Culture is inherently decentered and resists direct linkage to other structures

Evidence

These forms are frameworks for the creative life which, however, soon transcends them. They should also house the imitative life, for which, in the final analysis, there is no space left. They acquire fixed identities, a logic and lawfulness of their own; this new rigidity inevitably places them at a distance from the spiritual dynamic which created them and which makes them independent. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 837 (#expands, via linked claim)

The difference is that, whereas culturalism would correct the hyper-structuralism of earlier models by restoring the unified subject (collective or individual) of consciousness at the center of “the Structure,” discourse theory, by way of the Freudian concepts of the unconscious and the Lacanian concepts of how subjects are constituted in language (through the entry into the Symbolic and the Law of Culture), restores the decentered subject, the contradictory subject, as a set of positions in language and knowledge, from which culture can appear to be enunciated. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 204 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Social and cultural structures overdetermine our natural human constitution.; Marx treats culture as a productive force materialized in labor and language; Culture as objectivated design of human existence is the anthropological definition (+6 more)

Related

• Structuralism decentered individual agency that culturalism treated as authentic (similarity 0.90)
• Culturalism’s totality reduces to the simple unity of praxis with homologous contradictions. (similarity 0.86)
• Discourse theory restores a decentered subject while culturalism restores a unified consciousness (similarity 0.85)
• Social and cultural structures overdetermine our natural human constitution. (similarity 0.84)
• Linguistics decentered identity by showing subjects are positioned in pre-existing discourse (similarity 0.84)
• Cultural study is permanently displaced because signifying practice eludes direct linkage to social structures (similarity 0.83)
• Culture as constitutive of practice retains contingency and is never finally determined (similarity 0.83)
• Human culture originates in the socially mediated relation between man and nature (similarity 0.83)
• The discursive turn requires reintroducing the subject as non-unitary and internally contradictory (similarity 0.82)
• Cultures represent themselves as fixed but are always changed by history (similarity 0.81)
• Culture remained an indeterminate site of convergent interests, not a fixed concept. (similarity 0.81)
• Cultural forms ossify and drift apart from the life that created them (similarity 0.81)
• Subjects are constituted by unconscious cultural categories rather than their authors (similarity 0.80)
• Culture as objectivated design of human existence is the anthropological definition (similarity 0.80)
• The discursive perspective reintroduces non-unitary subjectivity that structuralism had abolished (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Discourse theory restores a decentered subject while culturalism restores a unified consciousness #expands (0.80) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 204
• Cultural forms ossify and drift apart from the life that created them #expands (0.80) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 837
• Structuralism decentered individual agency that culturalism treated as authentic #expands (0.70)