I'm really quite busy over the next few days and, it being E's nap time, I should be tending to a plethora of more immediately pressing things. However, I need to work through this a little bit.
I've been reevaluating Jeff Alexander's strong program of cultural sociology since the ASA. I decided earlier on in my graduate career that the strong program is a little too retrospective (in that it doesn't seem to have any predictive power) and a little too agent-less for me. However, some conversations I had at the meeting led to me think I should reconsider. So, I'm reading.
Anyway, in theory (used here as a figure of speech) I am sympathetic to the strong program which is akin in many ways to Foucault's study of the causal and arbitrary nature of language/discourse/knowledge (have I mentioned that I LOVE Foucault? Discipline & Punish would likely make it on my all-time top 10 READING list) but maintains the autonomy of culture, which is to say that the cultural realm is distinct from and not homologous (sorry Bourdieu) or reducible to other elements of the social world like the state, economic interests, etc, etc.
It is no wonder that Alexander's theoretical work is appealing to me. My entire larger research project, including my quantitative master's thesis and even my BA thesis, is concerned with the relationship between intention and action (particularly as both intention and action are mutually constitutive as well as necessarily referential to both internal and external meaning systems). However, I have never encountered an application of the strong program that works for me.
What I am looking for is a more microsociological theory of cultural autonomy that takes pragmatic (here used as a reference to American Pragmatism. I am thinking here about the importance of habit and intelligence in that pragmatic sense) and ethnomethodological (e.g. accountability to everday interaction) concerns into account. I want this microsociological theory to be the corrolary of a more macrosociological theory of culture explaining the development, dissemination and impact (causally speaking) at the macro level of culture structures.
Any ideas, folks? Seems like too large a project for the dissertation.
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2 comments:
What's the canonical statement of this program?
Back when I first learned about the strong program in a culture seminar, we looked to _Action and its Environments_ however, _The Meanings of Social Life_ is, I believe, considered to be the treatise on the strong program and its application.
Of course, what do I know?
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