Hybrid subjectivity and understanding of social action: On the phenomenology of ambivalence

Much of the history of sociological theory is rooted in the metaphor of culture as a bounded, well-defined whole, which serves as the ultimate frame of reference for everything social. In particular (as epitomized by Parsonian theory), social actions have, as their final source of reference, the system of norms and values characteristic of a particular culture.
As Billig and Urry have shown, such a conception is firmly grounded in the post-Westphalian political concept of nation-state. Abandonment of this nationalist and colonialist discourse forces us to depart from what Bhabha characterized as “our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People”. Indeed, in a world of hypermobility and hyperconnectivity many people are immersed in multitudes of ambivalent cultural patterns and social norms on a daily basis, as well as over life course.
In these conditions we can no longer refer to the monolithic, solid, bounded notion of culture as a source of values and symbols, or society as a source of norms, in our understanding of social action. I revisit the Weberian categories of action and Bourdieu’s notion of habitus through the lens of hybridity and marginality, and in light of dynamic co-development of personal and collective culture. I question the basic metaphor of culture as a well-defined region and suggest that the metaphor of fluid, and the notion of collective culture as a locally specific, temporarily assembled mixture of cultural patterns, can be used to understand the genesis of personal culture. This latter—thus conceived as an inherently hybrid subjectivity—may serve as a source for phenomenological teleological understanding of individual action in conditions of permanent ambivalence, and as a useful framework for discussing justice in a world of ambivalent difference.