Sean,
Yes, 'culture' is indeed a word. Yes,
because it is a word the meanings associated with
it have changed over time. Moreover the power
investments in the term have changed too. Unlike
many other disciplines the study of culture
questions its very own name. Unlike most
academic disciplines it questions how
power is articulated around its name and seeks,
nay strives, to account in media, and yes in
communication, for its articulation of this power.
As Stuart Hall puts it:
'Culture' is not a practice; nor is it simply the
descriptive sum of the 'mores and folkways' of
societies... . It is threaded through all social
practices and is the sum of their inter-relationship...
The 'culture' is those patterns of organization...which
can be discovered as revealing themselves, in 'unexpected
identities and correspondences' as well as 'in
discontinuities of an unexpected kind', within or
underlying all social practices.
>I prefer communication/mediation because it doesn't force you into =
identity politics.=20
How interesting that you focus on
communication/mediation - I did too in 1996.
'Identity' is merely one among the range of concepts
including 'communication' and including 'mediation'
including 'represenatation', including 'political economy'
and so on, that can be applied toward an understanding of
the world and our place in it.
>the word culture is a risky one
the study of culture riskier, Sean, much riskier.
However, I haven't come here to defend 'cultural studies'.
I will leave that difficult job to the British students of
Stuart Hall. A tall task, but I am sure they are up to it.
If British Cultural Studies wasn't in a crisis, it wouldn't
be Cultural Studies and it certainly wouldn't be British. I
like to help the 'Project' of cultural studies
in this regard. From 'crises' we get 'critical' and thence,
through the quite normal, indeed cultural process
of dialogue of ideas in culture at large and in its study
we get something called 'criticism'. Remember that?
However, I don't think Raymond Williams considered
'culture as a whole way of life' in or focussed on
the idea of the Individual. This was partly his point.
Of course not every one can have a 'whole way of life'
they are all a part of everyone elses way of life and
this fact requires analysis. Such analysis is already
carried out in culture, in art, music, 'ways of life',
and the study of culture clebrates this fact. Ideally
speaking of course.
Ar Williams put it in a quote I felt prescient enough
to include in one of the first British WWW
pages in 1994:
'Human community grows by the discovery of common
meanings and common means of communication... Thus
our descriptions of our experience come to compose
a network of relationships, and all our communication
systems, including the arts, are literally parts of
our social organization. The selection and interpretation
involved in our descriptions embody our attitudes, needs
and interests, and the long process of comparison and
interaction is our vital associative life. Since our
way of seeing things is literally our ways of living,
the process of communication is in fact the process of
community: the sharing of common meanings, and thence
common activities and purposes; the offering, reception
and comparison of new meanings, leading to the tensions
and achievements of growth and change.'
Raymond Williams, 1961.
>. . . and as any East Anglian will tell you, the
fruit of the tree of =
knowledge of good and evil is only loosely translated from the ancient =
Aramaic as 'apple'. The green fruit in question is of course the =
marrowfat pea. That was the fall: Eve ate the peas, adam ate eve, the =
snake ate adam and unsatisfied by the result, set to devouring its own =
>tail
The creation myth is a myth Sean, Your reification
of the humble pea over the Apple in the story of
Adam and Eve in the Garden hints at a perverted
empiricism that takes the myth as significant
historical event. Its important to make a
distinction between the imaginary and the Real,
Sean, otherwise culture and criticism, mediation and
communication, ethics and morality all become as it were
mushy peas.
Re: 'text'
The idea of textuality is one that helps in this cultural
distinction. I'd be wary of dispensing with it altogether
at this stage.
Lachlan
Lachlan Brown
T(416) 826 6937
VM (416) 822 1123
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