whether the rubric of ���cultural sociology��� is necessarily the best one for this purpose. Its value as an open-ended title for a journal that aspires to serve as a venue for broad debate on these questions is, of course, clear. It serves this pur- pose better than ���the sociology of culture���, and not just because this formula- tion implies a field of inquiry that is limited to the institutions and practices comprising the arts, cultural industries and media sectors. It is rather the theo- retical implication that ���society��� is to be invoked as an explanatory ground in relation to those institutions and practices that is the problem. ���Cultural sociology��� is much looser and more pliable in these respects. It encompasses the arts, cultural and media sectors but as parts of a broader soci- ological canvas which, indeed, is often stretched so as to be coterminous with that of sociology as a whole. Resonating to the logic of ���the cultural turn���, it implies that as there is no determining ground of the social that exists outside culture, with the implication, in many formulations, that the very idea of a non- cultural sociology would be an oxymoron. It is also a formulation that estab- lishes useful historical affiliations. After all, wasn���t ���the sociological tradition���, from Durkheim to Parsons, concerned precisely with the role of norms, beliefs, customs, etc. ��� and so, in its extended sense, culture ��� in the organization of social life?1 And, finally, it makes good international connections with both the French and American schools of cultural sociology. Yet I do have some doubts about the theoretical value of bringing culture and sociology together on these terms chiefly because they often bring in tow a ten- dency to merge culture and the social so closely together that they become indis- tinguishable. This is not to dispute the prevailing contention that, in a general sense, cultural practices are implicated in the make-up and organization of social relationships ��� although this has become so familiar a claim that its value is now more-or-less doxological, a ritual invocation that occludes more than it reveals. For, if analysis does not push beyond such general formulations to consider more closely the varied mechanisms through which culture and the social are con- nected, it can only too easily result in a set of ghostly, disembodied agents ��� val- ues, beliefs, meanings, narratives ��� being credited with the ability to perform heroic tasks: securing social cohesion, or bringing about civic renewal, for exam- ple. Moreover, it often seems that this is to be accomplished quite effortlessly without any distinctive kind of work being involved in either producing culture as a specific realm with identifiably specific and concrete actors, or organizing the interfaces through which culture is able to connect with and act on the social. As a corrective to this, then, I want to propose some principles for analysing the relations between culture and the social that will, first, accord sig- nificant attention to the work of making culture. This involves, I shall suggest, a focus on the material processes through which culture has come to be, and continues to be, differentiated from the social, the latter understood, like cul- ture, as itself a historical rather than an anthropological reality. It also involves attending to the further work through which culture, in its varied differentiated forms, then acts on the social through the ���working surfaces on the social��� that it produces. These are organized by specific cultural knowledges and techniques 32 Cultural Sociology Volume 1 ��� Number 1 ��� March 2007 unauthorized distribution. �� 2007 SAGE Publications and the British Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or by Ondra Krajtl on December 18, 2007 http://cus.sagepub.com Downloaded from

of intervention which operate either directly, or in combination with the operation of specific social knowledges, to format the social for specific kinds of action and intervention.2 It is, then, these two aspects of the work of culture ��� the work of making it, and the work it does ��� that I think need to be placed at the centre of any pro- gramme for the analysis of the relations between culture and the social.3 I shall, in developing this perspective, put three theoretical traditions into play as a means both of identifying a somewhat fractured genealogy for the arguments I shall propose and of elaborating their implications. They comprise, first, the rapidly emerging field of post-Bourdieusian sociology which, shaped by its interactions with Bourdieu���s key concepts, is currently poised somewhere between proposing a series of internal corrections to and qualifications of Bourdieu���s work, and going beyond it to map out a theoretical territory that is constructed on different premises. I include here Bernard Lahire���s work on the sociology of individuals and its critical implications for Bourdieu���s understanding of the concept of habitus (Lahire, 2001, 2003, 2004), and the work of Antoine Hennion and others in its concern to find a place for things in the networks of relations that Bourdieu theorizes as fields (Hennion, 1997 Gomart and Hennion, 1999 Hennion et al., 2005).4 Second, I shall draw on the work of Bruno Latour, and the traditions of actor-network theory, science studies, and practice studies as well as those tendencies in anthropology ��� the approaches to art developed by Alfred Gell, for example (Gell, 1998) ��� which focus attention on tracing the socio-material networks of relations through which heteroge- neous elements (including human and non-human actors) are brought together in specific forms of action and interaction. While there are close connections between these traditions and post-Bourdieusian sociology, they clearly depart from the explanatory logic of Bourdieu���s work in which a hidden structure, brought to light by the sociologist, is invoked to account for the phenomenal level of observable differences in dispositions and practices ��� differences in cul- tural tastes, for example.5 In lieu of this, actor-network theory proposes a sin- gle-levelled reality which, since there are no hidden depths or structures to be fathomed, merges the process of explanation with that of description: to describe how socio-material networks of relations are assembled, disassembled, and reassembled in new configurations is ��� if the range of the networks that are thus traced is extensive enough ��� also to explain how those networks are made up and operate. And third, I shall draw on two aspects of Foucault���s work. In the first instance, I draw on his concept of dispositif or apparatus in view both of its influence on actor-network theory and of the respects in which Foucault���s understanding of such apparatuses as always somehow ready made is usefully corrected by actor-network-theory���s focus on the processes through which het- erogeneous elements are assembled into specific apparatuses.6 In the second instance, I explore the implications of Foucault���s work on governmentality (Foucault, 1991) which, in historicizing the relations between culture, the econ- omy and the social, offers an account of the social that has a sharper political focus than the status that is accorded it in Latour���s work. 33 The Work of Culture Bennett unauthorized distribution. �� 2007 SAGE Publications and the British Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or by Ondra Krajtl on December 18, 2007 http://cus.sagepub.com Downloaded from

Culture and the Social: Principles of Analysis Let me now, in the light of these general remarks, advance five principles through which the terms for analysing the relations between culture and the social to which they point might be put into effect: (i) First, we need to rule out the possibility that culture might be distinguished from the social in terms of a special kind of cultural stuff that is distinct from a special kind of social stuff of which the social is made up. This makes no more sense than it does to suggest, as is the case with those ver- sions of the cultural turn that are still in thrall to the linguistic turn, in either its structuralist or post-structuralist guises, that culture and the social should be merged because they are said to be made up of the same kind of stuff (organized structures of meaning).7 To follow Latour���s con- tention that the social cannot be designated as ���a special domain, a special realm, or a particular sort of thing, but only as a very peculiar move- ment of re-association and reassembling��� (Latour, 2005: 7) entails that we cease to look for ways of differentiating culture and the social as different realms made up of different kinds of things (representations, say, versus material social relations). To the degree that both (and, indeed, the econ- omy too) are made of similar heterogeneous elements, the differences between them have to be sought in the manner and locations in which they are assembled. Their status as different is thus not ontological but public: they are distinguished from one another as different public organizations of things, texts and humans that are able to operate on and in relation to each other through the differences that have thus been historically pro- duced between them. (ii) The making of culture and its differentiation from the social is, above all else, the work of institutions. It is here that the work of making culture is enacted and through which the work it accomplishes is performed. To analyse the work of making culture entails attending to all those processes of accumu- lation, classification and ordering to which varied practices are subject and through which their ���culturalness��� is conferred on them. It is clear, for exam- ple, to put the point historically, that the bringing together of varied kinds of writing to form literature or of painting to constitute art is the result of the work of classification and codification performed by literary and artis- tic institutions, and the forms of cultural knowledge which they marshal, work which always involves the differentiation of the ensembles it assem- bles from other assemblages of knowledges and practices. It is equally clear that the ���culturalness��� that is produced in this way is not the same as culture in some general semiotic sense (culture as meaning-making practices) but rather involves the production of specific relations between the objects and practices that are thus brought together and, as a consequence, the organi- zation of distinctive meta-semiotic properties arising from their inscription in specific, institutionally produced zones of cultural action. 34 Cultural Sociology Volume 1 ��� Number 1 ��� March 2007 unauthorized distribution. �� 2007 SAGE Publications and the British Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or by Ondra Krajtl on December 18, 2007 http://cus.sagepub.com Downloaded from