The notion of culture and of cultural dynamics in my work and in the practice of the programmes I am involved in (both the Utrecht centre for the Humanities and the gender studies programme) connects philosophical issues related to the structures of subjectivity to more concrete concerns about how to initiate and successfully sustain processes of social  and political change. More specifically, the focus of my work is on the complex interaction between societal processes and in-depth transformation of the structures of the self. This approach bears the marks of the poststructuralist tradition of thought in at least two areas: the first is the notion of language and the second that of theoretical and cultural practice. Language is defined here, in line with semiotics, psychoanalysis and poststructuralist theories, as the material and symbolic foundation of the subject. It is a fundamental structure that is less about communication than about structuring the process of becoming-subject in terms of dynamic interaction with material, symbolic, social and other forces.  Practice refers to both a methodology and a political strategy that combines theory and action in the effort to both account for and have an impact on real-life conditions and social structures. Ideas such as  'textual practice', for instance, express a strategy that aims at accounting for contemporary culture, structures of subjectivity, social interaction and conditions. the method involved in this form of epistemic accountability is the cartographies of power relations and of their interaction with social subjects. The focus is both on the analysis of present social conditions and on the cartographic accounts of the multiples technologies of the self that structure them. I consider these two features as central to critical theory.