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The conflict between cultures is
no longer a scuffle of characterisations, but a worldwide
clash. It is a matter of tangible conflicts, not just academic
ones. It is not merely a fight between the traditional new
critics and the bright young things who study the relevance of
masturbation to creativity. Culture is relevant to a world in
which "the joint wealth of the three richest individuals
is equal to the combined wealth of 600 millions of the
poorest". It is just that culture wars that are of
importance concern such questions as ethnic cleansing, not
just the relative merits of Stendhal or the detective novel.
Fine arts and fine living are not the monopoly of the West and
the difference between "high" and "low"
culture is blurred. Popular culture can well be conservative.
And not necessarily the values of canonical literature support
the establishment:
Flaubert
despised the middle class, Shakespeare stood for
egalitarianism, Virgil did not champion bourgeois values. The
work itself is not what matters; it is the way it is construed
or used to perpetuate the dominant ideology. The content of
culture is not what is important; its relevance lies in what
it signifies.
The idea of
culture, therefore, has a tenacious hold on contemporary
societies both in the West and the East. It is best understood
in relation to the idea of the social nature of human life; in
the area of literary and social studies this includes
criticism that takes a text to be an articulation of social
and historical forces. As Raymond Williams points out in his
"Keywords", culture is one of the two or three most
complicated words in the English language. The etymology of
the word "culture" can be traced back to the Latin
word cultura which meant "cultivate" or
"husbandry" , the tending of natural growth. Another
root word is coulter which literally means
"ploughshare". The tending of natural growth
gradually over the centuries was extended to, as Bacon says,
"the culture and manurance of the mind".
The problem
of definition permeates the processes of its formation and the
assessment of the major controversies surrounding it. This is
so to a degree because of its tortuous historical growth in
numerous European languages, but essentially because it has
now come to be used for principal concepts in numerous
divergent academic disciplines and in several dissimilar and
incompatible systems of thought.
This makes
the study of culture a post-modern discipline and a focal
point in debates over the impact of post-modernism on
academic, publishing and media industries. Though it often
seemed in the past few years that the concept of
post-modernism would fade away under the painful burden of its
own incoherence, the attraction for it and the clamour of
debates has multiplied. With its powerful configurations of
new sentiments and thoughts it seemed, as David Harvey argues,
"set fair to play a crucial role in defining the
trajectory of social and political development simply by
virtue of the way it defined standards of social critique and
political practice".
It thus
begins to appear both fascinating and repellent, unabashedly
complex and tantalising: out of it develop stereotypes of
different kinds depending on one’s ideology and world-view.
It is a landscape which is sometimes self-questioning, and at
other times rushing blindly into an unkempt confusion of the
supermarket and other commonly known features of popular
culture.
Terry
Eagleton’s centre of attention in his recent book "The
Idea of Culture" is on discriminating different meanings
of culture, as a way of kicking off the current deliberations
around it. In what amounts to a foremost avowal, with sharp
bearing on the world in the new millennium, Eagleton embarks
on an appraisal of post-modern "culturalism",
disputing in its place for an intensely more multifarious
relation between culture and nature, and endeavouring to
recover the magnitude of such notions as human nature from a
non-naturalistic standpoint.
His book
counters a clear chic populism in this branch of learning, as
well as drawing awareness to the insufficiency of exclusivity.
It makes fundamental inquiry into the reasons, both laudable
and unworthy, why "culture" has come in our own
epoch to such voluminous form, and incitingly suggests that it
is time, while conceding its implications, to put it back in
its place.
There are
multiple values of culture and versions of it that fit a
certain intellectual and political agenda. Unlike what has
happened to post-structuralism, it tries to go beyond just a
vacuum methodology for reading cultural texts so as to develop
a more politically conscientious approach to culture and
addresses the emergent split in cultural studies between a
methodologically academised programme and a more politicised,
dehegemonising version. No singular version of a pre-given
methodology is possible within this discipline. There is no
canon, but only a heterogeneity of cultural gestures which
lends it its pervasive strength.
But in order
to give it a legitimacy in the academic sphere, it becomes
essential to codify cultural studies, though this may in all
probability harm its political concern and finally kill it, as
it happened with deconstruction in the United States. Cultural
populism has led to, what Terry Eagleton terms, "a strong
current of anything-goes-ism" within cultural studies. He
goes on to comment on the history of cultural studies in
Britain where the study of popular culture has posed, since
its first glimmerings in the 1960s, a whole series of
theoretical paradigms:
"From
its left-Leavisite origins to Hoggart’s Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham, it progressed
through Althusserian Marxism and preoccupation with
sub-cultures in the 90s to a more feminist,
ethnically-conscious neo-Gramscianism in the succeeding
decade."
He sees the
neo- Gramscian paradigm between the paranoid and the populist,
between the belief that "mass" culture is an alien
imposition on the people from above, and the euphoric view of
it as a vital flourishing from below.
Cultural
meanings, he adds "are seen as in a permanent state of
contestation, in which dominant values are indeed at work in
popular culture, but rarely without resistance to adaptation
on the part of their audience, while meanings which emerge
more organically from popular life are always at risk of being
appropriated and reflected by the ruling cultural order."
The idea of
culture today splits into a conformist, comfortable version
notable for its methodological approach to cultural reading
and a more critical version that can be traced directly to the
inspiration of the Frankfurt School, albeit fertilised with
insights from less mandarin perspectives on culture,
especially that of the Birmingham School. A conformist
cultural studies approach cripples it into becoming
atheoretical and apolitical. It must be kept in mind that the
rejection of absolute values by the post-modernists ought not
to imply the rejection of all values, especially those
necessary to guide the task of social reconstruction. A
version of culture that avoids post-modern relativism and
nihilism, on the one hand, and absolutism, on the other, is
what is needed.
In his essay
"Discourse and Discos" Eagleton writes: "Theory
is radical and conservative together; and nowhere is this more
obvious than in post-modern thought itself. It is a striking
feature of advanced capitalist societies that they are at once
libertarian and authoritarian, hedonist and repressive,
multiple and monolithic. The reason for this is not hard to
find. The logic of the market-place is one of pleasure and
plurality, of the ephemeral and discontinuous, of a great
decentred network of desires of which individual consumers are
the passing function. . . . Capitalism is the most pluralist
order history has ever known, restlessly transgressing
boundaries and pitching diverse life-forms together."
Often we come
across a false sense of social exclusivity and narrowness in
not introducing the study of popular literature and culture as
part of the cultural studies programme which is integral to
the study and invigoration of culture. Culture within such a
programme is neither aesthetic nor humanist in emphasis, but
political as it includes the study of, to use Raymond Williams
words, "a particular sway of life of a people, a period
or a group" and thereby becomes a corrective for the
brazen world. Its importance lies in its contested and
conflictual set of practices of representation bound up with
the processes of formulation and reformulation of social
groups.
To understand
the meaning of culture there is a need to analyse it in
relation to the "social structure and its historical
contingency", with ideology and hegemony as the central
concepts. Such a discourse of social involvement would examine
critically the connection between popular literature and
cultural production, between media interests and public
consumption in a way that would inform our political practice.
Social
relations are intimately connected with cultural affairs,
especially class relations and class consciousness as well as
racial structuring of all such relations. We must not forget
the role of power that "produces asymmetries in the
abilities of individuals and social groups to define and
realise their needs". It is therefore argued that culture
is not autonomous but a site for all ethnic, class,
generational, and gender differences along which our
capitalist societies are unequally divided .
It is not
only in the writings of philosophers, sociologists, or other
"high" forms of art that we can find the basis for
what to do for the best in our lives; our judgements can also
be rooted in the confusion of the everyday, civil life of
society. Ordinary people in their conversations and in their
practical knowledge create the basic reality in which social
institutions have their life. It must not be forgotten that
human culture has to be studied in the widest sense, with
ideas of personal relationships, civil society, social
ecology, identity and belonging its main concerns.
These are
important issues in social and cultural theory.
Literary and
cultural studies have much common ground to tread. Drawing on
a range of different academic disciplines such as
anthropology, social history, linguistics, and sociology,
cultural studies has emerged as a separate field of
interdisciplinary study in recent years though way back in the
1960s it was Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams who were
responsible for its conception. Both these key figures were
drawn from the area of literary studies to larger historical
cultural and political issues of both a practical and a
theoretical nature.
The sociology
of literature forms an intrinsic area of their study within
what Hoggart has termed "the culture and society
debate". A strong interest in theory and a general
radical flavour are characteristics of this discipline which
has drawn immensely on literary studies as well as given to it
the study of popular and non-canonical writing. It concerns
itself with the problems of vital importance to society and in
the words of Richard Hoggart covers "the whole way of
life, its beliefs, attitudes and temper as expressed in all
kinds of structures, rituals and gestures, as well as in the
traditionally defined forms of art".
The post-modern debate within
cultural studies is a self-reflexive phenomenon whose nature
and form reflect the conditions of the post-modern and the
institutional conditions along with intellectual regroupings
which give shape to contemporary critical theory and critique.
There is a possibility that openness and diversity in global
culture which this approach encourages might usher in a
cultural-political ethics in the post-modern era. The social
and economic basis of this "free-floating
phenomenon" — as Eagleton would call it — of
post-modernist culture is one important way of identifying
contemporary experience with all its variants that effect
individual values and social processes of the most fundamental
kind.
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OUR
history extends over a critical and crucial period of
adjustments when nothing in religion, politics, society or the
life of the individual is absolute and any attempt to prove
the contrary is doomed to failure. Life cannot be fixed and
codified; the very nature of existence is that it is changing
and when one thing changes everything changes with it. Living
at the crossroads of culture one can feel the immediacy of a
fluctuating, unstable, dualistic, exciting and creative life.
Though it has connotations of aesthetic development pertaining
to works and practices of intellectual and artistic activity,
in recent literary-cultural debates the term
"culture" has been employed to situate literature in
a socio-historical context.
