Labor and the materiality of the sign: Beyond dualist theories of culture [1]

Conclusion

What I hope to have shown is that the labor theory of culture developed here has much to contribute to an understanding of culture as meaning, and that there need not be a contradiction between pragmatic and symbolic approaches to culture as a result. It may appear that this reconciliation depends upon a break with the economic theory of labor as “instrumental action,” which is implicit in the very operation of capitalist society, and therefore impossible to transcend at will. No doubt the lived weight of the mental/manual division of labor in our society will continue to exercise an inordinate influence on popular opinion and common sense for some time to come. But I have nevertheless argued that what is truly impossible are the theories of meaning which result from this division of labor, whose attempts to definitively separate meaning from practice could only be realized by abolishing both. We have already seen that the notion of culture as pure reason has never been anything more than an ideology. By the same token, no specimen of completely instrumentalized labor has ever been discovered, and would not even be worth exploiting if it did exist: “in any physical work, even the most degraded and mechanical, there exists a minimum of technical qualification, that is, a minimum of creative intellectual activity” [126].

The integrity of labor is therefore at least as demonstrable as its division, and is finally a more primordial and insuperable fact. Despite the way it has been stigmatized by dualist thought, labor continues to maintain our world, not just in a material sense, but also in a meaningful sense, as it has always done. This is something that we can point to in the here-and-now as the basis for an alternative cultural theory, one which is both more realistic and more optimistic than dualism. For in revindicating this neglected reality of labor, our concept of culture is also affirmed in new and important ways.