Cultural Theory: The Individual and Society in Modernity

College course lecture from Ron Strickland.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Strickland
• History
• Culture
• Individualism
• Protestantism
• Modernity

[jonnylocks]

Thank you so much for this video!

Question: Is there a new form of social subjectivity that comes with Post-Modernity? Has kinship and the relationship between the individual and society changed in relevant ways? What are the thoughts of social theorists?

These videos a great! Please post more, they are well received.

[rlstrick]

Thanks for your interest. Absolutely, there is a new form of social subjectivity in postmodernity. Family ties are further diminished, etc. Some theorists (Foucault, Baudrillard, Judith Butler) assume that in postmodern societies one can choose one's "identity" by consuming certain products/styles or performing certain behaviors. Of course, the most enthusiastic proponents of the postmodern "choice" of identity evade the material constraints on this choice, for most people.

[yupper99]

I am sorry, but your reading of Foucault and Butler may be a bit...rudimentary. Performitivity is not voluntary choice or even necessarily made conscienciously but produced through disciplinary regimes and restrained by frames of intelligibility (eg. drag performances are only intelligible as such if they reproduce gender conventions).

[rlstrick]

I take your point... my earlier response was a bit reductive. But, to the extent that the concept of performativity is embraced as a way to evade the constraints of hegemonic disciplinary regimes and frames of intelligibility without acknowledging the limitations of those constraints, performativity gets recuperated as consumerism-masquerading-as-in­dividual agency.

[Balloonification]

Doesn't Butler exceed the philosophical dialectic of individual voluntarism/ social determinism by theorizing performativity as constitutive? Curious to know what you think. Thanks for the fantastic lectures! :]

[rlstrick]

I think the most serious problem with "performativity as agency" is that it is so conveniently coopted as "consumption as agency" (or constitutive of subjectivity. I think Jean Baudrillard succumbs to this view much more enthusiastically than Butler.

[sailaway786]

Thank you for taking the time to make these videos!

[XxCachyxX]

@marin677a Wouldn't an 100% individual society lead to anarchy and chaos?

[marin677a]

Imagine a 100% individual society.No life space sharing with other people.I could reveal my full artistic and intellectual potential and wouldn't have to take other peoples bullying me and their bull shits and them slowing me down.Every day and night i dream of this.free from all the shits around you.

[floating00eye]

nice work and nice soundtrack!

[herrapikkarainen]

... My critique, however, is not that social constructionists are wrong on all accounts but that they tend to take their conclusions further than their analysis would seem to permit. Usually the problem is that they leap from the common sense assumption that cultural changes have occurred in terms of our perception of the world to the not so sensible assumption that these are entirely new concepts they are discussing.

[herrapikkarainen]

I smell trouble whenever social constructionists talk about changes in the basic constituents of the human experience. When you peel off the myriad layers of inane jargon, you discover a view of the world that is more rudimentary than the starkest biological reductionism. Statements like "the concept of the individual did not really exist until [insert date]" or "children were not really in any way distinct from adults until [throw in another date]" serve as examples...

[nmqtabtp]

There will always be classes within mankind. Think of putting rocks, gravels, sands, impurities, into a cylinder and shake it. Gradually these materials will find their own space. In communist country there are at least three classes: the communist party leader, the communist members, and the prisoner of the communist doctrine.

Education to eliminate ego and ignorance, teaching morale conducts are the key to harmonious social orders.

[yupper99]

although I just realized this is a lecture for "marxism 101", so I guess it's more aimed to cover the basics of marxism then the entire spectrum of "critical theory." Have you filmed any lectures that cover more "advanced" debates in critical theory?

[yupper99]

I think this is the heart of what Foucault is trying to get at through biopolitics and governmentality. One of the main issue of contention between structuralists and post-structuralists is the different conception of "agency" (humanist vs post-humanist). the kinds of agency/ies promised by liberal capitalism--infinite choices through consumerism, even while tethering us ever tighter to the regimes of capital--Butler and Foucault are both very much trying underscore that in their critiques.