A Network-Location Theory of Culture

Abstract

Stephan Fuchs's Against Essentialism is the most important work of general that has appeared in the last 10 years or more. It is grand on the level with Luhmann, Habermas, and Giddens, encompassing society, culture, knowledge, and philosophy. It is general both in the sense of giving a framework for all of sociology and in the sense that the word theory is now used in humanistic and especially literary fields, the orienting perspective on what cultural knowledge consists in. Fuchs confronts the deconstructionist school of Derrida and Foucault as well as the cultural field analysis of Bourdieu, and in general takes on the main intellectual action in recent decades. His own position, which might be called a network-location of the observer, gives us a new position that is more comprehensive and less narrowly contentious than the positions he critiques. Fuchs's of culture is a present-day development of classic sociology. Its basic conception stems from Durkheim's Division of Labor in Society, Primitive Classification, and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. It is social morphology in just the sense that Durkheim argued: the form of determines the form of ideas held by people within it. A low degree of division of labor-what Durkheim called mechanical solidarity-produces concrete, particularistic symbols, which social members treat in a reified way; in contemporary terminology, we would say that a dense, redundantly connected social network produces a culture in which collective representations are dogmatically treated as essences. Conversely, a high degree of division of labor-a differentiated network with sparse and long-range connectionsproduces a culture that is abstract and relativistic. Fuchs radicalizes this Durkheimian social morphology and brings it up to date with network and the findings of contemporary empirical research. Fuchs's radicalism is especially in his conception of what are the units with which we are dealing. Where Durkheim simply would have referred to society without probing just where this abstraction is located, Fuchs points out that there are no intrinsically fixed units of social life, but only what kinds of units are determined by the condition of social networks of interaction in that particular region at a particular time. All identities, as Harrison White would put it (in his 1992 book, Identity and Control), all group boundaries, all organizations, all states or nations are not fixed but temporary crystallizations of networks influx. They are results of networks of communication communicating about themselves, usually to outsiders. The same applies on the level of individual selves, what we in a reified or essentialist mode would call personalities; these too are fluxes, temporarily fixed in the microlevel of face-to-face communication when these micronetworks communicate about themselves. As Goffman said in the