individualism and cultural constructivism: many practitioners of both these approaches are suspicious of relying on the idea of the group and seek to disaggregate the seeming solidarity of the collective.75 And all across political science, sociology, history, and anthropology scholars recognize that it is through culture that we apprehend the world and construct the imaginative concepts with which to understand our place within it. Culture both limits and empowers; it gives agency and constrains it. Culture defines goals, guides us toward achieving them, and misguides us often as to what might be in our “interest.”
Roads Less Traveled
Many of the insights and stances of the cultural turn—the inherently unstable nature of categories, the problem of reflexivity, the preference for deep texture and thick description over parsimony, and the Foucauldian extension of power out from the state into the realm of disciplinary discourses and onto the body itself—provide fascinating openings for research by social scientists interested in politics. The very sphere of politics has been widened. (Just think of the job opportunities this offers!) Not only does Foucault’s micropolitics become a locus for investigation, not only is the personal political and the body a site for politics, but fundamental assumptions about interests, the state, and the power and limits of political language now have to be interrogated.
Rather than flee from Foucault’s imprecisions and obscurities, political scientists should borrow what they can from his difficult but fecund mind. The concept of discourse as a field of knowledge with its own practices and rules contributes a powerful new frame for thinking about politics, but at the same time discursive analysis would benefit from more precise critical examination and empirical grounding. There is much here for political science to do in understanding the state, the less institutionalized forms of politics, and the languages and representations of power.76 The insights from the cultural turn give us some purchase on the web of disciplinary and power relations that make up a political regime, the web in which subjects and citizens are caught, of which they may or may not be aware, and against which they may or may not be able to resist. At the same time the state can be brought back in along with culture. In an exciting departure, the authors of the essays in State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn, edited by sociologist George Steinmetz, seek to reverse the idea of culture as a product of the state and elaborate culture’s constitutive role in state formation—not only in the Weberian application exclusively to non-Western states but in the core countries of northwestern Europe.77 Without deciding beforehand the power of discursive or cultural “constraints” on actors’ abilities, or accepting what interests or identities are out there, political scientists might expand the range of possible preferences and motivations, rationally calculated and emotional, that people may have and explore how particular subjectivities are constituted.
The cultural turn, however, comes with its own politics and political costs. The radical doubting of cultures (and national cultures as the moment of congruence of culture and politics) challenges the dominant discourses of politics in the modern world. If cultures can no longer be assumed to be coherent, bounded entities in the real world, then their claims to self-determination, autonomy, and possibly statehood cannot be said to derive unproblematically from the need to represent a particular culture politically. The claims of nationalists that national cultures run back in time to a primordial originating moment and that culture was, is, or should be isomorphic with a territory (the “homeland”) have been subjected to critical, subversive historical analysis. Moreover, the very idea of constructedness of nations, like that of cultures in general, and the central importance of belief, representation, and imagination in making cultures and nations, both challenge the more positivist theories of ethnic conflict and open the possibility for new constructions of national identity that could lead less predictably to conflict or cooperation. Here is an opportunity for a reconceptualization of a problem in political science. Indeed, the historicization and cultural formation of nations and nationalism were most significantly taken up by a political scientist, Benedict Anderson, but one who for all of his influence in broader social science, history, and literary studies remained marginal to the mainstream of political science.78
The deconstructive thrust of the cultural turn, however, need not lead us into a completely indeterminate world without any coherences or temporal solidarities whatsoever. Even as cultural interpretivists disaggregate the assumed wholeness of societies, cultures, and nations, there is an awareness that a certain “thin coherence” (the term is Sewell’s) remains.79 Sherry Ortner suggests where anthropology may be on this point at the present:
People are spinning what Geertz called “webs of meaning” all the time, with whatever cultural resources happen to be at hand. Thus, even if culture(s) were never as whole and consistent and static as anthropologists portrayed them in the past, and even if, as many thinkers now claim, there are fewer and fewer in the way of distinct and recognizable “cultures” in the contemporary world (though I am less sure about that), the fundamental assumption that people are always trying to make sense of their lives, always weaving fabrics of meaning, however fragile and fragmentary, still holds.80
Thin coherence and weaving fabrics of meaning also imply a (not-so-new) political program of deconstruction that holds that the social reality of any society is only one possibility among many. History and anthropology have often promised us an open world, a world (in Sewell’s words) “contingent rather than necessary,” in which
there exist forms of life radically different from ours that are nonetheless fully human … In the pasts they study, historians find worlds, structured differently from ours, worlds where people’s motives, senses of honor, daily tasks, and political calculations are based on unfamiliar assumptions about human society and the cosmic order … History, like anthropology, specializes in the discovery and display of human variety, but in time rather than space.81
The most potent moment for this act of discovery is probably in the study of origins, the very moment in more essentialist theories used to naturalize present phenomena. Pierre Bourdieu suggests that “There is no more potent tool for rupture than the reconstruction of genesis: by bringing back into view the conflicts and confrontations of the early beginnings and therefore all the discarded possibles, it retrieves the possibility that things could have been (and still could be) otherwise. And, through such a practical utopia, it questions the ‘possible’ which, among all others, was actualized.”82 This, of course, was precisely what the projects of Thompson and Geertz were all about—recovery of alternative worlds that held up visions, not of why we had arrived at where we were, but of where we might have gone.
In a way, we have come back from beyond. For the same idea of possible futures other than the present was what compelled people to turn to Marxism. Although a deep pessimism about the possibility of socialism followed in the wake of the collapse of Soviet-style systems and the global hegemony of market capitalism, there has been a revival of the kind of radical historicism that marked the best of the Marxist tradition—the view that all social formations (capitalism included) have their own history and evolution, their birth, maturity, and death, and their replacement by other forms. This revival has taken place not on materialist grounds but in the array of approaches loosely labeled post-structuralist and post-modern. In his conclusion to Beyond the Cultural Turn, one of the most influential voices in that turn, Hayden White, proposes:
A modernist social science must be directed to the study of those aspects of social reality that attest to human beings’ capacities to make and remake that reality, not merely adjust to it. And it seems to me that the significance of the cultural turn in history and the social sciences inheres in its suggestion that in “culture” we can apprehend a niche within social reality from which any given society can be deconstructed and shown to be less an inevitability than only one possibility among a host of others.83
This new historicization of capitalism and the dominant social forms, the attempt to be self-reflexive about the very order in which you live and work, is reminiscent of earlier Marxist attempts
