Economic-only explanations of culture cannot capture conjunctural specificity
Evidence
All the same, with the return to this more “classical” terrain, many of the problems which originally beset it also reappear. The specificity of the effect of the cultural and ideological dimension once more tends to disappear. It tends to conceive the economic level as not only a “necessary” but a “sufficient” explanation of cultural and ideological effects. Its focus on the analysis of the commodity-form, similarly, blurs all the carefully established distinctions between different practices, since it is the most generic aspects of the commodity-form which attract attention. Its deductions are therefore, largely, confined to an epochal level of abstraction: the generalizations about the commodity-form hold true throughout the capitalist epoch as a whole. Very little by way of concrete and conjuncture analysis can be derived at this high-level “logic of capital” form of abstraction. It also tends to its own kind of functionalism—a functionalism of “logic” rather than of “structure” or history. This approach, too, has insights which are well worth following through. But it sacrifices too much of what has been painfully secured, without a compensating gain in explanatory power. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 206
Categorization
- XREF: Ties to classical Marxist debates on base/superstructure and to Hall’s own conjunctural (Gramscian) method. — connects to: Evolutionary and neurological accounts cannot fully explain cultural patterns — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 807; The slur Indian giver masks a genuine cross-cultural economic misunderstanding — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 103; All representations of culture are necessarily partial accounts — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction: A…, 109
- DEEPTHINKING: The distinction between ‘necessary’ and ‘sufficient’ explanation and ‘functionalism of logic’ is dense and repays multiple readings.