Peter Suchin, 'Defining Culture'
Published in 'Round Midnight 1: Reach for your gun' directed by Anthony Everitt. 'The Carlise Papers: Cultural Policy Making' discussion papers which were published and distributed through the magazine Artists Newsletter in 1997.
Raymond Williams calls "culture" "one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language", proposing that the use of the word to refer to "the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity...seems often now the most widespread use: culture is music, literature, painting and sculpture, theatre and film. A Ministry of Culture refers to these specific activities, sometimes with the addition of philosophy, scholarship, history." Williams' dictionary entry is a useful point of departure for a consideration of what might be being referred to when we talk about culture. It is worth calling up several other definitions, for contrast with, and extension of the term.
Brian Eno's diary for 1995 contains in its appendix numerous short tracts on a wide range of topics. He is not afraid to tackle culture. This, he suggests, "is everything we don't have to do. We have to eat, but we don't have to have "cuisines", Big Macs or Tournedos Rossini. We have to cover ourselves against the weather, but we don't have to be so concerned as we are about whether we put on Levi's or Yves Saint-Laurent. We have to move about the face of the globe, but we don't have to dance. These other things, we choose to do. We could survive if we chose not to."
This notion of culture broadens out the focus from that proposed by Williams to cover virtually everything done within the confines of human practice.
For Roland Barthes culture is inescapable - all human life is part of culture. It is a complex, plural entity. Within culture the different voices of social class, of diverse values and positions struggle for prominence, with individual groups attempting to impose upon others their idiosyncratic values. Referring to the existence of state power Barthes writes: "...so-called mass culture is the direct expression of this state presence: in France, for example, the state now seeks to dissociate itself from the university...for it realizes that it is not here that a conquering culture will be created; but for nothing in the world will it release its hold on television or radio; by possessing these means of culture, it governs real culture, and by governing it, makes it into its own...". The point that culture can be given a false coherence through the mass media transmission of the values of one small section of a vastly diverse culture is worth holding in mind in any consideration of cultural value. It is an image of the imposition of values.
I want to briefly raise here two more notions of culture. They are each of some pertinence as regards recent debates about the so-called "Postmodern" society we today inhabit. The first of these comes from the nineteenth-century.
At the beginning of Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations one encounters a succinct definition of culture. "Culture is, above all", he writes, "unity of style in all the expressions of the life of a people." Nietzsche opposes culture to what he considers its opposite, "barbarism, which is lack of style or a chaotic jumble of all styles." This opposition culture/barbarism suggests that too much diversity is not diversity at al but chaos, a breakdown of structure, a complete lack of coherence. In this definition, then, culture is a term implying a limited set of values held in common throughout a society or people. Given that much of the debate about Postmodernism characterises it as a multiplicity of often conflicting voices and values it would appear that, from Nietzsche's standpoint, our Postmodern "culture" would be no culture at all. philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the second from the contemporary academic George Steiner.
George Steiner has often utilised the term "post-culture". In many ways this label covers a period referred to by other commentators as Postmodern culture or Postindustrial society. The important point to note about Steiner's expression is that for him "culture", after the Second World War horrors of Auschwitz and the other death camps, no longer coheres as a body of commonly-agreed values. Prior to the presence of the camps, art, music and literature were felt to embody generalisable humanitarian values. However, the well-known fact that the prison guards at Auschwitz were well-educated consumers of high culture - of, that is, precisely those forms of culture that were thought to embody humanitarian ethics - indicates that the bond between art and these values had been severed. Art no longer carries within it an intrinsic humanitarian ethics. The consumption of culture had not prevented the carrying out of atrocious crimes. Clearly, once-shared values were no longer the common property they had once been seen to be. It is in this sense that Steiner can use the phrase "post-culture", since he regards culture as, implicitly, a shared continuum of beliefs and ethical constraints. By his reckoning, the present period is characterised by only incoherent patterns of value and the word "culture" is no longer appropriate. We exist in a time that is after culture, a period in which culture, in Steiner's sense of the word, has been lost. It's a position echoed in the writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard and Theodor Adorno.
Adorno, Theodor, "Cultural Criticism and Society", in Adorno, Prisms, MIT Press, 1967. Barthes, Roland, "Pax Culturalis", in Barthes, The Rustle of Language, Basil Blackwell, 1986, pp. 100, 104 - 105. Also published, in a different translation, as "Languages at war in a culture at peace", The Times Literary Supplement, 8 October, 1971. Eno, Brian, "Culture", in Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices, Faber, 1996, p. 317. Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Postmodern Condition, Manchester University Press, 1984. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Untimely Meditations, Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 5 - 6. Steiner, George, In Bluebeard's Castle, Faber, 1971. Steiner, George, "In a Post-Culture" in Steiner, Extraterritorial, Penguin, 1975. Williams, Raymond, entry on "Culture" in Williams, Keywords (First Edition), Fontana, 1976, p. 76.