Séminaire Imaginaire et Société : Émotion, Perception, Créativité – 2015-2016 (5)

An Outline of a Theory of Rationalization and Resistance in Culture

The major theoretical problem I would try to outline in this paper requires showing how different activities, programmatic statements, and products in art and culture can be understood to resist the increasingly rationalized and reified world that Weber and the Frankfurt school brought to mind as an incipient system of domination. After outlining a theory of rationalization and resistance in culture, we will discuss three cases that I have examined in some detail along these lines: the Dada art movement, Mexican-American arts organizations, and the wine world.

Key words: Rationalization; resistance; Dada, the “wine-world”; Mexican-American arts organizations; Weber; the Frankfurt School.

Jeffrey A. Halley is Professor of Sociology at The University of Texas at San Antonio, where he directs the Laboratory for the Sociology of the Arts, Culture, and Communications (SACC) of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). His research focuses on theory, art, culture, and media. Recent articles concern the problem of the rationalization of culture in the Dada art movement, Mexican American Conjunto music, and the wine industry. In 2010 and 2011 he was Guest Editor of two volumes of Sociologie De l’Art (Sociology of Art), “Théorie/Épistémologie/Littérature” [Theory/Epistemology/Literature], and “Rationalisation et Résistance/Postmodernisme” [Rationalization and Resistance/Postmodernism]. He has been a Fulbright Fellow and guest professor at the universities of Ljubljana, Metz, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France. He was elected President, Research Committee [equivalent to ASA Section] on the Sociology of the Arts, the International Sociological Association.


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