Introduction: Which Culture?

Abstract

The first chapter highlights the confusing plurality of meanings attached to the notion of culture. While it is used in increasingly many contexts, giving rise to the idea of an ongoing ‘culturalisation’, a range of new materialists and antihermeneutic posthumanists have sought to undermine the centrality of culture, meaning, interpretation and mediation. The book structure is explained: Chapters 2–5 in Part I summarising the main concepts of culture, presenting their meanings, uses and limitations; Chapters 6–8 in Part II scrutinising the contestations in structuralism, science and technology studies and media archaeology; and Chapters 9–11 in Part III reconstructing sustainable foundations for a ‘post-antihermeneutic’ concept of culture, defending the idea of meaning-making practices of communication and mediation, while attentively learning from the critiques.