Doorway to the dharma of duality

One of the most exciting formal approaches in the sociology of culture involves the exploration of duality-that the meaning of any of one set of elements (for example, choices of cultural consumption) is the subset of persons to which it is linked (for example, the occupations of the persons who make this choice). We here generalize this notion of duality, which we call “Breiger classic,” to the case in which similarities between persons are constructed not on the basis of which cultural elements they choose or deploy, but how these cultural elements are themselves connected, which we call “Mega-Breiger.” We then consider how to look at the duality between cultural and social units within cultural formations, treating each cultural formation as a virtual social structure among cultural elements, which we call “Mondo Breiger.” We finally discuss the “Full Breiger” duality as the complete use of a person-to-person and person-to-cultural element data set to arrange relations among one set of cultural elements. We illustrate with an analysis of all the texts of the members of the first generation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory.