Reading Group Meeting - Cultural Theory Part 3
Today we discussed "Political Cultures", Part 3 of Cultural Theory by Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky. Mike Thompson was able to join us, and I video-ed in from Washington.
Part 3 is largely an attempt to resurrect the idea of ‘political culture’ from it’s demise in the 1970s. The first question, then, was what has been done to update political culture ideas since the publishing of Cultural Theory. One of the more interesting advances that Mike cited was Steve Ney’s recently completed thesis, which builds off Dahl’s diagram of plural democracy. Dahl has two-axes (from my understanding), one for whether the public has access to decision-making, and the other for how responsive the decision-makers are to the public. When the political system is neither accessible nor responsive, there is closed hegemony. When it is both accessible and responsive, there is plural democracy.
According to Mike, Ney dis-aggregates the ‘public’ in to types of social organisation, thereby gradating the axes depending on the number of voices that are accessible and responded to. I think this is a worthwhile development, because such a diagram could be useful in showing how a particular issue area could move to being more ‘plurally democratic’, or as cultural theorist say it these days, ‘clumsy’.
We then tackled the last chapter of the book, which levels some of the criticisms of Cultural Theory and tries to respond to them. The one we chose to look at was the ‘Multiple Self’ (p.264). Two quotes are worth reciting here:
Our theory asserts that cultural bias depends on social context (and vice versa). If this is so, then we would expect that an individual’s bias will be consistent only to the extent that his social context is consistent.
Let us imagine two extreme cases, one in which an individual perceives each object of attention equally through the five cultural biases and another in which an individual perceives all objects through the same cultural bias. In the former instance, it is difficult to see how such an individual could ever act. Just as to the man in Dostoevsky’s famous novel Notes from the Underground, evidence for all positions would always appear equally compelling, so that we could never make up our minds. . . In the case of the individual who sees everything through the same cultural bias, it is hard to imagine him ever cooperating with anyone.
The first quote the the one that is reasserted in this section, saying that further research needs to be conducted to see how people cope with being in multiple contexts: whether they compartmentalise or try to harmonise their contexts into one cultural bias.
I took issue with the second quote, however, because it seems to disregard the asserted ’scale-independence’ of Cultural Theory. Why, on one hand, can an individual not have competing voices inside of them and be able to make a decision, while on the other, only when there are competing voices in a society can clumsy solutions come about? Said another way, how could society make any decisions when there are competing voices, when a person could not if they have competing voices? Either a person should be able to see an issue equally through all cultural biases and be able to come up with a clumsy solution by themselves (e.g. Marco Verweij’s chapter in Clumsy Solutions) or else when all voices are equally represented in a group of individuals (be it at the society or any other level), a solution should be impossible to achieve.
Steve Rayner avoids the conundrum I have laid out above by removing the individual (and indeed the idea of there being a ’scale’ from individual to civilisation) from his analyses. For him (and correct me if I’m putting words in your mouth, Steve), the unit of analysis for cultural theory is the voice that each solidarity (combination of cultural bias and type of social organisation) espouses.
I’m of the persuasion that an individual could be able to see an issue equally from each cultural lens, but that doesn’t necessary mean that the solution he or she comes up with will be acceptable to others who are involved in the issue. I think the main reason this is the case is not because the solution is not ‘good’, or even that it’s not ‘clumsy’, but it’s that not all of those involved got a chance to voice their opinion. I think that the actual act of voicing an opinion, of taking a stance on an issue, is critical to a person’s acceptance of whatever the outcome of that issue is. So as long at the issue only affects one person, then I think that person could find a solution that they could accept from each cultural bias (not that people do this!).
Those are some thoughts. I’ve asked the others to contribute their ideas too.
February 5th, 2007 at 4.13 pm
The position of ‘individual’ in Cultural Theory is very insteresting question. Before the meeting I had some conversation with Mike. He seemed to be agreed that CT covered individuals when Mary Douglas wrote Cultural Bias. I really want to trace this back and find a way to accommodate individuals in the theory.
We talked that the focus is behavioral style rather than actual behaviour (e.g. hierarchist likes traditional meal but it can be sushi or roast beef). So, two people should be able to agree on the solution even though they have different cultural biases.
To the question ‘can an individual see an issue equally from each cultural lens’, I think the answer is both yes and no. Maybe one can listen to what other people say and accpet ideas of other cultural biases, but maybe one cannot logical construct the idea from other cultural lenses because this would undermine your own logical thinking. Another answer would be ‘only if you take a certain distance from the issue itself’. By doing this, your cosmology changes to ‘hermit’. You think that is right and also that is right etc. and then your idea is de-personalised, i.e. no need to locate your self within one of the four boxes.
If you can arrive at the Clumsy Solution in a self-conclusive way, you are seeing the world in perfect way. This contradicts to the idea that people can only make sense of the world partially, and therefore the basis of cultural bias, I guess.