The Sources of Cultural Power: Beyond the Cultural Arbitrary

Abstract

Since the 19 century the dominant conceptualization of cultural power has been the Bcultural arbitrary,^ the idea that the meaning of a sign comes not from any substantive relationship to the signified but from its relationship to other signs in a symbolic structure. Put differently, the relationship of the signifier to the signified is arbitrary. The beauty of the cultural arbitrary is that it provides a solid foundation for recognizing the relative autonomy of culture. Culture becomes a structure with its own integrity, and as such is a resource that competes alongside social, economic and political structures and motivations as a determinant of social action. Culture frames the possible, provides moral frameworks for judging the actual, and can motivate the actions of individuals and groups. The scholarship of Jeffrey Alexander and others working within the Bstrong program^ of cultural sociology has shown the analytical purchase and interpretative power of this conceptualization. However fruitful, this conceptualization is not without limitations. First, feminist and postcolonial scholars have suggested that concepts of culture that portray it as autonomous cover over the politics of cultural creation and the real social struggles involved in representation (see Smilde 2013). Second, concepts of culture based on an arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified do not seem to capture the actual engagement of culture in life, in which people formulate and use culture to address the challenges they face in the world. Culture does not just motivate, restrict and condition behind the backs of actors. It is created by them as they engage the world and is consciously modified as it succeeds or fails. Third, while the cultural arbitrary strengthens the autonomy of culture, by the same token it reduces the scope of culture, forfeiting intentional practice over to conceptions of unconstructed rational action. Scholars working with the strong program of cultural sociology can certainly deal with political and economic actors that manipulate and instrumentally use culture. But they tend to do so using concepts of naked rational action. This is unfortunate Qual Sociol (2016) 39:195–198 DOI 10.1007/s11133-016-9327-6