Culturalization treats culture as frozen and divorced from power structures

Evidence

We understand struggle and resistance, nowadays, rather better than we do reform and transformation. Yet “transformations” are at the heart of the study of popular culture. I mean the active work on existing traditions and activities, their active reworking, so that they come out a different way: they appear to “persist”—yet, from one period to another, they come to stand in a different relation to the ways working people live and the ways they define their relations to each other, to “the others” and to their conditions of life. Transformation is the key to the long and protracted process of the “moralization” of the laboring classes, and the “demoralization” of the poor, and the “re-education” of the people. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 993 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Yet to argue that culture is today no longer endowed with the relative autonomy it once enjoyed as one level among others in earlier moments of capitalism (let alone in precapitalist societies) is not necessarily to imply its disappearance or extinction. Quite the contrary; we must go on to affirm that the dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture is rather to be imagined in terms of an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life — from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself — can be said to have become “cultural” in some original and yet untheorized sense. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 157 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Mere preservation of tradition destroys culture, not sustains it — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 564; Culture follows power, so declining Western dominance erodes Western culture’s reach; Culture becomes administrable precisely by being severed from practical action — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 161 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Cultural elements that appear to persist can secretly shift their social meaning and function #complicates (0.80) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 993
• Cultural domination has real effects without being all-powerful or all-inclusive #complicates (0.80)
• Culture’s dissolution means total expansion, not its disappearance #complicates (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 157
• Culture is inherently decentered and resists direct linkage to other structures #complicates (0.75)