Cultural Studies: Between Normativity and Fragmentation

Abstract

The definition of the term “culture” involves complications and multiple dimensions that prevent it from being grasped once and for all. Faced with this problem of determining a basic concept, there is nothing more appropriate than tracing, throughout history, the different sources of meaning in order to understand and clarify the plurality of its present echoes, while also evaluating their fertility and heuristic validity.

This diachronic semantics shows that, in modern times, two antinomic meanings took shape and have coexisted since then. These may be categorized as follows:

1. An ethical or normative conception of culture, heir to the Enlightenment concept of progress and related to an absolute definition of values.
2. An anthropological or empirical conception of culture, heir to the Romantic movement and linked to a relativist definition of values.

Each of these conceptions delimits two different ways of approaching cultural studies. However, the limits of both positions lie in the fact that they capture only the reification of cultural manifestations, but not the human activity, the practice, that produces them.

Cultural studies must overcome both perspectives by returning to the classical conceptualization of culture not as an object, but as a process. Recovering the concept of the cultural in these terms makes it possible to grasp the complexity of the field of study, which brings together objectifications and subjectivities, universality and particularity, values and facts.