Abstract
Tony Bennett has established systematic theories and methodologies on the New Materialism from the perspective of governmentality, which, however, is often neglected by scholars. Based on intensive reading of relevant textual contents and conceptual interpretation, the article deeply and comprehensively investigates Bennett's New Materialism with dialectical analysis and reflection. It argues that Bennett has boldly assimilated the Actor-network Theory by the French post-structuralist sociologist Latour and others when recontextualizing, from the governmentality perspective, society, culture and their relationships. In this process, Bennett developed the idea of Assembling Culture to underscore the dynamic material generating process of culture and the social, giving them material and dialectical meaning, and revealing how cultural practices regulate and shape the social and social behaviors through the knowledge-power pattern. Bennett has pioneered the new materialistic turn of cultural studies, thereby providing a new clue for cultural study scholars to contemplate cultural production beyond the economic and political model that define historical materialism.
First Page
63
Last Page
71
Recommended Citation
Xu, Xiaoxia. 2019. "The Material Return of Cultural Studies: Culture and Society from the Perspective of Tony Bennett's Governmentality." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 39, (1): pp.63-71. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol39/iss1/18
