Howard part 1
I generally find Howard’s definition of political culture useful, but I kind of hate the way he organizes his arguments in the pages in which he lays out this definition (~p55-80). He states: “Political culture is a set of cognitive and material schemata for organizing the movement of socially significant objects through scripted political process in political events and for organizing the way we remember those objects, events, and processes” (71). Yet I would have found his definition more useful had he offered it up earlier and then proceeded to explain his use of the undefined terms; this way readers would be able to refer back to the definition they had already read, instead of questioning certain parts of his arguments that seemed to contradict one another until finally arriving at the definition of “political culture”, and then wondering why he didn’t just say so in the first place. Perhaps this was an intentional move on his part to get his readers riled up and ready to attack his argument at every turn only to eventually agree with him. Yet he seems somewhat careless with terminology, at the same time that he is criticizing other social scientists for their carelessness in this area.
The most glaring example of this is his fumbling through a somewhat off-handed justification for his own interest in culture as stemming from what he sees as a newfound interest in the importance of the culture concept (variously used and ill-defined as it is) among social scientists. At the risk of sounding like an evangelist of anthropology (which I am not, but I am steeped in its tradition and find much of value there), culture has been at the center of the discipline for far longer than the “recent years” which Howard identifies on page 66. Although anthropology’s place in the social sciences is uncomfortable at best, an author who purports to write a “network ethnography” and borrow a methodological frame rooted in anthropology ought to be more sensitive to the work that has come before him. He moves freely between talking about “culture” (seemingly in a general sense) and “political culture” more specifically, and I was frequently confused about which he was referring to. I was so distracted by what seems to be a conspicuous glaze over theories of culture in his claim that “its greatest usefulness has been to distinguish between ‘human’ and ‘material’ development” (67) and his lack of clarity in referring to “culture” (generally) and “political culture” as interchangeable terms that I had trouble following this rest of his argument about different approaches to political culture.
Howard is right to call for greater attention to the interdependencies of the social and the material, and to argue that “an analytic frame for political culture needs to integrate both the capacities of human agency and the constraints of material structuration” (70). To be sure, there are a defined group of people, some of whom he describes in the ethnographic material throughout the book, who use information and communication technology to constrain and enable the rest of us (voters, politicians, and their staff alike) to think and act in certain ways and not in others with respect to the political objects and processes of our government. I find his definitions of political objects, processes, events, and memory (p.55) apt for the discussion of political culture as conveyed through any medium (not just hypermedia). Yet he variously defines political culture “as a kind of exostructure” (70), placing the social and ideological dimensions of political engagement outside of this definition, and then almost immediately says that political culture consists of both material and social structures (71). Although I liked his definition of political culture in the end, I was left confused about how well his arguments in support of the definition actually justified it. While I don’t necessarily believe that an author must explicitly define all of his terms, I do believe that he must be consist in his use of them if he is to build a clear and convincing argument for a critical audience. It seems then that my problem is not with Howard’s definition of political culture and its various interpretations, per se, but with the rhetorical style which he adopts to build his arguments and his lack of consistency with terms that are important to his concept of the role of hypermedia in contemporary “political culture”.