A second sort of critique that has helped to move discussions of difference beyond the idea of “culture” is highlighted in part 2. This line of criticism raises questions over the classical idea of culture as “order,” emphasizing instead questions of partiality, perspective, and -above all- power. The idea of culture as order – standing, like a hobbesian Leviathan, against the ever present threat of chaos and anomie – is, of course, a very well established one in Western thought. Whether styled as the functionalist glue making social cohesion possible (the Durkheimian reading); the abstract code enabling societal communication (the structuralist one); the domain of shared, in tersujective meanings that alone make sense of symbolic social action (the Weberian/Geertzian interpretation), concepts of culture have consistently emphasized the shared, the agreed on, and the orderly.
Marxist and feminist revisions in the 1969s and 1970s only partly displaced these earlier visions. By centering questions of domination, both approaches made it possible to ask searing questions about how the culture “rules of the game” got made, by whom, and for whom. But the idea of culture (and of ideology) as order remained mostly intact, even as that order was politicized.