Cultural Rules and Material Relations

Abstract

This paper attempts to synthesize the Winchian stress on constitutive rules with the Marxian stress on material relationships by developing the concept of emergently material social relations. Such relationships, it is argued, arise from the constitutive rules that constitute a group's way of life. Although such relationships thus are derivative from the conscious rule-following behavior of actors, nevertheless they have an objective existence independent of actors' specific awareness. It is argued that such material relations are an important mechanism beyond the cultural rules through which our behavior is constrained, enabled, and motivated. Yet the Winchian tradition in general and contemporary structuration theory in particular have tended to peripheralize the notion of material relations, treating them largely as epiphenomenal abstractions. This, it is argued, is a mistake and the source of an important lacuna in structuration theory. In particular, because structuration theory decenters the actor, conflates the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules, and peripheralizes social relations, it lacks an adequate explanation of motivation, as symptomized by its inordinate appeal to the unconscious. The concept of emergently material social relations overcomes this problem and offers a reintegration of the Marxian and the Winchian traditions. In this paper I attempt to synthesize a Winchian stress on cultural rules with a traditional Marxian stress on material relations. Whereas Winch (1958) argued that actors' collective self-understanding of what they are doing must be the starting point of any social analysis, certain traditional readings of Marx have always maintained that the proper starting point of analysis must be the objective or material conditions in which actors are situated. This paper offers a synthesis of these seemingly opposed views by emphasizing two distinctions. The first distinction is between context and behavior. Both the Winchian and the Marxian views tend to agree that social behavior must be explained in terms of its context. They disagree, however, on the nature of that context. Whereas Winch stressed the cultural context created by constitutive rules, the relevant Marxian tradition emphasizes the material context created by objective social structural relations. I will argue here that a more complete context for explaining behavior involves both constitutive rules and material relations, and that this context analytically precedes actors' further self-understanding of and behavior in their situation. Actually I propose a dialectical process that augments Giddens's stratification model of action such that the material and cultural context is both the condition and the outcome of social behavior.