style="font-size:15px;"> Fifth, the cultural turn has increasingly moved from the elaboration of systems of meaning, in the Geertzian sense, to an exploration of regimes of domination, of power, reflecting the influence of Foucault and feminism. The cultural turn embeds politics in everyday life, in the ways in which meaning is constructed and actors are either empowered or constrained. “Foucault’s concept of the disciplinary society,” Geoff Eley writes, “profoundly shifts our understanding of politics, carrying the analysis of power away from the core institutions of the state in the national-centralized sense toward the emergence of new individualizing strategies ‘that function outside, below, and alongside the State apparatuses, on a much more minute and everyday level’.”40 This radically alternative conception of power—in Keith Baker’s succinct formulation—“included emphases on power as constituted by regimes of truth rather than by the exercise of political will, as polymorphous and pervasive rather than unitary, as productive rather than repressive, as internal rather than external to the subject, as subjectivizing rather than subjecting.”41 Identity, discourse, and affect are all brought into play in explaining political choice, not only in the micropolitics of everyday life, but at the level of the state itself.
Sixth, the cultural turn exposed the art and artifice of historical metanarratives, with their usual starting point in the Enlightenment and their grand tours from tradition to modernity. The problem was not so much that the grand narratives were right or wrong but that they had been taken as true, as accurate reflections of an actual past, and as bases of analysis and further elaboration, rather than as highly selective and convenient frames for understanding. The cultural turn saw all social scientific accounts as constructed narratives, selected from available evidence, akin to other fictions, and told by narrators situated in specific time and place.42
Stories are necessary to make sense out of the raw material of lived experience. Gone is the omniscient, objective observer, and in his place is a weaver of a new historical or ethnographic web woven with the threads and according to the conventions of particular disciplines. The great stories of the past—the rise of the bourgeoisie or the working class, the struggle of nations toward consciousness and freedom, the progressive emancipation of humankind from ignorance and superstition—were now seen precisely to be stories more or less plausible and resonant in so far as they played by the rules of disciplinary games and appealed to disciplinary communities. As Margaret R. Somers puts it, “Within a knowledge culture, narratives … not only convey information but serve epistemological purposes. They do so by establishing veracity through the integrity of their storied form. This suggests that in the first instance the success or failure of truth claims embedded in narratives depends less on empirical verification and more on the logic and rhetorical persuasiveness of the narrative.”43
Seventh, by foregrounding the involvement of the investigator in the investigation, the cultural turn accepts the inability to achieve either full objectivity, the distance from the object of study for which the historians had longed, or the rapport so ardently imagined by classical anthropology. The observer/analyst is situated in both time and place, is educated in a particular way, and comes with her own subjectivity. She is involved despite herself, or because of herself, and is now free to reflect on her own position. Self-reflexivity parallels the whole constructivist thrust of the cultural turn, bringing the constitution of both structure and agent back to the observer/analyst. As the introduction to an influential collection explains, the ethnographers represented in the volume “see culture as composed of seriously contested codes and representations; they assume that the poetic and the political are inseparable, that science is in, not above, historical and linguistic processes … Their focus on text making and rhetoric serves to highlight the constructed, artificial nature of cultural accounts.” The “historical predicament of ethnography” is precisely that “it is always caught up in the invention, not the representation, of cultures.”44 Any attempt to represent and explain culture must by necessity be historicist and self-reflexive.
The list of stances and preferences of those having turned can be further extended, as can the new fields of inquiry that cultural interpretivists have opened up. The concern with the body and the self, and the whole question of the production of subjectivities, come to mind. While some historians and sociologists returned to the creation of new mega-historical narratives, only very partially informed by insights from cultural studies, others, particularly cultural historians, explored micro-history, a style of work in which the full context of a historical moment can be grasped.45 The image of historians in the mind of some social scientists has been of laborers toiling in the fields of data collection, whereas in fact the cultural turn has granted a general permission to historians to practice their own kind of intellectual imperialism, expanding the range of legitimate topics. If politics is profoundly culturally constructed, and culture is fraught with political meanings and practice, and both are produced in time, then historians can easily move past the disciplinary border guards at the softening edges of anthropology, sociology, economics, and political science.
Discourse and representations, of course, are central to the cultural turn, but in recent years some culturalists have pulled back from the desire to replace older materialist accounts with purely discursive ones. A noticeable trend, reflected unevenly in Beyond the Cultural Turn, was not so much an abandonment of the ground gained by the turn toward discourse, language, and culture, but a reassessment of the place of the material and the structural, or what is often referred to as “the social.” An oversimplified materialist or structural determination is not to be replaced by an equally one-sided cultural or discursive determination.46 The turn back to the material and social is evident in Sewell’s writings, notably in an essay on Geertz where he retrieves the materiality of the anthropologist’s location of symbolization in the evolution of the human mind. “If Geertz is right as I [Sewell] firmly believe he is, semiotic systems are not unworldly or ghostly or imaginary; they are as integral to the life of our species as respiration, digestion, or reproduction. Materialists, this suggests, should stop worrying and love the symbol.”47 “Beyond,” here, is in part a return, a going back, but even going back or beyond involves the journeys that one has already made and the consequent learning that has taken place. As Dorothy says, and Salman Rushdie reminds us: “There’s no place like home.”48
Where Does That Leave Political Science?
As a discipline, political science has hardly been touched by the cultural turn. The few influenced by the hermeneutic direction implicit in the linguistic, historical, and cultural turns have found themselves at a “separate table” within comparative politics, one set far from those engaged in rational-choice or game-theoretic work, a bit closer to those interested in new institutionalist and historical approaches, and closest to political theorists and international relations scholars of a constructivist bent.49 The resistance of those who see themselves to be both the core and the future of the discipline to the approaches and preferences of cultural interpretivists begins with a specific view of science, and a commitment to a particular politics that has informed much of political science. From its inception, American political science has held “aspirations to be both truly scientific and a servant of democracy, aspirations abetted by deep faith that these two enterprises went hand in hand.”50 But this basically liberal agenda contains within it an irreconcilable tension between asserting the importance of political agency, so fundamental to democratic citizenship, and providing “full causal accounts of politics, usually on the model of natural sciences that deny any conscious agency to the phenomena they study.”51
Historically, political science, a field bound more by the object of its study, that is politics, than by any consensus on the method of study, has engaged with a subject that even the most naturalistic and materialist investigators would agree is, unlike natural sciences, constituted by the activities and self-understandings of human actors, among them political scientists.52 In its initial phase of professionalization between the two world wars, political science stressed objective study, free from ideological preferences and values, and elaborated a naturalistic view of political behavior as determined by
