Culture
http://www.journal-online.co.uk/article/2693-new-cell-discovery-could-advance-understanding-of-cancer
Culture as reification is perhaps a relatively new theme for us. Reification is a double edged sword. On the one hand, it refers to the life of objects, in the straightforward empirical sense of ‘objects coming to life’ when they are engaged in action. However, at the same time, reification is often identified as a fallacy of misplaced concreteness: one abstracts generic qualities from particular object-relations and holds them ‘for real’. However when taken as this doubling, ‘theorizing culture as reification’ begets a critical edge which, despite its duplicity, leads to questioning everything that exists in terms of valuation.
Objectification, the making of objects, is what makes it possible for us to speak of ‘culture’ in the first place. It is always important to look at the smaller things, because they are more meaningful than the larger more abstract concepts. Culture as such an abstraction means very little, but when we look at distinctive cultures, they already become more complex. Cultures of bacteria, for example in yoghurt, are immensely complex in comparison with the sociological concept of culture as ‘shared meaning’. Bacteria expand through reproduction, which is a social activity, and this expansion is also referred to as ‘cultivation’. Although cultivation often entails an intentional connotation of deliberate, careful action, this is not an essential requirement. Cultivation can also happen spontaneously, and moreover, through imitations. In the end, intentionality makes not such a major difference to objectification as such; it is just one particular venue for imitation, alongside many others.
… Joost