Culture

In its broadest sense culture is all of the artifacts and practices of a group of people. But it is more generally used to mean those artifacts and practices outside of politics, science, and technology such as books, arts, crafts, music, dance, fashion, movies, television, food, conversation, and group activities.

Higher culture and popular culture differ in the amount of effort and prior background it takes to appreciate them. Popular culture is oriented toward larger numbers of people and it does not require extensive training to be able to appreciate. However, popular culture blurs into higher culture when it is filtered through more and more sophisticated theories.

Culture criticism takes the broadest definition of culture including politics, science and technology and covers both higher culture and popular culture. It is criticism in the sense that it evaluates and develops broad comparisons. The social sciences also study culture, and culture criticism draws from their results; however, the social sciences are more specific, collecting data and developing theories that can be systematically tested against the data. Culture criticism is not limited in that way. In a sense it is a form of literature used to orient us in the broad flow of culture.

Each specific discipline has its own methods and vocabularies and theories. But once you have surveyed all of the specific disciplines there are still a lot of unanswered questions. For example, what is the value of these disciplines? What areas of importance are not covered by a discipline? Are there combinations of results from different seemingly unrelated disciplines that could be useful? Are there disciplines that have special authority? Is there a hierarchy of disciplines or are there just different purposes?

It could be that new disciplines could come out of these considerations, or they could just remain texts of a particular place and time and be purely of historical interest. In any case, it seems that there will always remain a region of discourse between and above all of the other discourses that can cover what is left.

Culture criticism is not limited to an academic or literary environment. In fact, many people at various times have stopped to consider what kind of culture that they are living in. This may especially happen when they encounter another culture or when they notice some seemingly irreconcilable conflict within their own culture. Before that they were at home in their culture. They did not question or evaluate. This was just their way of life.

So we are all potential culture critics, but some people have become more or less professional culture critics. They might be interdisciplinary humanities professors or philosophers who have moved on after finding their discipline evaporate from underneath them. They may be art critics who keep expanding the scope of art until all of culture is art.

Some of the culture critics have used very obscure language. Is this obscurity really necessary? It could be argued that they need to break with normal discourse in order to avoid being pulled in. Culture has a force and if you do not break with traditional discourse you are not really getting beyond it.

For example, some culture critics have argued that there are logical structures and oversimplified concept pairs that are built into our discourse. To really get beyond that you must invent more novel forms of discourse. Some have taken this so far that it would be hard to distinguish their texts from particularly obscure prose poems.

I would argue that while it can be interesting to push language in these ways, it is also possible to be clear and direct and to use everyday language. Everyday language is the common base we have before we dig into some specialized language for some specialized purpose. When we draw back into our common space, are we not back into the realm of culture criticism?

Or maybe we could distinguish popular culture criticism from higher culture criticism. Higher culture criticism will be in a dense language with many associations with other dense texts. It thus becomes “higher” because of all of the reading and study needed to understand it. It can also serve a sort of gate keeping function, keeping out all of the unwashed masses. On the other hand, this all could be just a kind of tenure scam.

It may be necessary to use some of the specialized vocabulary of the target disciplines that you are studying. It may also make sense to use some special method such as semiotics. But you have to ask what the purpose is of seemingly unnecessary complexity.

The most useful distinctions for a professional culture critic would be the depth and breadth of their knowledge of cultural artifacts and practices, their ability to evaluate them and make comparisons, and their ability to suggest new disciplines or combinations of disciplines. If they could further do all of this in a clear, everyday language that is useful to the majority of people who are concerned with these issues, that would be even better.

Now let us consider conflicts between cultures. Take a dominant, relatively homogenous culture and add some new immigrant subcultures. These subcultures may have different languages and religions, different concepts of marriage and family relationships, and many other fundamental differences. If these subcultures make a concerted effort to assimilate and the dominant culture remains dominant, there may not be a problem. But if they attempt to maintain their distinctiveness, the dominant culture will be affected in one way or the other.

There are a couple of possible configurations. Suppose that the dominant culture has a universalizing ideology, that is, they feel that their culture is uniquely legitimate and that all others should follow. They will then want to see the subcultures merge into theirs without changing it. They may use different strategies such as a forced assimilation, ridicule, and discrimination.

Another possibility is that the dominant culture may simply be self-preservationist, that is, they want to preserve their culture, but they do not have the desire to change the subcultures. To do this, they need to preserve strict community boundaries. They need to prevent intermarriage, or at least if there is intermarriage the children need to be raised in the dominant culture. Different communities may live in separate neighborhoods or towns. The relationship between the communities is something like a federation of states with the dominant culture being the superpower.

Both of these scenarios are very difficult to maintain in the same country. Some of the members of the dominant culture that have more contact with the subcultures may start to question the dominant culture. They may want to move over to one of the subcultures, to adopt some of their features, or to change aspects of their own culture because the subcultures provide evidence that they are after all just cultural, not facts of nature. This multiculturalist or cultural relativist faction will then come into conflict with the more absolutist elements of the culture. The absolutists may take a number of stances. They may not think of what they are trying to preserve as merely an aspect of a culture. They may see it as divinely ordained, for example. Or they may be fully aware that it is cultural, but they still feel that it is superior. Or they may just want to preserve it because it is theirs and gives them a more powerful position. Finally, they may just be afraid that rapid change will throw their culture into chaos with disastrous results.

The immigrant subculture could be from immigration into Western countries, from Western specialists, businesses, or missionaries going into non-Western countries, or from various types of colonization. In some cases, the immigrants may become the dominant culture and the original people may become a subculture in their own country.

Similar considerations come up even without immigration, for example, with converts to new religions, with youth subcultures, with students trained in another country, or with academic subcultures. The dominant culture may react in similar ways.

Something like this is happening in many countries of the world. In Moslem countries, for example, there is the conflict between traditional Islam and the secularizing West. Similar conflicts are underway between various traditional cultures and the West. This carries over into Western countries when members of these non-Western cultures immigrate.

But the West has its own problems. Within Western culture there is a conflict between those who hold to traditional Judeo-Christian values, those who hold to Enlightenment ideals, and those who are influenced by postmodern multicultural ideas. The traditionalists are continuing their long battle with the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment partisans are in conflict with the postmodernists because the postmodernists question the exclusive legitimacy of scientific rationalism. Many of the traditionalists are also at odds with the postmodernists because the postmodernists question the unique legitimacy of their tradition. But there is an odd wrinkle here. Some traditionalists are drawing on postmodern ideas to justify their right to belief and their unique way of life as one of the cultures of multiculturalism, a new defense against their old Enlightenment enemies. The postmodernists by embracing pluralism allow space for different traditions, as long as they do not seek hegemony. This can seem to be workable compromise to some moderate traditionalists. Also, postmodernism can be seen as a sort of super Enlightenment, carrying the Enlightenment ideas to their logical conclusions, these ideas having in their turn been influenced by Greek skepticism.

Where does this book fit into this landscape? It is trying to work out a way of living within the limits of language, experience, and desire. It acknowledges diversity and relativity. This would seem to position it in the general territory of postmodernist multiculturalism. But it also wants to preserve within this framework some of the most useful insights from the Enlightenment and from traditional culture. It wants to do this, though, while giving up the attempt to give these insights an absolute justification or legitimacy. This seems to position it as a sort of moderate compromise between the three.

One final question: Is our culture too fragmented into subcultures?

As long as there is a common basis for interaction between the subcultures, such as democratic institutions and the market, it can be enriching. It can make it more difficult to come to common decisions, but this seems like a price work paying for the richness, variety, and excitement that it adds.