that the

literature in this area is dominated by work on Europe, North America and Australasia. In this

way, Hedegard’s paper on the taste culture of Brazilian elites fills a conspicuous gap. Drawing

on a content and frame analysis of an elite Brazilian cultural magazine, BRAVO!, and a well-

known broadsheet, O Globo, Hedegard illustrates how these tastemaking media sources help to

valorize particular modes of cultural consumption among Brazilian elites. Significantly, though,

Hedegard finds that Brazilian elites incorporate a very particular ‘transnational repertoire’ of

cultural tastes that is different to their equivalents in other national contexts. Brazilian elite

cultural repertoires, for example, are strongly orientated around legitimizing a particular white,

educated and wealthy lifestyle that attempts to ‘create a symbolic connection between

Brazilian elites and their counterparts in the US and Europe, while simultaneously marking a

boundary of exclusion between these Brazilians and other Brazilians’. What is particularly

interesting about distinction in the Brazilian case, however, is that it differs in important ways

from Western developments highlighted in Jarness and Mears’ paper. While Brazilian elites do

display a penchant for both highbrow and popular cultural forms, they are unconcerned with

cultivating particular esoteric styles of appreciation to distinguish their consumption of popular

forms. Instead, these popular forms tend to be Western brands such as Apple and Starbucks,

which in a domestic Brazilian context can be reframed as high-status and incorporated into an

elite lifestyle. While this may have something to do with the particular elite fraction Hedegard

investigates, which appears richer in economic than cultural capital, it nonetheless

demonstrates how the relative value and rarity of different cultural objects varies significantly

in different national contexts.

4: The need for methodological pluralism

In studies of cultural capital there has been a persistent tendency to reify the concept as an

asset contained within specific cultural tastes and practices. This logic is often derived from

Bourdieu’s empirical findings in Distinction, where he argued that the legitimacy and perceived

interpretative ‘difficulty’ of traditional French highbrow culture (classical music, opera, theatre,

ballet, visual art) endowed these tastes with a distinct stratificatory power - as ‘objects’ of

cultural capital. Subsequently, much quantitative research in cultural sociology has fixated on

measuring patterns of taste for these hallowed objects and uses subsequent findings to

definitively support or refute the power of cultural capital. Yet, as Vegard Jarness illustrates in

his article, to treat cultural capital as a fixed entity only residing in the high arts is to

operationalise a dangerously short-sighted understanding of Bourdieu’s concept. In Bourdieu’s

(1986) famous essay on ‘the forms of capital’ he did indeed identify ‘objectified cultural capital’

as an asset residing in particular artefacts, but at the same time he very clearly stated that

cultural capital also existed in both institutionalized forms, such as educational credentials, and

perhaps most importantly as an embodied resource. The most significant manifestation of this

embodied cultural capital, he went on to argue, was the operation of a particular ‘disinterested

aesthetic disposition’ that was premised on a refusal of easy or facile taste and where true

artistic beauty can only be experienced if one separates oneself from any physical, emotional or

functional investment in an art work. Thus, it becomes important to deploy methods which

allow us to adequately grasp the complex interplay between objectified, institutionalised and

embodied modes of cultural capital.

While we are not advocating abandoning quantitative analysis – which we see as essential in

our own work – we do believe, like Jarness, that such work should ideally be carried out in

conjunction with qualitative enquiry. The advantage of this kind of data, aptly demonstrated by

Jarness’ paper, is that it allows for an examination of not just what culture people consume, but

how they consume; their style of appreciation. Considering the increasing complexity of the

cultural field, Jarness shows convincingly that it is only by looking at this modality of

consumption that one is able to discern the real contemporary power of cultural capital - as a

resource most recognised and most effectively cashed in via the embodied performance of

distinction.

Drawing on in-depth interviews in Stavanger, Norway, Jarness identifies four distinct types of

taste orientation – intellectual, luxurious, educational and practical – and then locates these

orientations in Bourdieusian social space by examining the capital profiles of those in each

group. Characterising the taste orientations, he further explains that a propensity to enjoy

goods non-instrumentally is associated with higher volumes of capital and via versa. Another

key dimension of Jarness’ work is to show, like Friedman (2014), that social groups that appear

to share common tastes for the same cultural objects can distinguish themselves by employing

contrasting styles of appreciation. It is not what you enjoy, but how you enjoy which is telling.

Innovative methodological modes are evident in all the other papers. Lizardo and Skiles, for

example, use unusually sophisticated techniques to differentiate age, cohort and generational

effects that allow for a much better appreciation of the temporal dynamics of musical

appreciation than that found elsewhere in quantitative cultural sociology. Hedegard uses frame

analysis to develop repertoires to map visual analyses to the study of cultural capital, in a way

which is entirely necessary given our comments about of the enhanced role of the visual in

‘emerging cultural capital’. Mears shows how detailed ethnographic work can be used to

provide subtle readings of cultural capital in social interaction which would not be evident in

survey responses. And finally, Kuipers develops new mixed methods approaches, linking

qualitative in depth interviews with regression models. Together, these papers collectively

show the essential requirement to broaden and develop methodological repertoires away from

standard survey analysis towards more ambitious mixed methods and qualitative approaches.

5. Conclusion

The five papers here have probed new empirical avenues for understanding the contemporary

expression of cultural distinction. Some explore distinction in particular cultural fields, such as

music and beauty, and some within nationally-specific class fractions, such as Brazil, Norway

and the U.S. Of course each paper still leaves some important questions unanswered. It is not

given, for example, that the attempts of dominant groups to exercise distinction in these cases

is necessarily successful, in the sense of an effective deployment or ‘cashing in’ of cultural

capital. Similarly, the papers are not enough in themselves to determine whether ‘emerging

cultural capital’ can fully be seen as a capital. For a cultural taste or practice to serve as a capital

in a Bourdieusian sense, it is necessary to illustrate that it contains widespread legitimacy. It

must be, as Lamont and Lareau (1986) famously noted, a ‘widely shared status signal’. Equally,

it is important to demonstrate that it is an asset that can be converted into other forms of

capital and that it is linked to processes of domination (Savage, Warde, and Devine 2005).These

are pivotally important aspects to consider if one is to faithfully operationalize the term cultural

capital and require extensive, long-term longitudinal research that locates particular cultural

tastes or practices within a fully realised field analytical perspective (see, for example, Bauman,

2002 on film, Hanquinet on Belgian art tastes or Friedman, 2014 on British comedy taste).

Our more modest hope here, however, is that the five papers presented in this issue will act as

a useful platform for future researchers who wish to address the ever-changing ways in which

the dominant attempt to distinguish themselves culturally. By systematically exploring issues of

age, the visual aesthetic and elites, each paper challenges existing repertoires in cultural

sociology and points towards the need to dig in more imaginative methodological and analytical

directions to capture contemporary modes of cultural distinction.

References

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Coulangeon, Philippe, and Yannick Lemel. 2007. “Is ‘distinction’ Really Outdated? Questioning the Meaning of the Omnivorization of Musical Taste in Contemporary France.” Poetics, Social status and cultural consumption in seven countries, 35 (2–3): 93–111. doi:10.1016/j.poetic.2007.03.006.

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Emmison, Michael. 2003. “Social Class and Cultural Mobility Reconfiguring the Cultural Omnivore Thesis.” Journal of Sociology 39 (3): 211–30. doi:10.1177/00048690030393001.

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Sociology of cultureThe sociology of culture, and the related cultural sociology, concerns the systematic analysis of culture,usually understood as the ensemble of symbolic codes used by a member of a society, as it is manifested in thesociety. For Georg Simmel, culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of externalforms which have been objectified in the course of history". Culture in the sociological field is analyzed as theways of thinking and describing, acting, and the material objects that together shape a group of people's wayof life.

Contemporary sociologists' approach to culture is often divided between a "sociology of culture" and "culturalsociology"—the terms are similar, though not interchangeable.[1] The sociology of culture is an older concept,and considers some topics and objects as more or less "cultural" than others. By way of contrast, Jeffrey C.Alexander introduced the term cultural sociology, an approach that sees all, or most, social phenomena asinherently cultural at some level.[2] For instance, a leading proponent of the "strong program" in culturalsociology, Alexander argues: "To believe in the possibility of cultural sociology is to subscribe to the idea thatevery action, no matter how instrumental, reflexive, or coerced [compared to] its external environment, isembedded to some extent in a horizon of affect and meaning."[3] In terms of analysis, sociology of cultureoften attempts to explain some discretely cultural phenomena as a product of social processes, while culturalsociology sees culture as a component of explanations of social phenomena.[4] As opposed to the field ofcultural studies, cultural sociology does not reduce all human matters to a problem of cultural encoding anddecoding. For instance, Pierre Bourdieu's cultural sociology has a "clear recognition of the social and theeconomic as categories which are interlinked with, but not reducible to, the cultural."[5]

DevelopmentEarly researchers

Karl MarxÉmile DurkheimMax WeberGeorg Simmel

The elements of a cultureAnthropology

Bronisław MalinowskiAlfred Reginald Radcliffe-BrownMarcel MaussClaude Lévi-Strauss

Major areas of researchTheoretical constructs in Bourdieu's sociology of cultureCultural changeCulture theory

Frankfurt SchoolWalter BenjaminTheodor W. Adorno

Contents

Herbert MarcuseErich Fromm

Current researchComputer-mediated communication as cultureCultural institutions

Key figuresSee alsoReferences

CitationsSources

External links

Cultural sociology first emerged in Weimar, Germany, where sociologists such as Alfred Weber used the termKultursoziologie (cultural sociology). Cultural sociology was then "reinvented" in the English-speaking worldas a product of the "cultural turn" of the 1960s, which ushered in structuralist and postmodern approaches tosocial science. This type of cultural sociology may loosely be regarded as an approach incorporating culturalanalysis and critical theory. In the beginning of the cultural turn, sociologists tended to use qualitative methodsand hermeneutic approaches to research, focusing on meanings, words, artifacts and symbols. "Culture" hassince become an important concept across many branches of sociology, including historically quantitative andmodel-based subfields, such as social stratification and social network analysis.

The sociology of culture grew from the intersection between sociology, as shaped by early theorists like Marx,Durkheim, and Weber, and anthropology where researchers pioneered ethnographic strategies for describingand analyzing a variety of cultures around the world. Part of the legacy of the early development of the field isstill felt in the methods (much of cultural sociological research is qualitative) in the theories (a variety of criticalapproaches to sociology are central to current research communities) and substantive focus of the field. Forinstance, relationships between popular culture, political control, and social class were early and lastingconcerns in the field.

As a major contributor to conflict theory, Marx argued that culture served to justify inequality. The ruling class,or the bourgeoisie, produce a culture that promotes their interests, while repressing the interests of theproletariat. His most famous line to this effect is that "Religion is the opium of the people". Marx believed thatthe "engine of history" was the struggle between groups of people with diverging economic interests and thusthe economy determined the cultural superstructure of values and ideologies. For this reason, Marx is aconsidered a materialist as he believes that the economic (material) produces the cultural (ideal), which "standsHegel on his head,"[6] who argued the ideal produced the material.

Durkheim held the belief that culture has many relationships to society which include:

Development

Early researchers

Karl Marx

Émile Durkheim

Logical – Power over individuals belongs to certain cultural categories, and beliefs such as inGod.Functional – Certain rites and myths create and build up social order by having more peoplecreate strong beliefs. The greater the number of people who believe strongly in these mythsmore will the social order be strengthened.Historical – Culture had its origins in society, and from those experiences came evolution intothings such as classification systems.

Weber innovated the idea of a status group as a certain type of subculture. Status groups are based on thingssuch as: race, ethnicity, religion, region, occupation, gender, sexual preference, etc. These groups live a certainlifestyle based on different values and norms. They are a culture within a culture, hence the label subculture.Weber also purported the idea that people were motivated by their material and ideal interests, which includethings such as preventing one from going to hell. Weber also explains that people use symbols to express theirspirituality, that symbols are used to express the spiritual side of real events, and that ideal interests are derivedfrom symbols.

For Simmel, culture refers to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which havebeen objectified in the course of history."[7] Simmel presented his analyses within a context of "form" and"content". Sociological concept and analysis can be viewed.

As no two cultures are exactly alike they do all have common characteristics. [8]

A culture contains:

1. Social Organization: Structured by organizing its members into smaller numbers to meet the culturesspecific requirements. Social classes ranked in order of importance (status) based on the cultures core values.In example: money, job, education, family, etc.

2. Customs and Traditions: Rules of behavior enforced by the cultures ideas of right and wrong such as iscustoms, traditions, rules, or written laws.

3. Symbols: Any thing that carries particular meaning recognized by people who share the same culture.[9]

4. Norms: Rules and expectations by which a society guides the behavior of its members. The two types ofnorms are mores and folkways. Mores are norms that are widely observed and have a great moralsignificance. Folkways are norms for routine, casual interaction.[9]

5. Religion: The answers to their basic meanings of life and values.

6. Language: A system of symbols that allows people to communicate with one another.[9]

7. Arts and Literature: Products of human imagination made into art, music, literature, stories, and dance.

Max Weber

Georg Simmel

The elements of a culture

8. Forms of Government: How the culture distributes power. Who keeps the order within the society, whoprotects them from danger, and who provides for their needs. Can fall into terms such as Democracy,Republic, or Dictatorship.

9. Economic Systems: What to produce, how to produce it, and for whom. How people use their limitedresources to satisfy their wants and needs. Can fall into the terms Traditional Economy, Market Economy,Command Economy, Mixed Economy.

10. Artifacts: Distinct material objects, such as architecture, technologies, and artistic creations.

11. Social institutions: Patterns of organization and relationships regarding governance, production,socializing, education, knowledge creation, arts, and relating to other cultures.

In an anthropological sense, culture is society based on the values and ideas without influence of the materialworld.[10]

The cultural system is the cognitive and symbolic matrix for the central values system

— Talcott Parsons

Culture is like the shell of a lobster. Human nature is the organism living inside of that shell. The shell, culture,identifies the organism, or human nature. Culture is what sets human nature apart, and helps direct the life ofhuman nature.

Anthropologists lay claim to the establishment of modern uses of the culture concept as defined by EdwardBurnett Tylor in the mid-19th century.

Malinowski collected data from the Trobriand Islands. Descent groups across the island claim parts of the land,and to back up those claims, they tell myths of how an ancestress started a clan and how the clan descendsfrom that ancestress. Malinowski's observations followed the research of that found by Durkheim.

Radcliffe-Brown put himself in the culture of the Andaman Islanders. His research showed that groupsolidification among the islanders is based on music and kinship, and the rituals that involve the use of thoseactivities. In the words of Radcliffe-Brown, "Ritual fortifies Society".

Marcel Mauss made many comparative studies on religion, magic, law and morality of occidental and non-occidental societies, and developed the concept of total social fact, and argued that the reciprocity is theuniversal logic of the cultural interaction.

Anthropology

Bronisław Malinowski

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown

Marcel Mauss

Lévi-Strauss, based, at the same time, on the sociological and anthropological positivism of Durkheim, Mauss,Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, on the economic and sociological marxism, on freudian and Gestaltpsychology and on structural linguistics of Saussure and Jakobson, realized great studies on areas myth,kinship, religion, ritual, symbolism, magic, ideology (souvage pensée), knowledge, art and aesthetics, applyingthe methodological structuralism on his investigations. He searched the universal principals of human thoughtas a form of explaining social behaviors and structures.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's influential model of society and social relations has its roots in Marxisttheories of class and conflict. Bourdieu characterizes social relations in the context of what he calls the field,defined as a competitive system of social relations functioning according to its own specific logic or rules. Thefield is the site of struggle for power between the dominant and subordinate classes. It is within the field thatlegitimacy—a key aspect defining the dominant class—is conferred or withdrawn.

Bourdieu's theory of practice is practical rather than discursive, embodied as well as cognitive and durablethough adaptive. A valid concern that sets the agenda in Bourdieu's theory of practice is how action followsregular statistical patterns without the product of accordance to rules, norms and/or conscious intention. Toexplain this concern, Bourdieu explains habitus and field. Habitus explains the mutually penetrating realities ofindividual subjectivity and societal objectivity after the function of social construction. It is employed totranscend the subjective and objective dichotomy.

The belief that culture is symbolically coded and can thus be taught from one person to another means thatcultures, although bounded, can change. Cultures are both predisposed to change and resistant to it. Resistancecan come from habit, religion, and the integration and interdependence of cultural traits.

Cultural change can have many causes, including: the environment, inventions, and contact with othercultures.

Several understandings of how cultures change come from anthropology. For instance, in diffusion theory, theform of something moves from one culture to another, but not its meaning. For example, the ankh symboloriginated in Egyptian culture but has diffused to numerous cultures. Its original meaning may have been lost,but it is now used by many practitioners of New Age religion as an arcane symbol of power or life forces. Avariant of the diffusion theory, stimulus diffusion, refers to an element of one culture leading to an invention inanother.

Contact between cultures can also result in acculturation. Acculturation has different meanings, but in thiscontext refers to replacement of the traits of one culture with those of another, such as what happened withmany Native American Indians. Related processes on an individual level are assimilation and transculturation,both of which refer to adoption of a different culture by an individual.

Griswold outlined another sociological approach to cultural change. Griswold points out that it may seem asthough culture comes from individuals – which, for certain elements of cultural change, is true – but there isalso the larger, collective, and long-lasting culture that cannot have been the creation of single individuals as it

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Major areas of research

Theoretical constructs in Bourdieu's sociology of culture

Cultural change

predates and post-dates individual humans and contributors to culture. The author presents a sociologicalperspective to address this conflict.

Sociology suggests an alternative to both the view that it has always been an unsatisfying way at one extremeand the sociological individual genius view at the other. This alternative posits that culture and cultural worksare collective, not individual, creations. We can best understand specific cultural objects... by seeing them notas unique to their creators but as the fruits of collective production, fundamentally social in their genesis.(p. 53) In short, Griswold argues that culture changes through the contextually dependent and socially situatedactions of individuals; macro-level culture influences the individual who, in turn, can influence that sameculture. The logic is a bit circular, but illustrates how culture can change over time yet remain somewhatconstant.

It is, of course, important to recognize here that Griswold is talking about cultural change and not the actualorigins of culture (as in, "there was no culture and then, suddenly, there was"). Because Griswold does notexplicitly distinguish between the origins of cultural change and the origins of culture, it may appear as thoughGriswold is arguing here for the origins of culture and situating these origins in society. This is neither accuratenor a clear representation of sociological thought on this issue. Culture, just like society, has existed since thebeginning of humanity (humans being social and cultural). Society and culture co-exist because humans havesocial relations and meanings tied to those relations (e.g. brother, lover, friend). Culture as a super-phenomenon has no real beginning except in the sense that humans (homo sapiens) have a beginning. This,then, makes the question of the origins of culture moot – it has existed as long as we have, and will likely existas long as we do. Cultural change, on the other hand, is a matter that can be questioned and researched, asGriswold does.

Culture theory, developed in the 1980s and 1990s, sees audiences as playing an active rather than passive rolein relation to mass media. One strand of research focuses on the audiences and how they interact with media;the other strand of research focuses on those who produce the media, particularly the news.[11]

Culture theory

Frankfurt School

Walter Benjamin

Theodor W. Adorno

Herbert Marcuse

Erich Fromm

Current research

Computer-mediated communication as culture

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is the process of sending messages—primarily, but not limited totext messages—through the direct use by participants of computers and communication networks. Byrestricting the definition to the direct use of computers in the communication process, you have to get rid of thecommunication technologies that rely upon computers for switching technology (such as telephony orcompressed video), but do not require the users to interact directly with the computer system via a keyboard orsimilar computer interface. To be mediated by computers in the sense of this project, the communication mustbe done by participants fully aware of their interaction with the computer technology in the process of creatingand delivering messages. Given the current state of computer communications and networks, this limits CMCto primarily text-based messaging, while leaving the possibility of incorporating sound, graphics, and videoimages as the technology becomes more sophisticated.

Cultural activities are institutionalised; the focus on institutional settings leads to the investigation "of activitiesin the cultural sector, conceived as historically evolved societal forms of organising the conception, production,distribution, propagation, interpretation, reception, conservation and maintenance of specific culturalgoods".[12] Cultural Institutions Studies is therefore a specific approach within the sociology of culture.

Key figures in today's cultural sociology include: Julia Adams, Jeffrey Alexander, John Carroll, Diane Crane,Paul DiMaggio, Henning Eichberg, Ron Eyerman, Sarah Gatson, Andreas Glaeser, Wendy Griswold, EvaIllouz, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Michele Lamont, Annette Lareau, Stjepan Mestrovic, Philip Smith, MargaretSomers, Yasemin Soysal, Dan Sperber, Lynette Spillman, Ann Swidler, Diane Vaughan, and Viviana Zelizer.

Communication studiesCultural anthropologyCultural Sociology (journal)Cultural studiesCultureSociologySociology of literatureSociomusicologyTaste (sociology)

1. "the sociology of culture versus cultural sociology | orgtheory.net" (http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2006/08/27/the-sociology-of-culture-versus-cultural-sociology/). orgtheory.wordpress.com.Retrieved 2014-10-01.

2. "Sociology of Culture and Cultural Sociology" (https://web.archive.org/web/20150505182344/http://blog.lib.umn.edu/edgell/culture/). blog.lib.umn.edu. Archived from the original (http://blog.lib.umn.edu/edgell/culture/) on 2015-05-05. Retrieved 2014-10-01.

Cultural institutions

Key figures

See also

References

Citations

Groh, Arnold. 2019. Theories of Culture. London, England: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-138-66865-2.Stark, Rodney. 2007. Sociology: Tenth Edition. Belmont, CA: Thomson Learning, Inc.ISBN 049509344-0.Walker, Gavin. 2001. Society and culture in sociological and anthropological tradition (http://hhs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/14/3/30). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.Peacock, James L. (1981). "Durkheim and the Social Anthropology of Culture". Social Forces.Oxford University Press. 59 (4, Special Issue): 996–1008. doi:10.2307/2577977 (https://doi.org/10.2307%2F2577977). ISSN 1534-7605 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/1534-7605).JSTOR 2577977 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2577977).Lawley, Elizabeth. 1994. The Sociology of Culture in Computer-Mediated Communication: AnInitial Exploration (http://www.itcs.com/elawley/bourdieu.html).Swartz, David. 1997. Culture & Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (https://books.google.com/books?id=wtv6upysjjgC&dq=substantive+area+of+sociology). Chicago, IL: University ofChicago Press.Griswold, Wendy. 2004. Cultures and Societies in a Changing World. Thousand Oaks, CA:Pine Forge Press.Swidler, Ann (1986). "Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies". American SociologicalReview. American Sociological Association. 51 (2): 273–86. doi:10.2307/2095521 (https://doi.org/10.2307%2F2095521). ISSN 0003-1224 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0003-1224).JSTOR 2095521 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2095521).La logica dei processi culturali. Jürgen Habermas tra filosofia e sociologia (https://books.google.com/books?id=U56Sag72eSoC&pg=PP1&dq=habermas+corchia#v=onepage&q=&f=false).Genova: Edizioni ECIG. ISBN 978-88-7544-195-1."Culture and Public Action: Further Reading." Welcome to Culture and Public Action. Web. 23Feb. 2012.<http://www.cultureandpublicaction.org/conference/s_o_d_sociologyanddevelopment.htm>.

3. The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology By Jeffrey C. Alexanderhttps://books.google.com/books?id=CIA3AwAAQBAJ&lpg=PT10&ots=csNoAH4xzN&dq=%22cultural%20turn%22&lr&pg=PT18

4. Griswold, W.; Carroll, C. (2012). Cultures and Societies in a Changing World (https://books.google.com/books?id=dwQPS4H3aVcC). SAGE Publications. ISBN 9781412990547.

5. Rojek, Chris, and Bryan Turner. "Decorative sociology: towards a critique of the cultural turn."The Sociological Review 48.4 (2000): 629-648.

6. http://www.nyu.edu/classes/jackson/calhoun.jackson.theory/papers/A--MarxGeneral.pdf7. Levine, Donald (ed) 'Simmel: On individuality and social forms' Chicago University Press,

1971. pxix.8. http://www.ocs.cnyric.org/webpages/phyland/global_10.cfm?subpage=195959. Gerber, John J., and Linda M. Macionis (2011). Sociology (7th Canadian ed.). Toronto: Pearson

Canada. pp. 59–65. ISBN 978-0-13-700161-3.10. Radcliffe-Brown11. "The Role and Influence of Mass Media" (https://web.archive.org/web/20120821005211/http://w

ww.cliffsnotes.com:80/study_guide/topicArticleId-26957,articleId-26946.html). Cliffs Notes.Archived from the original (http://www.cliffsnotes.com:80/study_guide/topicArticleId-26957,articleId-26946.html) on 22 September 2018.

12. Zembylas, Tasos (2004): Kulturbetriebslehre. Begründung einer Inter-Disziplin. Wiesbaden:VS-Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, p. 13.

Sources

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