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This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 898288.
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Description of the Action
Recently, western democracies have been wracked by unanticipated swells of populism, ethnonationalism, and isolationism, all of which greatly unsettled the neoliberal, globalist, and multicultural trajectories many assumed were durable and determined.
The shock produced by events like Brexit in the UK, Donald Trump’s victory in the USA, and the Alternative for Deutschland’s (AfD) rise in Germany -- and by association, the success of far-right European parties such as the Sweden Democrats, the Party of Freedom in the Netherlands, the National Rally in France, and the Brothers of Italy -- indicate that taken for granted cultural assumptions are being not only called into question but upended.
The Code Flux research project approaches these developments theoretically as representing severe challenges to the foundational cultural elements that control, anchor, and organize liberal, western democratic social orders. Code Flux examines the scope and intensity of these challenges.
As the turn of the twenty-first century neared, a much cited cultural sociologist reflected:
“the greatest unanswered question in the sociology of culture is whether and how some cultural elements control, anchor, or organize others.”
The research in CODE FLUX draws on the theory of the binary codes of civil society to investigate this question.
Binary cultural codes are pairs of evaluative signs that stand in strict opposition to one another, much like Emile Durkheim’s categories of the sacred and profane.
The codes play a central role in CODE FLUX because they represent durable building blocks upon which more context-specific narratives, scripts, discourses, and repertoires are constructed.
The binary codes “control, anchor, and organize” other cultural forms, the research in CODE FLUX shows.
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