Sometimes it feels to me like you are all over the map. It's not the State, it's not the mouth pieces, it's not the advocates for the Brand™, it's not the individual effectors of policy, it's not the abstraction, but instead the two megacorps (Are you really so sure there are two?).[bystander]

I have hoped (for some time) someone would ask this question. It's the right question.

Without getting into academic details (often ego driven), I subscribe to a structuralist view of culture.

the belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract culture

I would amend the above statement to replace the words "constant laws" with the word "regularities" (perhaps a piffling distinction, but if academics don't piffle, then tenures are lost and reputations destroyed.)

Over the years (since, say, de Saussure [also see previous link]) the renaming/rebranding project continues as each objection to prevailing orthodoxy falls to newer, more persuasive, more adaptive or more fashionable labels for essentially the same analytic process. Recently I've been drawn to the word "unbuilding" as a label.

I'm not an academic though and I don't keep current on the most recent trends. I simply use a structuralist approach to specifics.

Further I try to distinguish between structures and "agency": that is, between those analyses of cultural architectures that demand this or that doorway or this or that height and the meaningful decisions and actions taken by real people in actual situations despite structural obstacles and facilitating pathways.

For instance (an extreme to be sure) the structures of the Army demand obedience and ruthlessness -- the ability to kill humans without consideration or remorse. Yet these same military structures demand restraint in certain situations (displayed, perhaps, through such concepts of "just war" or the protection of civilians.)

In actual fact people can and do act in direct contradiction to the structures of their culture -- they jump out a window because they decide (for whatever reasons) they cannot leave through a door ... or they take the stairs because there are too many bodies and too much blood in the elevator.

Often (as in this morning's post) I try to describe the cultural structures -- the regularities of cultural thought -- so that one may better negotiate the maze of signs, designs, mood music, plastic plants, and even smells that make the cultural mall so confusing and seemingly inescapable.