Abstract
The research programme, which has interdisciplinary characteristics, but is deeply rooted in the sociological paradigm, is focused on the sociological, historical, systems, and culturally anthropological study of the relevancy of culture comprehended in the sence of Raymond Williams' conceptualisation of expresing spiritual and material processes ( religion, arts, science, subculture, lifestyle, lingual practices, mythology, emotions, etc.), in relationship to social structures and institutions. The socially historical context of this research is the postmodern, ie. postindustrial society in which the major social conflict has been transfered from the axis »labour – capital« to the axis »information – power«. Starting from the empirically determined suppositions that culture, in the described sence has, on entering the third millennium, already surpassed the autonomous sphere of the past modern era (Weber), the research focuses on the identification, classification and analytical interpretation of the processes that have contributed to such an expansion of cultural relevancy. As it is possible to talk about »Kulturgesellschaften«, about cultural societies because of the central status that culture has as a socialisation agent in contemporary western democracies, so does this research describe and critically expose those historical and structural shifts which hide the potential for modified forms of hegemony, which almost completely replaces the domination, ie.the transformation of symbols, ideas, ikons, and symbols of the culturally generated life is politically »interested«. Processes of cultural mediation, especially the aesthetisation of everyday life, in frame of which the dialectics of hegemony and revolt at the end of the 20th century occurs, lean on the expanding commercial and ideological power of transnational corporations, the nation states either collaborate with, or oppose to. These processes are the focal point of interest in this research. The ways in which the presumably »neutral« cultural, artistic, religious, mythological, and life practices for establishing the field, where there is conflict between the ambition of articulating an individual's identity on the one hand, and the formation of the collective on the other, are exactly the means of symbolic adoptions of the material life and the transformation of existential experience, in which it is possible to detect the relevancy of cultural norms that are the object of this research. In this frame, special attention shall be paid to the conditions of the constitution of pluralistic value orientations in the growing postnational globalised societies, also including, but not limited to Slovenia, in which the problem of national identities is, in fact, one of the major centers of conflict between the universal (economic) and particular (ethnic, lingual, national and religious) impulses, without the study of which we cannot understand the fundamental issues of cultural and social capital.
