In recent years political and social conflicts have increasingly been interpreted as cultural conflicts. "Culture" has thus become a central operational category of contemporary political discourses and decision-making. Cultural theories have most often contested this process only by stressing a different - albeit "dynamicized" or "translational" – concept of culture, thereby actually contributing to the ongoing culturalization of the political and the social, however, without investigating the discursive regularities and the immediate political implications of the notion of "culture" as such. In return, an in-depth investigation, both in a historical and contemporary perspective, of the political functionalities and societal "materializations" of the cultural dispositive can be described as the task of a critique of culturalization.