Materialistyczna Analiza Kulturoznawcza: Refleksja Metabadawcza

The subject of this text is metadisciplinary and methodological reflection in the context of current discussions on the specificity of cultural studies in Poland. I present my vision of the methodological approach, which I call social (materialist) cultural analysis, and which crystallized in the course of conceptualization and operationalization of my research on the phenomenon most often called street art. And although I formulated it in the context of a specific research procedure, as if in interaction with the issue I am exploring, it seems to me that it has a broader value in at least two related areas: as a contribution to the discussion on the specificity of cultural studies ‘work’ (as a formula of softly understood empirical research) and as a reflection on the ‘bottom-up’ approach postulated in the era of the end of universalism and macrotheory. I situate my proposition in the context of the discussion on the formula of Polish cultural studies; in relation to the postulates of abandoning thinking in terms of traditional scientific disciplines; and in the context of the idea of ‘bottom-up’ development of theoretical categories. The three most important aspects are: transdisciplinarity; a turn towards a sociological perspective in cultural research; reflective empiricism, in which the theory becomes a derivative of the process of collecting empirical data (sources), and which ‘saturates’ in the process of their collection.