This paper examines Slavoj Zizek’s reading of Immanuel Kant. Its undergirding argument is that Zizek’s work as a whole- up to and including his politically radical statements, which have become more and more prominent since 1997- is conceivable as a project in the rereading of the Kantian ‘Copernican Revolution’ via Lacanian psychoanalysis. Critics now agree that Zizek’s orienting aim is to write a philosophy of politics, as more recent texts, like The Ticklish Subject make clear. (Kay, 2003; Sharpe, 2004; Dean (...) 2006) If Zizek’s philosophy is ultimately a philosophy of politics, however, Zizek’s political philosophy is grounded in a wider post or ‘neo’-Kantian philosophy of subjectivity.
The essay has three major parts. Part I gives Zizek’s reading of Kant on the subject of apperception. Part II recounts Zizek’s pivotal reading of Kant on the sublime, which he ties closely to the problematics of the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ of the first Critique. Part III then examines Zizek’s conception of subjectivity in terms of the faculties (and especially the faculty of imagination) that Kant argues are involved in the transcendental constitution of objects in the first half of The Critique of Pure Reason.
In the Conclusion, the force of the paper’s subtitle—‘Politicising the Transcendental Turn’—will become manifest. I lay out three principles of Zizek’s ‘neoKantian/Hegelian’ ontology. These also make clear how his philosophy of political agency is grounded in this apparently suprapolitical or solely philosophical reading of Kant.
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In an essay published in 1918, Walter Benjamin sets forth a task that will concern him for the rest of his life: The task of a future epistemology is to find for knowledge the sphere of total neutrality in regards to concepts of both subject and object; in other words, it is to discover the autonomous, innate sphere of knowledge in which this concept in no way continues to designate the relation between two metaphysical entities. (‘‘The Coming Philosophy’’ 104) Benjamin (...) seeks an ‘‘autonomous, innate sphere of knowledge’’ that bypasses the Kantian dualism of subject and object to ‘‘form a pure and systematic continuum of experience’’ (105). He wants to break down the relation between subject and object that has led to the ossification of experience in fixed modes of life, in order to develop a theoretical thinking that ‘‘grasps the world as such as an undivided whole’’. (shrink)

This introduction surveys a number of problems for contemporary cultural theory, which arise from the transformations in culture that have been produced by developments ranging from the globalization of third wave capitalism to the emergence of tele-technologies. It summarizes arguments presented by Lash, Thoburn, Johnson, Terranova and Venn, as well as a number of reflections on the state of cultural studies outside Euro-America, to present alternative genealogies of cultural studies and open up new sites for theoretical (...) elaboration. (shrink)

This article deals with cultural theory in the version of Thompson, Ellis and Wildavsky. Cultural theory is important for research in the area of political and policy science because this theory has the pretension of pinning down endogenous preference formation. Using Durkheim's dimensions, ‘social integration’ and ‘regulation of the actions of individuals’, cultural theory distinguishes five ways of life or cultures, namely individualism, hierarchy, egalitarianism, fatalism and autonomy. The statement that there are only (...) five ways of life is, however, the result of a selective interpretation of the dimension, ‘regulation of the actions of individuals’. A broad perspective on this dimension — including the ‘horizontal’ aspects of human relations — will lead to the conclusion that there is a sixth culture existent that has been neglected by current cultural theory. This sixth culture is essentially ‘mutualism-driven’. In this mutualist way of life, people hold highly specialized positions and are closely associated. The production of goods and services within this culture is based on cooperation and mutual adjustment. Power is widely spread, but not because equal rights and duties are considered a good thing. Knowledge and skills are primary in mutualist settings, and power follows knowledge and skills. (shrink)

This article deals with cultural theory in the version of Thompson, Ellis and Wildavsky. Cultural theory is important for research in the area of political and policy science because this theory has the pretension of pinning down endogenous preference formation. Using Durkheim's dimensions, ‘social integration’ and ‘regulation of the actions of individuals’, cultural theory distinguishes five ways of life or cultures, namely individualism, hierarchy, egalitarianism, fatalism and autonomy. The statement that there are only (...) five ways of life is, however, the result of a selective interpretation of the dimension, ‘regulation of the actions of individuals’. A broad perspective on this dimension — including the ‘horizontal’ aspects of human relations — will lead to the conclusion that there is a sixth culture existent that has been neglected by current cultural theory. This sixth culture is essentially ‘mutualism-driven’. In this mutualist way of life, people hold highly specialized positions and are closely associated. The production of goods and services within this culture is based on cooperation and mutual adjustment. Power is widely spread, but not because equal rights and duties are considered a good thing. Knowledge and skills are primary in mutualist settings, and power follows knowledge and skills. (shrink)

This article displaces the terrain upon which the question of power in modern societies has been framed by reference to the concept of hegemony. It presents a genealogy of power which pays attention to what has been at stake in the shifts in the effectivity of the concept of hegemony for cultural theory from the 1960s, correlating the mutations in the analyses of power to shifts in the analysis of the relations of culture, politics and the economy. Questions (...) of the relation of internality or externality of power with regard to the governed, and issues of counter-conducts and 'counter-hegemonic' struggles will guide the development of this genealogy. The article brings to bear on the issues the point of view of hybrid forms of sovereignty, such as imperial governmentality and implications relating to the emergence of biopolitics in the 19th century. It is argued that the situation today regarding global governance and new forms of rule compels us to re-examine the problem of consent and consensus by turning to the apparatuses for constituting hybrid publics that work through biomedia and new strategies of securitization and insecuritization. (shrink)

Political culture theory enjoyed a revival during the 1980s despite its alleged inability to account for change, values, conflict, and differences within nations. A new school of thought attempts to remedy the shortfalls of Almond and Verba's The Civic Culture. The grid-group cultural theory, propounded by Thompson, Ellis and Wildavsky, proposes a typology of ways of life as the missing link in a cultural-functional analysis of the formation of preferences. This essay assesses cultural theory (...) as a methodology and a substantive theory or sociology of knowledge. Cultural theory claims that there are only five possible ways of life: Hierarchy, egalitarianism, fatalism, individualism, and autonomy. Yet it fails to address questions of universal values, ethics, power, or human rights and freedoms. There are inherent problems in applying cultural theory as a mode of political analysis. In the absence of exogenous, non-systemic ethical criteria, cultural theory as a social construction of reality begs the question of ethical conduct. (shrink)

In his article, ‘Social constructionism and climate science denial’, Hansson claims to present empirical evidence that the cultural theory developed by Dame Mary Douglas, Aaron Wildavsky and ourselves leads to science denial. In this reply, we show that there is no validity to these claims. First, we show that Hansson’s empirical evidence that cultural theory has led to climate science denial falls apart under closer inspection. Contrary to Hansson’s claims, cultural theory has made significant (...) contributions to understanding and addressing climate change. Second, we discuss various features of Douglas’ cultural theory that differentiate it from other constructivist approaches and make it compatible with the scientific method. Thus, we also demonstrate that cultural theory cannot be accused of epistemic relativism. (shrink)

In this 4th edition of his successful Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, John Storey has extensively revised the text throughout.

Designing broad public deliberation is challenging. In addition, participants of public deliberation are guided by their cultural norms, values, and rules. This creates a tension between the goal of practical approaches to broad public deliberation and how individuals perceive issues and relate to others in the world. Despite such challenges, we must continue to create opportunities for the public to deliberate about and provide input into the regulation of emerging technologies. Therefore, previously imagined approaches to broad public deliberation should (...) be reevaluated to better utilize the information gained during the process and expand the range of ideas incorporated into decision‐making. To do this, institutions must consider how the public makes sense of complex issues concerning cultural conflict. This article introduces a framework that demonstrates how cultural theory can be used for rethinking previous approaches to public deliberation. In doing so, it offers guidelines for designing public deliberation involving distinct public participation venues based on different worldviews. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: -- Clinical Theory -- 1. Psychiatry on schizophrenia: clinical pictures of a sublime object -- 2. Schizophrenia: the sublime text of psychoanalysis -- Cultural Theory -- 3. Antipsychiatry: schizophrenic experience and the sublime -- 4. Anti-Oedipus and the politics of the schizophrenic sublime -- 5. Schizophrenia, modernity, postmodernity -- 6. Postmodern schizophrenia -- 7. Glamorama, postmodernity and the schizophrenic sublime -- Conclusion.

This article argues that from a territorial perspective a certain coherence and continuity can be identified in the Estonian cultural-theoretical tradition – a discursive body based on common sources of influence and similar fundamental attitudes. We understand Estonian theory as a local episteme – a territorialized web of epistemological associations and rules for making sense of the world, which favours some premises while discouraging others. The article focuses on the older layers of Estonian theory, discussing the work (...) of Karl Ernst von Baer, Victor Hehn, Gustav Teichmüller, Jakob von Uexküll, Hermann Keyserling, Johannes Gabriel Granö, Juri Lotman a.o. We examine the philosophical foundations of Estonian theory as well as its main epistemic facets. The article concludes that the conceptualization of Estonian theory could contribute to a general transformation of contemporary (cultural) theory, a redefining of the relations between the centre and the peripheries. (shrink)

This symposium highlighted the relevance of the cultural theory pioneered by anthropologists Mary Douglas, Steve Rayner, and Michael Thompson and political scientists Aaron Wildavsky and Richard Ellis for explaining political phenomena. In this concluding article, we suggest ways in which CT can be further tested and developed. First, we describe how the theory has been applied thus far and some of the achievements of these applications. Then, we examine some of the challenges revealed by this research. Finally, (...) we discuss ways of applying CT that promise to help meet these challenges. These methods include nesting case studies and combining case study and survey research, simulations, experiments, and approaches from social neuroscience. (shrink)

This article approaches the topics of invention and innovation by way of cultural theory. Building on the works of Ferdinand de Saussure and John Austin, the article offers definitions of invention and innovation in semiotic and performative terms. It conceptualizes invention as a process of resignification, and frames innovation as a felicitous performative. Structuralist theory appears to foreclose the potential for these two terms to exist in the empirical world. This article explores these barriers but also locates (...) conceptual spaces for invention and innovation, and identifies these phenomena as they occur in contemporary empirical sites. (shrink)

Takes some of the most prominent theoretical approaches used in Cultural Studies and demonstrates the ways in which they are used to evaluate, analyse and interpret recent events, debates, topics and texts in contemporary society. N. Anderson, Macquarie University; K. Schlunke, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.

Introduction BEVERLEY SKEGGS By asking a group of feminist cultural theorists who have produced exemplary interdisciplinary scholarship in the to reflect ...

_Philosophy in Cultural Theory_ boldly crosses disciplinary boundaries to offer a philosophical critique of cultural theory today. Drawing on the legacy of Walter Benjamin, Peter Osborne looks critically at central philosophical debates in cultural theory, such as: * the relationship between sign and image * the technological basis of cultural form * the conceptuality of art * the place of fantasy in human affairs. It will appeal to those in philosophy, cultural studies and (...) art theory. (shrink)

_Philosophy in Cultural Theory_ boldly crosses disciplinary boundaries to offer a philosophical critique of cultural theory today. Drawing on the legacy of Walter Benjamin, Peter Osborne looks critically at central philosophical debates in cultural theory, such as: * the relationship between sign and image * the technological basis of cultural form * the conceptuality of art * the place of fantasy in human affairs. It will appeal to those in philosophy, cultural studies and (...) art theory. (shrink)

New to this edition: 4 new readings Stuart Hall The rediscovery of 'ideology': return of the repressed in media studies Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe Post ...

This article analyzes the socio-cultural theories of Adorno, Benjamin, and Brecht through the lens of the theatre, most especially as it pertains to the work of actors. It explores the forces of capitalism that determine how art is produced, distributed, and consumed. Following Adorno’s reading of Marx, actors are here posited as commodities whose labor is separated from the product they create for public consumption. This commodification raises various questions: How does a market economy shape the production and consumption (...) of art? What is technology’s function in the commodification of art? What is art’s sociopolitical role and how does it apply to theatre? To address these questions I juxtapose the cultural theory of Adorno and Benjamin with Brecht’s epic theatre. This comparison exposes the ritualistic potential of the theatre to bring an audience together as a community through sharing a socially enriching event. (shrink)

Addressing both the humanities and the social sciences, this volume aims to explore the enduring significance of the work of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) in the field of cultural theory. It assembles a variety of articles by internationally renowned scholars from different academic disciplines and traditions. Contrary to recent commemorative publications on Derrida¿s oeuvre, this volume proposes to critically evaluate and rethink key concepts in Derrida¿s work within the present state of affairs in cultural theory. Centred around (...) four main topics (manoeuvres, societies, images and fictions), the sections propose a creative and contemporary reading of `Derrida¿ and its openings to new work in cultural theory. Ce livre qui se destine à la fois aux humanités et aux études sociales tente d¿explorer la signification durable de l¿¿uvre de Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) dans le champ de la théorie culturelle. Il rassemble un ensemble d¿articles variés écrits par des chercheurs de renommée internationale provenant de différentes disciplines et traditions académiques. S¿opposant par là à la majorité du flot de publications récentes sur l¿¿uvre de Derrida ce volume se propose d¿évaluer et de repenser d¿un point de vue critique les concepts clé de Derrida tenant compte de l¿état actuel de la recherche en études culturelles. Centrées autour de quatre domaines majeurs (man¿uvres ¿ sociétés ¿ images ¿ fictions), les sections offrent une lecture créatrice et actuelle de `Derrida¿ et des ouvertures que sa pensée permet vers une nouvelle idée de la théorie culturelle. (shrink)

Everyday Life and Cultural Theory provides a unique critical and historical introduction to theories of everyday life. Ben Highmore traces the development of conceptions of everyday life, from the Mass Observation project of the 1930s to contemporary theorists. Individual chapters examine: * Theories of the everyday * Fragments of everyday life * Surrealism: the marvelous in the everyday * Walter Benjamin's Trash Aesthetics * Mass Observation: the science of everyday life * Henri Lefebvre's Dialectics of Everyday Life * (...) Michel de Certeau's Poetics of Everyday Life * Everyday life and the future of cultural studies. (shrink)

In this book Shepherd and Wicke make a bold and original contribution to the understanding of music as a form of human expression. They argue that music is fundamental to social life. Music is not merely a form of leisure or entertainment: it is central to the very formation and reproduction of human societies. The authors pursue this argument through a wide-ranging assessment of some of the major cultural theoretical contributions to understanding music. Theories of culture, linguistic theories, structuralist (...) and post-structuralist theories and psychoanalytic theories of music are carefully explained and critically examined. The authors then develop their own account of music as a non-referential yet material form of human expression which embodies and conveys principles of symbolic structuring. They emphasize the human body as a principal site for the musical mediation of social and symbolic processes. Music and Cultural Theory establishes new links between musicology and cultural studies, showing how each discipline can inform and enrich the other. It will be recommended reading for students and professionals in musicology, media and communication studies, cultural studies and the sociology of culture. (shrink)

Various proponents of Cultural Theory have claimed that CT's Impossibility Theorem, namely that there are precisely five viable ways of life, has been formally proved. In this paper, I show that the Impossibility Theorem has not been formally proved and present a refutation of the Impossibility Theorem. With regard to, the problem areas identified include a failure to take into account the analogical nature of their theory and also a failure to carefully consider the nature of the (...) relationship between mathematical models and the empirical phenomena that they are supposed to model. With regard to, an empirically grounded description of a distinct, sixth viable way of life, here called the Philosophical way of life, is presented. Second, a general argument is presented that demonstrates the necessity of positing a sixth form of rationality and a sixth viable way of life in addition to the five rationalities and five ways of life recognized by CT. (shrink)

Introduction In September of 1973, I defended my doctoral thesis in the field of European cultural history. I was two months shy of my twenty-seventh ...

This article examines the resources offered by various forms of critical cultural theory for the study of religion. It then briefly explores the turn to religion by a range of recent cultural theorists.

In an essay in these pages, Jeffrey Friedman charged that Cultural Theory obscures the unity and uniqueness of modern egalitarian individualism; reduces culture to society; ignores history; is only applicable to contemporary, Western politics; provides an unsatisfactory account of preference formation and preference change; and leaves no place for the vitally important debate over what we should prefer. Although some of Friedman's criticisms stem from a misreading or strained reading of Cultural Theory, others raise vitally important (...) questions not only about Cultural Theory but social theory generally. My reply to Friedman offers not just a defense of the particular categorization of cultures used in Cultural Theory, but a defense of the entire enterprise of constructing general social theories that seek to discern transhistorical patterns in the all too evident diversity and contingency of history. (shrink)

The question of stakeholder salience has recently resurfaced in the suggestion that the ethical foundations of corporate cultures result in stakeholder cultures that largely explain how firms allocate resources among stakeholders. The present article seeks to complement this novel approach to understanding stakeholder management by adding insights from the multilevel influences that create the corporate culture in the first place, and ultimately affect managers in their stakeholder decisions. This article draws on cultural theory to examine how the individuals (...) who compose firms present group and grid solidarity that results in cultural biases in the corporate culture. These cultural biases—individualism, hierarchy, fatalism, and egalitarianism—are then paired with the stakeholder cultures they enable, and inferences are extracted concerning the salience managers are likely to accord to various classes of stakeholders as a result. Future research and managerial implications stemming from this new view on stakeholder management conclude this article. (shrink)

The philosophy of “presence” seeks to challenge current understandings of meaning and understanding. One can trace its origins back to Vico, Dilthey, and Heidegger, though its more immediate exponents include Jean-Luc Nancy, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and such contemporary philosophers of history as Frank Ankersmit and Eelco Runia. The theoretical paradigm of presence conveys how the past is literally with us in the present in significant and material ways: Things we cannot touch nonetheless touch us. This makes presence a post-linguistic or (...) post-discursive theory that challenges current understandings of “meaning” and “interpretation.” Presence provides an overview of the concept and surveys both its weaknesses and its possible uses. In this book, Ethan Kleinberg and Ranjan Ghosh bring together an interdisciplinary group of contributors to explore the possibilities and limitations of presence from a variety of perspectives—history, sociology, literature, cultural theory, media studies, photography, memory, and political theory. The book features critical engagements with the presence paradigm within intellectual history, literary criticism, and the philosophy of history. In three original case studies, presence illuminates the relationships among photography, the past, memory, and the Other. What these diverse but overlapping essays have in common is a shared commitment to investigate the attempt to reconnect meaning with something “real” and to push the paradigm of presence beyond its current uses. The volume is thus an important intervention in the most fundamental debates within the humanities today. Contributors: Bill Ashcroft, University of New South Wales; Mark Bevir, University of California, Berkeley; Susan A. Crane, University of Arizona; Ranjan Ghosh, University of North Bengal; Suman Gupta, Open University Ethan Kleinberg, Wesleyan University; John Michael, University of Rochester; Vincent P. Pecora, University of Utah; Roger I. Simon. (shrink)

The publication of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice in 1971 coincided with a complex set of changes in the political situation of the west, the role of intellectuals, the state of the social sciences and humanities, and in the development of the welfare state itself. These changes provided the conditions for the creation of a body of thought quite different from the one the sixties had produced, and a significant change from the discipline-dominated thinking of the period after (...) the Second World War. The immediately relevant events included the effective demise of Parsons’ systems theory, the waning of the passions of 1968, and an enrollment crisis in universities’ humanities and social science departments as economic fear drove students into professional programs, creating a sharp downturn in demand for faculty. The optimism that had characterized disciplines in these fields during the 1960s quickly faded. The idea that sociology was soon to become a “science,” the source of the positivism dispute of the sixties, faded along with it. Logical Positivism as a coherent movement collapsed under the weight of the problems of the theory-observation distinction. At the same time Political Theory, which had been taught largely as an historical study – a history of error, as Leo Strauss described the standard textbook of the time, George Sabine’s A History of Political Theory, or as a continuation of the mood of Kulturpessimismus, as in the writings of Sabine’s critic, Leo Strauss – revived, partly in response to the stimulus from the success of Rawls, partly in response to new ideas about participatory democracy rooted in the experience of the sixties. Social theory also changed: the role that Parsons had played as a focus of theoretical discussion was replaced; the work of Ju˝rgen Habermas, particularly his Theory of Communicative Action, reassessed and re-appropriated the classical theoretical tradition in social theory to replace Parsons’ synthetic account, and this work coincided with a systematic reconsideration of the classic social theorists, especially Weber. An additional source of new thinking came from the “dependent” periphery, as thinkers such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, which emancipated Socialist theory from received dogmas about class struggle and recognized the centrality of other antagonisms and the need for open democracy. (shrink)

How can one examine the sources of people's beliefs, tastes, and preferences without falling into the self‐refuting determinism that has so often characterized the most systematic theory of preferences, Marxism? Cultural Theory's attempt to do so posits five anthropologically derived, competing “ways of life"— individualism, egalitarianism, hierarchism, fatalism, and withdrawal from social life—that are intended to apply to all forms of culture and, therefore, to provide a universal framework for explaining people's preferential biases. Richard Ellis's defense of (...) Cultural Theory, however, does not adequately address the concerns expressed in my critique of it. Ellis fails to instance a single case of a premodern culture containing the five ways of life; he does not show that exclusivist premodern versions of “individualism” and “egalitarianism” are more than superficially comparable to the inclusive modern variants of these alleged universals; and he adds new evidence to support my claim that in modern societies, people's preferences are largely unlinked to the particular social relations identified by Cultural Theory. While Ellis overtly denies that Cultural Theory is deterministic, his search for links between preferences and social relations shows that this denial cannot be sustained.Cultural Theory's reductionism stems from its neglect of historically contingent cultural traditions that thwart a priori attempts to predict culture. This ahistori‐cism transforms a myopic view of American politics as a battle of egalitarianism against individualism into a timeless truth, providing ideological self‐affirmation for “individualists” but diminishing the prospects for being able to explain or criticize individualism—or any other political preference. (shrink)

To be effective, whistleblowing policies should be adapted to the organisational culture. They need to be custom-made and not follow a one-size-fits-all logic, specifically when they are installed to stimulate responsible peer reporting, a highly sensitive and value-laden type of whistleblowing. This paper attempts to illustrate that grid-group cultural theory could help to construct a whistleblowing policy by linking reporting styles to the organisational culture. First, we will identify four types of policy measures that are hypothesized to be (...) effective in four types of organisational culture. Second, we develop the hypothesis that certain organisational cultures can induce peer reporting that is harmful for the organisation. The whistleblowing policy can then be used as a catalyst for cultural change. (shrink)

This article explores the continuities and discontinuities of pre-Revolutionary intellectual traditions in 1920s Soviet culture and the Stalin-era cultural revolution. Through examination of the pre-revolutionary philosophical legacy underpinning Soviet musicological theory, I demonstrate that there are decisive features, such asSoviet Prometheanism, that characterize the musicology of the 1920s that both underline and differ from the pre-revolutionary philosophy of music and the musicology of the 1930s. I offer the basic outlines of aSoviet cultural theory of musicformulated by (...) Russian music critic, historian, composer and musicologist Boris Asafiev (1884–1949) in the 1920s. Explaining and describing what I mean by a particular cultural theory of music in the Soviet context forms the core issue of my article. (shrink)

Liberalism sanctifies the values chosen by the sovereign individual. This tends to rule out criticisms of an individual's “preference” for one value over another by, ironically, establishing a deterministic view of the self that protects the self's desires from scrutiny. Similarly, rational choice approaches to social theory begin with previously determined individual preferences and focus on the means by which they are pursued, concentrating on the results rather than the sources of people's values.A striking new attempt to go behind (...) the liberal and rational‐choice starting point in order to understand political preferences is found in Aaron Wildavsky's Cultural Theory. Yet Cultural Theory does not facilitate the criticism of preferences, because its understanding of them is fundamentally liberal. Even while rejecting methodological individualism, Cultural Theory's monocausally social theory of preference formation retains in a new guise the liberal preservation of preferences from criticism by reestablishing a deterministic view of the formation of values, leading it to share with liberalism an a historical view of their origins. (shrink)

An interrogation of the term 'theory' from the perspective of linguistic discourse Zima offers a new definition of theory from a cultural and sociological perspective, with a view to encountering heterogenerous points of view in critical dialogue.

Posthuman ethics -- Great ephemeral tattooed skin -- Art: inhuman ecstasy -- Animalities: ethics and absolute abolition -- Wonder of Teras -- Mystic queer -- Vitalistic ethics: an end to necrophilosophy -- After life.

This book offers an exciting look at the important and often uneasy place of philosophy in cultural theory today. In the United States and Britain, cultural studies has taken a largely non-philosophical form. Yet, in its hostility to disciplinary boundaries and its search for theoretical generality, cultural studies has much in common with a philosophical tradition of totalization from which it has historically distanced itself. Throughout, Osborne shows how and why concepts currently popular in cultural (...) theory have brought philosophical questions to center stage. He discusses many important thinkers who have straddled the philosophy-cultural divide such as Benjamin, Adorno, Jameson, and Clement Greenberg. (shrink)

Ambitious and elegant, this book builds a bridge between evolutionary theory and cultural psychology. Michael Tomasello is one of the very few people to have done systematic research on the cognitive capacities of both nonhuman primates and human children. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition identifies what the differences are, and suggests where they might have come from. -/- Tomasello argues that the roots of the human capacity for symbol-based culture, and the kind of psychological development that (...) takes place within it, are based in a cluster of uniquely human cognitive capacities that emerge early in human ontogeny. These include capacities for sharing attention with other persons; for understanding that others have intentions of their own; and for imitating, not just what someone else does, but what someone else has intended to do. In his discussions of language, symbolic representation, and cognitive development, Tomasello describes with authority and ingenuity the "ratchet effect" of these capacities working over evolutionary and historical time to create the kind of cultural artifacts and settings within which each new generation of children develops. He also proposes a novel hypothesis, based on processes of social cognition and cultural evolution, about what makes the cognitive representations of humans different from those of other primates. -/- Lucid, erudite, and passionate, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition will be essential reading for developmental psychology, animal behavior, and cultural psychology. (from the HUP website). (shrink)