Abstract
This book defends the view that culture, as shared meanings and symbols, is primarily subjective and that many misunderstandings in the analysis of culture in social theory are due to the pervasive presence, in social life and in social science, of the many different forms of a tendency to objectivize meanings. Culture is a way of saying that there is an irreducibly subjective dimension to social life that is also supraindividual and structured.
It is argued that Jeffrey C. Alexander’s concept of the analytic autonomy of culture suffers from internal contradictions that lead to what can be called, following Anne Kane, the dilemma of concrete autonomy of culture: either culture is autonomous, but then is only an analytic model remote from the action of concrete actors here and now; or culture is concretely present in the action of real actors, but then cannot be conceived as an autonomous system.
Also, Pierre Bourdieu’s work is shown as a prime instance of a theorizing sensitive to the cultural and symbolic aspects of social life but at the same time is hostile to the idea of culture being analytically independent of material conditions or the objective positions of individuals in society. The book makes an attempt to offer an alternative account of the culture-action link based on an “intentionalist concept of culture,” inspired by Schutzian phenomenology and Searle’s philosophy of mind, which stresses the double nature of culture, as, first, structured subjective meanings, subjective despite the fact of being shared across a social group, and, second, the construed model of meaningful relations that exists for the researcher, but not for the actor.
The structures of meaning and the structures of culture represent the same reality grasped at the two opposite ends of a common continuum: meanings as the very subjective reality of culture and the culture structures of cultural sociology as the most advanced form of objectivization of subjective meanings.