I'm walking
down a street in the meat packing district late at night, dressed
in a black singlet and jeans. I pass two guys packing a truck, also
dressed in dark singlets and jeans. I overhear them discussing options
for an evening out. 'You could always go to that faggot club around
the corner,' the one nearest to me says darkly, pointing in the direction
I happen to be heading. 'Take your little a-hole around there. Them
faggots will fill it up good.'
Then
he looks straight at me.
In the
space of a few seconds, the two of us have sized each other up and
know one or two things about each other. He is wearing the kind of
dark singlet that says 'working class male on the job'. I am wearing
the kind of singlet that says 'faggot going to a nightclub'.
Culture:
a 'wardrobe of signs'
This is the first thing we can say 'culture' is: a wardrobe of signs
people put out to each other, indicating where we are coming from
and what we're about, so other people can size us up and decide what
to do next. It is a way of marking out what makes us different.
Its the
other guy's move now he and I have made eye contact, and we both know
from what he's said that he doesn't like my kind all that much. What
does he do? Say, in classic New Yorker style, 'fuck you!'? Step over
and thump me one? NO, he stares at me, for one of those moments that
seem to cut a hole in time. Then he ignores me completely and I walk
on around to the club.
Urban
culture's indifference allows intermingling of different cultures
This is the second thing we can say about culture, and the different
ways of knowing who we are and who others are through culture. Modern,
urban culture is as much about indifference as it is about difference,
as sociologist Georg Simmel surmised. The man packing the truck and
I seem to occupy different kinds of cultural world, but the space
where we come across each other belongs, by mutual decision, to neither
of us in particular. The space itself in this case is indifferent,
and that indifference makes possible the intermingling of different
networks of cultural sense.
Culture
can be open or closed to different behaviours and attitudes
So culture is a set of signs and rules for their use that signal
how we might differ from an other. And it is also a set of signs and
rules about rubbing along, or not, depending on the particular cultural
convention of that place and time. Some cultures affirm their existence
by thumping anyone who breaks its rules. Some cultures are rather
more confident about themselves than that, and don't really give a
damn.
This
is the third thing we can say about culture: there are ethical and
political questions at stake as to how open or closed a particular
culture is to different behaviours and attitudes, both within the
ranks of those it considers 'inside' it, and those it considers 'outside'.
The signs and the rules set up these notions of an inside and an outside.
There is contestation. There is such a thing as cultural politics.
Culture:
a whole way of life, a structure of feeling
Cultural historian Raymond Williams spent a lot of time trying
to come up with a definition of culture. He referred to it as a whole
way of life, or a structure of feeling.2 I have always rather liked
that expression. It gives you the sense of culture as something you
learn, perhaps without really being aware of it, yet it shapes your
awareness of everything around you and how you react to things. The
actions of the truck packers and myself in the street are shaped by
something we have learned about each other and about getting along
in that particular, urban environment. There is a patchwork of such
rules, different in place and time, and not always adhered to anyway.
Culture
uses rituals and artefacts to sustain its coherence
Culture is something one picks up and intemalises. It only exists
if people act according to the codes and conventions of it. Yet a
culture also passes through a set of things external to the members
of the group it defines, as artefacts, rituals, texts. These things
should not be confused with culture itself. One learns a culture through
these things, but these things only come to have meaning within the
networks of actions that people make of them. A simple black singlet
becomes a sign.
This
is the fourth thing we can say about culture. It uses rituals and
artefacts to sustain its coherence across space and time, but it is
not reducible to those artefacts and rituals. Understanding culture
is not just a matter of reading its 'texts.' One has to follow them
around, see what uses or abuses they are subjected to in everyday
life.3
Cultures
are a resource for making sense of time and space
The fifth thing we can say about cultures is that they make sense
of time and space for their members. They are a resource for coping
with good and bad fortune. In the city where my encounter with the
truck packers took place, both the cultures in question are under
stress. In New York, gay culture has been hard hit by the AIDS pandemic.
Urban working class culture is struggling because blue collar jobs
are drying up. In both cases, the sense of identity provided by the
culture is a resource for coping with these bad tums of fortune, but
in neither case can culture itself reverse that fortune. That depends
on the resources the state and the economy between them put towards
health care and employment, in these examples.
Culture
is the process at work that lends continuity and meaning to lives
Modern living added a whole new dimension to what it is cultures
have to manage. Capitalism, as Karl Marx said, is a dynamic force
in society, and the modem society it shapes is one where 'all that
is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned.'4 Capitalism
accelerated the changes that culture has to try to make intelligible
to its members. This is one of the reasons a wide range of people
have come to focus on culture, because it appears to be the process
at work that lends continuity and meaning to lives that otherwise
are battered pretty hard by rapid economic and social change.
So the
sixth thing we can say about culture is that it has become a focus
for attention as capitalism increases the pace and scale of change
people have to adapt to. This idea goes back to the Scottish enlightenment,
and the idea I've already discussed of the role culture has to play
once the division of labour has fragmented life and makes of us narrow
people.5
Culture:
compensation for a fragmented and alienated life
More radical writers, influenced by Marx, will see the idea of
culture as compensation for a fragmented and alienated life as a con.
Guy Debord, perhaps the last of the great revolutionary thinkers of
Europe, will call it 'the spectacle'. In his view, everything that
is alienated from us by the relentless division of labour comes back
to haunt us as the media spectacle. You go to work. You make things.
You never see those things again. You get paid. With that pay, you
are supposed to buy things back again. But the value of the things
you made is greater than the value of the stuff you can buy with your
pay. The difference is called profit. The people who eam the profit
are called capitalists. This way of organising things is called capitalism.
As if for compensation for being short changed in terms of the things
one can buy, everything seems to be available as an image. The images
of advertising and TV and cinema present back to the people that made
stuff the image of what they have made and no longer possess, appearing
as a perfect world of things in all their splendour.
As Debord
puts it in his own cryptic style, 'all time, all space, becomes foreign
to them as their own alienated products accumulate. The spectacle
is a map of this new world - a map drawn to the scale of the territory
itself.'6 Debord was always looking forward to the day when workers
would give in to the passions the spectacle incites, not just by buying
a new dishwasher, but by throwing a brick through the window and taking
it. As Debord sees it, the looting that accompanied the Los
Angelesriots is just as much a product of the structure of feeling
of capitalism as a Mother's Day shopping spree.
Culture
is more important than the economy for many
While radical post-Marxist critiques of culture as compensation
for capitalism may be on the wane, other 'strong' positions on the
role of culture have arise to take its place. What One Nation in Australia
has in common with the Taliban in Afghanistan and Serbian nationalism
is a sense that culture comes first and the economy has to conform
to its dictates. Or in other words, culture is not there to supplement
for the limits of the market, the market is there to supplement culture.
This is sometimes framed in terms of a do-or-die conflict between
the two.
Culture
is a means of resistance
A less apocalyptic view of culture sees it simply as resistance.
Cultures are hardy weeds. They tend to make the best of things. They
sprout through cracked pavements. Their seeds lie dominant in hard
times and hard ground, and flourish in a little light and water. As
Michel de Certeau maintains, cultures can be an invisible fibre of
little tactics by which people maintain some sense of possibility
in lives lived in spaces always under someones's control. For de Certeau,
culture resides in the qualities of little everyday actions, always
singular, particular, almost unnoticeable. Things that can't ever
be entirely plotted on any grid.'7
Culture
as the best of what has been thought or expressed
So far I have talked about culture as a structure of feeling that
everybody within a particular culture more or less shares. There is
another notion of culture altogether, which is culture as the best
of what was thought and expressed. The English Victorian essayist
Mathew Arnold thought of culture this way, and literary and fine art
studies still do to this day.8 They are interested in the question
of what constitutes good cultural artefacts. They tend to rest on
the belief that the study of particularly good artefacts of culture
will make you a refined and gentle human being. So in a sense literary
or art intellectuals form a peculiar kind of culture. One that picks
out a quite select range of artefacts with which to make a quite rarefied
structure of feeling. This kind of critical culture is really just
a particular example of the wider process of culture at work.
Learning
a particular structure of feeling gives one no special insight whatsoever
into other people's structures of feeling. Indeed, for our present
purposes it has to remain an open question whether there is any way
at all to get an overview of how structures of feeling, in general,
operate. It is perfectly clear that literary and fine art cultures
have no special knowledge of culture in general. The view these cultures
come to hold of other cultures may be even more distorted by the kind
of prejudice and intolerance of different cultures than, say, working
class Manhattanites.
To sum
it up: Culture makes use of artefacts and rituals to pass on notions
of identity. These resources of identity sustain structures of feeling
that organise and make sense of everyday life. It has to do so under
the extraordinary pressure of the modern division of labour,which
fragments people's experience, such that people are always having
to negotiate with each other a culturalpolitics that allows different
bits of identity to coexist. Sounds impossible. But it gets even harder
when culture finds itself circulated and negotiated not just through
media that can simultaneously reach millions.
Note:
It is recommended that this be used as a teachers resource rather
than a student resource. You may wish to edit this before using in
the classroom.
McKenzie
Wark is the author of Virtual Geography, (Indiana University
Press 1994),
The Virtual Republic (Allen & Unwin 1997) and Celebrities,
Culture and Cyberspace (Pluto Press 1999)
References
I Georg
Simmel, 'The Metropolis and Mental Life', in The Sociology of George
Simmel,
Free Press, New York, 1950
2 Raymond
Wlliams, The Long Revolution, Hogarth Press, London, 1992, p41 ff.
The best introduction to Wllliams is Wllliams himself, starting with
his early, classic work, Culture and Society, Columbia University
Press, New Yor,c, 1983. For Williams' subsequent influence, see Graeme
Turner, British Cultural Studies: An Introduction, Routledge,
New York, 1996
3. Henri
Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Verso, London, 1991. See
also his Introduction to Modemity: 12 Preludes, Verso, London, 1995
Karl Marx, The Revolutions of 1848, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth,
1973, pp7-71.
4. Karl
Marx, The Revolutions of 1848, Penguine Books, Harmondworth, 1973,
pp 70-71. On Marx as a prophet of modernity, see Marshall Berman's
All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity,
Verso, London, 1982, chapter 2.
5. The
Scottish enlightenment pass into European consciousness through their
influence on German thinking-it was from Ferguson that we derive the
idea of 'civil society that runs from Hegel to Habermas. See Jurgen
Habemmas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Polity,
Cambridge, 1989
6. Guy
Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Zone Books, New York,
1994, p23.
By far the most entertaining account of Debord's life, art, politics,
and the radical tradition to which he belongs is in Greil Marcus,
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge Mass., 1986
7 Michel
de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California
Press, Berkeley, 1988. See also the essays in Michel de Certeau, Heterologies:
Discourse of the Other, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,
1986; Jeremy Ahearne, Michel de Certeau: Interpreation and its
Other, Stanford University Press,1995
8 Mathew
Arnold, Selected Prose, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1987. To put
Amold in the context of the functions English literature was meant
to serve, see Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism,
Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1983
