Decorative Sociology: Towards a Critique of the cultural turn

Friend of mine pointed me to this after I complained about a Bryan Turner lecture I attended. There is no doubt this cemented my rather poor opinion of the man.

Bibliographic Deets

 * Rojek, Chris & Turner, Bryan 2000. "Decorative sociology: towards a critique of the cultural turn" The Sociological Review. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford.

Overview
 In this article, Turner and Rojek take "Culture Studies" and its ilk to task, expressing deep skepticism of their methodologies and believing that there intellectual project threatens/compromises the work of sociology broadly

Content
Begins very historical:


 * In England "Criticism, often of a literary or quasi-literary bent, has generally been more prominent that plans for the reconstruction of the social and cultural fabric... The historical lesson of the collapse of Cromwell's republic, the restoration of the monarchy, and the constitutional settlement of 1688 was that the English have a very deep respect for tradition and compromise" (630).

History of Culture Studies

 * Very Good section, though all British


 * 1) Debates in English Departments -> Leavis' argument for theory and philosophy
 * 2) Result is the advent of Literary Studies and with it Postcolonialism (and Semiotics and French, etc.)
 * 3) Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson -> Working Class Culture deserves study
 * 4) Really gets going under Stuart Hall -> Read Sociology and Continental Philosophy at Oxford as Rhodes Scholar
 * 5) Founds "Birmingham School" of Social Research from which the contemporary British Culture Studies comes


 * Characteristics of Birmingham Culture Studies (According to the author)
 * Gramsci's "Organic Intellectual"
 * Almost exclusive ethnography as a method
 * Neglects history and comparative research
 * Deeply politicized (agendaed)
 * Overly interested in Aesthetics

Postmodernism and Cultural Turn

 * History of Postmodernism (according to authors)
 * 1) Crisis of Western Marxism
 * 2) Proletarian Revolution never happens -> defeated formally at May 1968
 * 3) "did not start a revolution" -> "emphasis on death of the subject, signifying culture, the method of deconstructivism and valorization of irony, amount to a return to an openly idealistic approach to the study of cultural phenomena" (636)
 * 4) "failed to suggest a way forward" -> (a weak/superficial understanding of the subject see below)
 * 5) "more generally clothes, music, sport, shopping, tourism, and film were all analyzed as being 'political'" (637)
 * 6) "reinforces the anti-humanist tendency in postmodern thought because it rules out the universal" (638)

The Critique

 * Calls culture studies "decorative sociology" which is just such a political statement


 * Three basic criticisms


 * 1) "Orientation to the analysis of human interaction which is driven by theory and theoretical responsiveness to change, rather than a stable research agenda" -> aka Theory is privileged over research subjects/questions/concerns (fair) (636)
 * 2) No comparative or historical understanding of subjects by instead insistence on a timeless "intertextuality" (Here the authors are just trying to apply sociological rules to culture studies and its clear why this would and does fail)
 * 3) "Cultural studies assumes the relevance and authority of its own interpretations while rejecting the possibility of any grand narrative" (this is just blatantly untrue-> in rejecting grand narratives, culture studies very much accepts multiple accounts of any issue/topic)
 * 4) Culture studies has no politics because of its inherent relativism (this is true)

Restoring Cultural Sociology

 * In which the authors offer alternatives
 * Sennett, Elias, Bourdieu (aka the usuals)
 * This is the BJ section, in which a normative "friendly" light is used to praised bedfellows of the authors


 * Paradoxical "detached engagement" is meant to offer a preferential theoretical approach to studying society and culture that culture studies is incapable of

My Responses & Misgivings

 * Essentially, Rojek and Turner fail to understand that media studies and culture studies are not "merely" Sociological projects that have escaped from the citadel of that discipline's imaginatively rigorous and objective citadel.


 * They fail to acknowledge and therefore understand how these new disciplines are inherently interdisciplinary and therefore share notes with not only literature studies, but also music (especially musicology), communications programs, art history, and most importantly actual "vocational" disciplines" like Computer Science from which they gather experience that is not merely sociological (i.e. experience as research data), but practical (i.e. for the purpose of production and experimentation within a knowledge set).


 * Turner and Rojek tip their hand at the end of the essay by expressing concern for the survival of sociology (especially in terms of funding) but again they are arguing from a various specific, rigidly-defined idea of sociology that essentially refuses to play ball in the "interdisciplinary turn" of humanities/social science work.


 * Instead of hating on culture studies, Turner and Rojek would do better to distance and separate themselves from the discipline (if this is what they must do) in order to gain the critical position they so desire.


 * Coming from Culture Studies, I have never perceived that we are borrowing and/or forcing out sociological work. They are different disciplines.


 * Also misunderstands Postmodernism. Not a united movement but rather a critique from several vantages of certain ideas of unity (such as Sociology's imagined objectivity and single-source truth)