The status of the material in theories of culture: From social structure to 'artefacts

The article compares the conceptualizations of the realm of the material or non-cultural in different versions of 20th-century cultural theory. It distinguishes between three phases of historical development: First, the classical sociology of knowledge-in the works of Mannheim and late Durkheim-understands the material as a separate realm of social structures, which acts as the foundation for the realm of symbolic orders. The instabilities of this theoretical option of a materialist-culturalist double are resolved in radical culturalism, which appears in different versions in (post-) structuralism, phenomenology, constructivism etc. and which interprets the non-cultural as objects of knowledge or symbolic objects. The problematic neo-Kantian subject-object-distinction in these approaches is the target of a third, novel culturalist option of dealing with material entities: In the work of Bruno Latour, these entities are rehabilitated as artefacts or things that are necessary, effective components of social practices or networks. Latour's approach should be embedded in the wider framework of a post-Wittgensteinian theory of social practices as it is formulated above all by Theodore Schatzki.