The Roles ‘Language’ Plays within the Sociology of Culture

• In Event: 398 - Section on Marxist Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Section on Marxist Sociology Roundtables (one-hour). Table 01. Critical Issues in Culture and Communication

Abstract

This paper treats the sociology of culture as a system of language games, which govern the usages that can be made of the term, ‘language,’ as an analytic construct or concept at its disposal. The analysis here is refined to three of the most general language-games in which the sociology of culture plays with ‘language’: the structuralist game, the Marxist game, and the poststructuralist game. This paper shows that each of these games can be analyzed with reference to two problems that recur within any sociology of language, and which one always confronts when contemplating language as an abstract component of human social life: the problem of meaning in language and the problem of the socio-historical emergence and conditioning of languages. With a clear understanding of what is at stake in these problems, this paper concludes the following: the structuralist game deals with the problem of meaning in language by denying the problem of the socio-historical emergence of languages; the Marxist game deals with the problem of the socio-historical emergence of languages by denying the problem of meaning; and the poststructuralist game pursues a couple of different avenues through which it attempts to recognize and evaluate both problems simultaneously.

Author

• Ritchie Savage, New School for Social Research