Object and Subject of Cultural Studies: Why the Obvious Has Become a Perplexity

For decades, the culturological community has been holding discussions about what culture is, what exactly the science of culturology studies, what its strictly outlined object, subject, and method are, whether it is a science at all. A 30-year-long unsuccessful attempt to create a “theory of culture instead of historical materialism” has led to the fact that culturologists themselves are already doubting whether there is such a science - culturology. How to isolate a specific subject of cultural studies, if culture is infinitely diverse and presents itself, in fact, in any form of human activity? However, this difficulty arises only when there is no understanding of the dialectical identity of form and content, the individual and the universal, when subjectivist approaches to culturological science - voluntarism, positivism, and neo-Kantianism - dominate. Following such approaches leads to three main quasi-solutions: either getting away from the question, stating that the humanities are too “personal” and “subjective” to somehow limit them and committing violence against the creative infinity of human thought, or getting away from the question, saying that there are as many culturologies as there are culturologists, or abstractly and one-sidedly reducing the subject of cultural studies to the study of the moral, ethical, or, for example, symbolic forms of social life, which in no way covers the entire diversity of cultural phenomena. The need to cover the entire culture tempts to say that culturology studies everything in the world (politics, economics, law, religion, art, etc.), but only with the help of some mysterious “culturological approach”, “culturological point of view” about which they argue a lot, but the generally accepted systemic theory of which does not exist. This is understandable: points of view can only form an eclectic set of points of view, but not a system. Comprehending the problem with the help of dialectical logic, the author concludes that a subject is one of the properties of a diverse object. Diversity consists in the unity of functionally opposite forms. Therefore, if culture is all forms of social activity, then one form (say, values) cannot lie in its basis - only the unity of opposites of the main forms of activity: spiritual and material. Culture together with society is historically born from the developing nature, becomes a humanized nature, a world of things. A contradictory interaction also arises between the world of people and the world of things, mediated by the tools of labor, with the help of which these things are created. The subject of cultural studies is such a property of asociety (object), which: a) is inherent in it, b) is externally expressed as interaction with oneself and other properties. This property is the ability to accumulate and transfer spiritual and material experience in order to survive and develop the humankind, expressed in various ways of mastering nature and people themselves in their objective-sensory activity.

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