Cultural Intermediation and Civil Society: Towards a Hermeneutically Strong Conception

Abstract

Literary fiction narrates ethical and moral meaning. It is rich with ethical conceptions of the good life and expressions of moral universalism, and it assumes a meaningful role in civil society through this richness. And yet, existing conceptions of cultural intermediation do not consider this richness; they are reductive in the way they focus on the social-structural space in between author and reader. Cultural intermediation is trimmed down to competition and generalizations of taste and aesthetic acclaim without considering cultural meaningfulness. In this article, I propose and discuss a new conception of cultural intermediation that builds a bridge between understanding the production and reception of literature in social-structural terms and society’s civil discourse. I draw on a diverse set of authors from philosophy and cultural sociology – discourse ethics and civil sphere theory in particular – to form a critique of intermediation. I conceptualize what it means to claim that literary text is a morally meaningful medium in three different ways: productive intermediation, receptive intermediation and critical intermediation. And I highlight that literary fiction is not culture per se, but that it enables actors to mediate culture. From authors along with agents, publishers, distributors and critics towards readers, literary text is embedded in culture-specific context. This is a hermeneutically strong conception of cultural intermediation that contributes to a meaning-centred sociology of literature.