The Unfulfilled Promise of Cultural and Communication Theory: From Reconstructing Difference to Diagnosing Culture War

Abstract

The article reflects on how cultural and communication theory has evolved from being a critique of the hierarchical ordering of interpersonal and intergroup differences toward diagnosing antagonism as a fundamental mechanism regulating culture, and then examines the consequences of this shift. It starts from the observation that cultural theory circulates only to a limited extent in public discourse, while the diagnosis of culture war has become one of the most widespread ways of interpreting contemporary culture, shared by competing political and intellectual actors. This diagnosis contradicts the hopes associated with cultural and communication theory since the interpretive turn, particularly its engaged strand, which aimed to enable the expression of heterogeneous identities within a pro-egalitarian framework of social change. The article identifies three processes that contributed to this unfulfilled promise: the political pigeonholing of critical theories and the absorption of concepts of agency in the cultural field into the current of subjectivization in microsociology; the marginalization of approaches theorizing common-sense modes of categorizing reality; and the fetishization of social communication as an omnipresent, emotions- and affect-driven process. Consequently, influential contemporary approaches emphasize affective capitalism, emotional labor, and their instrumentalization, rather than the rarity of communication based on coexistence despite cultural differences.