Dialogism and Cultural Forms

Abstract

In the previous chapters I have examined the broad trends in theorising culture, culminating in Bourdieu’s attempted synthesis of the objectivist-subjectivist poles of cultural sociology. As we have seen, one of the major problems of both Marxist and sociological perspectives lay in analysing culture as a semi-autonomous sphere, or field, characterised by its own internal properties and forms, irreducible to the external conditions of social organisation. The functionalist tendency of Marxist and sociological analysis assumed coherence, unity and self-regulation of the social system (the macrostructures) which worked to integrate culture through a dominant centre (the world view of a social class, the common culture). Sociological functionalism, from Durkheim to Parsons, defined culture as a process in which individuals psychologically assimilate certain aspects of social structure, which then become institutionalised into the social system. This has the effect of weakening the analytic distinctions between meanings derived from culture and those from everyday social life. A close fit subsists between symbols, social behaviour and patterns of institutionalisation. The result is the marginalisation of the active role of the agent in the making of culture and a diminution of the creative and voluntaristic nature of action.