Showing papers in "Cultural Sociology in 2010"

The Social and the Aesthetic: For a Post-Bourdieuian Theory of Cultural Production:

Abstract: This article sets out new methodological principles for the sociology of art, a sub-discipline that it seeks to broaden conceptually by shifting the ground from art to cultural production. This shift suggests the utility of overcoming the boundaries that demarcate the sociology of art from adjacent fields, augmenting the sociological repertoire with reference to anthropology, cultural and media studies, art and cultural history, and the music disciplines. At the same time the article proposes that an explanatory theory of cultural production requires reinvention in relation to five key themes: aesthetics and the cultural object; agency and subjectivity; the place of institutions; history, temporality and change; and problems of value and judgement. The first half of the article approaches these issues through a sustained critique of Bourdieu. It proceeds through an exposition of generative research from contemporary anthropology, including the work of Alfred Gell, Christopher Pinney, Fred Myers and others...

Intersubjectivity and Bourdieusian Approaches to ‘Identity’

Abstract: Bourdieu’s emphasis on the socialized subjectivity of habitus is increasingly used in discussions of ‘identity’ to indicate the limits to reflexivity, situating ‘identity’ in tacit practice. In emphasizing the dispositional nature of ‘identity’, analysts also acknowledge more explicitly reflexive and self-consciously mobilized aspects; however, Bourdieu’s restrictive treatment of reflexivity makes it difficult to theorize the relations between these different aspects. The ‘problem of reflexivity’ is more properly a question of the intersubjective nature of practice, and the different aspects of ‘identity’ are better theorized as features of situated intersubjectivity. With practice the negotiated outcome of intersubjective coordination, then ‘calls to order from the group’, the routine monitoring of conduct, agents’ reflexive accounts of their activity, and the mobilization of agents into collectivities can be explored as features of the collective accomplishment of practices, by networks of variously dis...

The Celebrity-Icon:

Abstract: This article develops a non-reductive approach to celebrity, treating it as an iconic form of collective representation central to the meaningful construction of contemporary society Like other compelling material symbols, the celebrity-icon is structured by the interplay of surface and depth The surface is an aesthetic structure whose sensuous qualities command attention and compel attachment; the depth projects the sacred and profane binaries that structure meaning even in postmodern societies While celebrity worship displays elements of totemism, it also reflects the eschatological hopes for salvation that mark post-Axial Age religion The attacks on celebrity culture that inform critical public and intellectual thinking resemble iconoclastic criticisms of idol worship more than they do empirical social scientific study

Eastern Movement Forms as Body-Self Transforming Cultural Practices in the West: Towards a Sociological Perspective

Abstract: This article was published in Cultural Sociology on 4 March 2010 (online), available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1749975509356866

The evaluation of popular music in the United States, Germany and the Netherlands: a comparison of the use of high art and popular aesthetic criteria

Abstract: Popular music has apparently gained much in status and artistic legitimacy. Some have argued that popular music criticism has assimilated the evaluative criteria traditionally associated with high art aesthetics to legitimate pop music as a serious art form, while others have claimed that popular music discourse opposes the evaluative principles of high art worlds in favor of a ‘popular aesthetic’. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Lamont, DiMaggio and Bourdieu, we compare the critical discourse on popular music in the United States, Germany and the Netherlands and expect that the presence of ‘high art’ and ‘popular’ aesthetic criteria in popular music reviews published in elite newspapers varies cross-nationally due to differences in the hierarchy, universality and boundary strength of their respective cultural classification systems. We compare the prevalence of various high art and popular evaluative criteria in popular music album reviews in American, Dutch, and German newspapers. In the US, the boundary between high art and popular aesthetics appears to be weakest, German reviewers take the most high art approach to popular music, while Dutch reviews clearly favor the popular aesthetic over high art criteria.

Personal Branding and the Commodification of Reflexivity

Abstract: Reflexivity as a concept has produced theoretical debates which have explored the relationship of social actors to agency and identity. Less attention has been paid to reflexivity as a commodity, t...

The Changing Semantics of Youth and Adulthood

Abstract: This article analyses a contradiction: while living up to a selective image of youth has become imperative for the maximization of life chances, doing so attracts the discursive misrecognition of young adults’ personhoods. This cultural evaluation evinces a misapprehension of the meaning of adulthood whose increasing ambiguity is inseparable from changes in the semantics of ‘youth’. I begin by analysing the normative model ‘standard adulthood’ from a recognition-theoretical perspective and then outline transformations in the semantics of youth that undermine that model’s empirical validity. I argue further that labour and commodity markets have ‘liberated’ youthfulness from its biological, age-determined delimitations and have recast select, desirable (i.e. profitable) characteristics of youth as necessary for the maximization of individuals’ life chances. I conclude that the normative foundations of contemporary adulthood are ambiguous because the market has appropriated, altered and then sold back to us...

Michael Baxandall and the Sociological Interpretation of Art

Abstract: Art historian Michael Baxandall’s writings have played a key role in defining the major paradigms in the sociology of art: the production of culture perspective, Bourdieu’s critical sociology of art, Hennion and DeNora’s ‘new sociology of art’. Although making fruitful use of Baxandall’s focus on markets, material visual practices and the concept of the period eye, these appropriations have overlooked the centrality to Baxandall’s work of the concept of art as an institution. This institutional focus permits Baxandall to integrate social, cultural and visual analysis in a way which shows not only how visual art is socially constructed, but also how it plays an active role in the construction of social orders on a variety of levels of emergence, from the interaction order to larger social structures.

In defence of theoretical and methodological pluralism in the sociology of art: a critique of Georgina Born's programmatic essay

Abstract: This article welcomes Born’s proposal that the sociology of art learn from ‘adjacent fields’ that can ‘augment the sociological repertoire’. It agrees especially that sociologists can learn much from the anthropology of art and material culture studies. However, it challenges Born’s claim that the sociology of art has ‘seen little progress in recent years’ and thus questions certain aspects of her proposal for a ‘post-Bourdieuian theory of cultural production’. The central argument is: rather than an ‘analytics of mediation’ — which Born recommends — the sociology of art can benefit from studying material ‘mediators’ at work in concrete artistic networks, and the role of aesthetic agency and art in the constitution of social life more generally. The ar ticle concludes that the path forward for a sociology of art may lie precisely in not trying to force a reconciliation between macro and micro approaches, or between humanities and social science perspectives.

What Does ‘Sociology of Culture’ Mean? Notes on a Few Trans-Cultural Misunderstandings

Abstract: This article attempts to clarify some misunderstandings between English-speaking and French-speaking scholars in the field of the sociology of arts and culture. In addition to a number of ambiguities in the definition of what ‘culture’, ‘ar ts’ and ‘sociology’ mean within the French and the Anglo-American academic traditions, the very words ‘culture’, ‘cultural sociology’ and ‘cultural studies’ exhibit important differences between each other as they are understood within each linguistic context. Seen from a French point of view, so-called ‘French theory’ appears as a typically Anglo-American category, along with ‘post-modernism’, while French debates among sociologists of art seem to have few echoes abroad. The linguistic dissymmetry between French and Anglo-American academic cultures should be taken into account in order better to understand the nature of these misunderstandings.

The ‘Social Life’ of Scouse: Understanding Contemporary Liverpool through Changing Food Practices

Abstract: Questions of heritage, tradition and authenticity have been pushed to the fore by attempts to engineer a cultural and social ‘renaissance’ in the city of Liverpool, particularly in light of its recent European Capital of Culture status in 2008. Much of this reinvention has been discursive, asserting continuities with a re-imagined globalized, polyethnic and merchant past. This discursive turn has encouraged a resurgence of interest in the symbolic and cultural identities of Liverpool. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the dish, ‘scouse’ (and, the ‘Scousers’ who eat it) as it makes the transition from working class kitchens to the city’s well-to-do restaurants and bars. By drawing on the food history of Liverpool’s port, ethnographic observations and narrative accounts of food experiences, this article traces the ‘social life’ of scouse from its historical origins and symbolic links to poverty and identity to its emergence as a repositioned culinary cultural artefact of urban regeneration.

Meaning, Celebrity, and the Underage Pregnancy of Jamie Lynn Spears

Abstract: This article argues that the focus of previous literature on the economic and psychological aspects of the celebrity system unduly restricts our understanding of the social phenomenon of celebrity. Celebrities are commodities to be sure, but previous scholars have largely failed to explore the ways in which celebrities are also symbols. Celebrities are a locus of meaning-making in the contemporary USA. Using the case of Jamie Lynn Spears’s 2007—8 pregnancy, I demonstrate that, as a celebrity icon, her underage pregnancy raises questions and concerns about more than a single celebrity’s experience as a soon-to-be teenage mother. Her pregnancy imports a larger public discussion and debate about teen sex and how to avoid teen pregnancy. Through this study, I show that celebrities are symbols by which we narrate, negotiate, and interpret our collective experience, and establish moral boundaries.

Cultural Production and the Generative Matrix A Response to Georgina Born

Abstract: This article engages with several of the key issues raised by Georgina Born in her article in this issue It begins with a consideration of the emphasis on ‘production’ in Born’s piece, and argues that production studies are marked by an attentiveness to complexity that is often absent in studies of cultural reception This response engages polemically with Born’s call for a cultural analysis that includes moments of critical judgement, and argues against approaches to culture that are centrally concerned with questions of human creativity

Migration and remembrance: Sounds and spaces of klezmer 'revivals'

Abstract: This article discusses the cultural meanings of recent revivals in Yiddish music in the USA and central Europe. It does this with reference to Adorno’s critique of lyrical celebration of the past as a means of forgetting. It examines the criticisms that recent ‘Jewish’ cultural revivals are kitsch forms of unreflective nostalgia and considers the complexity of meanings here. It then explores the ways in which klezmer might be an aural form of memory and suggests that revivals can represent gateways into personal and collective engagement with the past. It further argues that experimental hybrid forms of new klezmer potentially open new spaces of remembrance and expressions of Jewish identity.

In the Blood:The Racializing Tones of Music Categorization

Abstract: This article examines the categorization of world music and how vexed and contentious issues pertaining to ideas of difference are navigated within processes of production and consumption of world ...

Narcissism as Ethical Practice?: Foucault, Askesis and an Ethics of Becoming

Abstract: An auto/biographical society brings with it fears of a drift towards a culture of narcissism in which the mutuality and ethicality of collective life may be eclipsed in favour of a self-indulgent ‘...

The Autopoiesis of the Artworld after the End of Art

Abstract: This article critically adapts and applies the views of Niklas Luhmann on the social system of art. Luhmann’s systems theory does not have an adequate account of ‘the artworld’. Yet by conceiving of the artworld as an autopoietic social system, Luhmann’s highly original work can be brought to bear in the sociology of art. This article applies that work by reviewing some historical changes in the autoreference of the artworld as a social system and the type of reference of works of art in the same periods. While 20th-century art saw the dominance of autoreference, which replaced a century-old mimetic reference to reality (social, natural or transcendent), current art seems to be moving in the direction of ‘defamiliarization’, taking social reality as its referent. While some philosophers have noted the ‘end of art’, contemporary art seems to be moving more in the direction of some form of sociology.

Book Review: Rozario, Kevin The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007, £19 hbk (ISBN: 9780226725703) 313 pp:

Abstract: one of the more interesting ways in which these themes are held together. This is the fact that the approaches to identity, the state, society, and organization which Organizing Identity is proposing we consider with greater reservations are themselves united by what Ian Hunter has referred to as ‘the moment of theory’, an anti-empiricist concern which has characterized social science since the 1970s, placing ‘critique’ itself at the heart of all analysis, but also generating highly problematic conceptions of identity and the self, as well as society and the state. For du Gay, as for Bruno Latour, the sociology of persons, organizations, state and social life could gain enormously from greater modesty about our conceptual and political aims, slightly less enthusiasm for epochalist ‘critique’, and a greater responsiveness to the nuances of the constitution of subjectivity in contemporary social and political life. Organizing Identity is an invaluable contribution to the sociology of identity, personhood and the self, identifying and critically examining the core theoretical issues running through the analysis of subjectivity in organized social life, and usefully developing its arguments with a range of key empirical illustrations. The title’s ‘After Theory’ is about, in fact, getting our theory right. It takes the field in an exciting and distinctive direction, retaining what is valuable and useful about both the more classical approaches such as Mauss and Elias, and the more recent work of Bourdieu and Latour, as well as staking out du Gay’s own important contribution to the theory and empirical study of identity.

Book Review: Shyon Baumann Hollywood Highbrow: From Entertainment to Art Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2007, £26.95 hbk (ISBN: 9780691125275) 242 pp:

Abstract: because we inhabit a more dreadful world. Rozario too accepts that we live in unusually dangerous times. ‘It is no surprise that we dream of catastrophes because we live in a catastrophic world,’ he notes (p. 6). He writes that calamities are ‘becoming such regular features of Southern California and American life that old optimisms about the benefits of disaster are finally wearing thin’ (p. 99). Rozario believes that not only has the world become more dangerous but ‘human beings are now more vulnerable to its effects’ (p. 6). Indeed he takes the view that rather than a solution, progress is the problem since it ‘often seems only to increase human vulnerability to increasingly severe calamities’ (p. 99). What is fascinating about The Culture of Calamity is the contrast in approach adopted by the author in his analysis of the disaster narratives of the past and of the present. His treatment of the ‘disaster as blessing’ discourse is critical and questioning. For example, he writes that in the past the response to a calamity was influenced by positions of economic power and class. It was the rich and powerful who ‘often viewed disasters as sources of moral, political and economic renewal’ (p. 3). However, when it comes to the deconstruction of the culture of calamity today, the critical distance found in historical parts of the text appears to be lacking. On the contrary, the author seems to adopt the stance of a proponent rather than that of a critic of contemporary representations of calamities. His discussion of what he calls the ‘“postmodern’’ culture of calamity’ is the weakest part of this well written study and it is far from clear what is distinctive about it. Although he makes some important points about the ‘hyperreal apocalypse’ sensibility that prevails in the post 9/11 era, there is very little discussion of social experiences that may account for it. But these are relatively minor problems. This is a very exciting text that shows the potential of cultural sociology for illuminating the changing forms of disaster consciousness.

Review essay: Shooting Billy Wordsworth [Book Review]

Abstract: In his recent autobiography, Miracles of Life, J.G. Ballard (2008) writes of the unease he felt among fellow novelists in the 1960s, who seemed to him then to be locked into seriously outmoded literary sensibilities (he much preferred the company of physicians, artists and hoodlum scientists). He gladly reports that the novel has changed very much for the better in recent years, and identifies Will Self and Iain Sinclair as among a new generation of writers ‘with powerful imaginations and a wide, roving intelligence’ (Ballard, 2008: 222). Self and Sinclair are quite different sorts of writer – from one another; but not without common interests and enthusiasms. They are united, for one thing, in their reciprocal regard for Ballard. Self is on the record as considering him one of the most significant post-war writers of the English language and clearly takes some of his tricks as a writer from Ballard. Sinclair is also an admirer: ‘an English Master ... [achieving] this astonishing paranoiac poetic’ (see Chapman, 2006). Self and Sinclair also share a passion for walking, and in this they leave Ballard behind.1

Telling Stories About Jesus: A Conversation with John Carroll

Abstract: Since the 1980s the Australian sociologist John Carroll has been engaged in a unique project. Over the course of a number of books he has sought to investigate the fate of authority, values and vocation in the tradition of Western culture. His books are characterised by a deep knowledge of the Western tradition of high culture, especially its art and texts; they are marked by historical sweep and seriousness of purpose. For Carroll, culture is the retelling of archetypal stories which take us beyond the ego and towards the work of soul-building. In 2007 he published the book The Existential Jesus which seeks to tell of the meaning of Jesus for contemporar y culture. This conversation uses the publication of the Jesus book as an opportunity to ask Carroll to reflect on his work. Consequently the article is also an invitation for the wider academic community to begin to engage with Carroll’s profound and challenging inquiry into the state of Western culture.

Book Review: Tom Boellstorff Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2008, £22.95 hbk (ISBN 9780691135281), 316 pp:

Abstract: unfounded guesses about what may cause erroneous activation and change their lifestyles, trying to avoid behaviour they suspect to be risky. One may contend that these devices were given sovereignty, a governmental (monitoring and punishment) power over the recipient’s body. Once the device is implanted, recipients can no longer refuse medical treatment. Even if having second thoughts, patients consider asking to remove an ICD as tantamount to an active ‘suicide’. Pollock recognizes here a new cyborg concept of suicide: the recipients have ‘cyborg identities’. They have made a decision to introduce a machine into their body, but this decision has both limited their future agency and re-defined their boundaries and identities. The Inner History of Devices is an ambitious book. Its ambition to give added value by combining texts from different genres and disciplines only partly succeeds. While the texts written by psychoanalysts have little to offer to students of culture and society, most of the ethnographies do not gain much by borrowing psychological analytic tools (Sanal even confuses the ethnographer’s role with the therapist’s). However, this most enjoyable book may be of great interest for anyone interested in the fluid boundaries between machines, bodies and souls: their different agencies, convergences and conflicts.

Book Review: Claude Rosental Weaving Self-Evidence: A Sociology of Logic Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2008, £59 hbk, (ISBN: 9780691139401), £16.96 pbk, 269 pp

Abstract: what must be grasped is the precise gradients of belonging through which something like film passes. That it goes through critical ridges of re-organization suggests that these gradients of belonging are not arbitrary, but part of correlated populations of events and rhythms which are organized through what is known as stochastic resonance. Film, in its history, through its events, is a non-coinciding resonant unity constituted by these gradients of repetitive, parallel processes. Manuel Delanda articulates what is at stake in moving decisively away from social constructivism toward a unified framework of nonlinear dynamics in social institutions. He writes: