Culture and Arts N3 PDF

Culture and art Versions of Culture Culture, etymologically speaking, is a concept derived from nature… The word ‘coulter’, which is a cognate of ‘culture’, means the blade of a ploughshare. We derive our word for the finest of human activities from labour and agriculture, crops and cultivation. ...

Culture and art Versions of Culture Culture, etymologically speaking, is a concept derived from nature… The word ‘coulter’, which is a cognate of ‘culture’, means the blade of a ploughshare. We derive our word for the finest of human activities from labour and agriculture, crops and cultivation. The shift ‘Culture’ at first denoted of thoroughly material process, which was then metaphorically transposed to affairs of the spirit. The word thus charts within its semantic unfolding humanity’s own historic shift from rural to urban existence, pig farming to Picasso, tilling the soil to splitting the atoms’. The paradox it is the urban dwellers who are ‘cultivated’, and those who actually live by tilling the soil who are not. Those who cultivate the land are less able to cultivate themselves. Agriculture leaves no leisure for culture. Philosophical issues Determinism vs freedom Identity vs change It is an epistemologically ‘realist’ notion, since it implies that there is a nature or raw material beyond ourselves; but it also has a ‘constructivist’ dimension, since this raw material must be worked up into humanly significant shape. So it is less a matter of deconstructing the opposition between culture and nature than of recognizing that the term ‘culture’ is already such a deconstruction. Nature produces culture which changes nature If nature is always in some sense cultural, then cultures are built out of that ceaseless traffic with nature which we call labour. Cities are raised out of sand, wood, iron, stone, water and the like, and are thus quite as natural as rural idylls are cultural. The geographer David Harvey argues that there is nothing ‘unnatural’ about New York city, and doubts that tribal peoples can be said to be ‘closer to nature’ than the West. If culture originally means husbandry, it suggests both regulation and spontaneous growth. The cultural is what we can change, but the stuff to be altered has its own autonomous existence, which then lends it something of the recalcitrance of nature. Rules But culture is also a matter of following rules, and this too involves an interplay of the regulated and unregulated… Rule-following is a matter neither of anarchy nor autocracy. Rules, like cultures, are neither sheerly random nor rigidly determined – which is to say that both involve the idea of freedom. Human beings are not mere products of their environs, but neither are those environs sheer clay for their arbitrary self-fashioning... The very word ‘culture’ contains a tension between making and being made, rationality and spontaneity, which upbraids the disembodied intellect of the Enlightenment …  Self-culture Once culture is grasped as self-culture, it posits a duality between higher and lower faculties, will and desire, reason and passion… Nature now is not just the stuff of the world, but the dangerously appetitive stuff of the self. Like culture, the word means both what is around us and inside us, and the disruptive drives within... Culture is thus a matter of self-overcoming as much as self-realization. If it celebrates the self, it also disciplines it... Human nature is not quite the same as a field of beetroot, but like a field it needs to be cultivated – so that as the word ‘culture’ shifts us from the natural to the spiritual… If we are cultural beings, we are also part of the nature on which we go to work. Indeed it is part of the point of the word ‘nature’ to remind us of the continuum between ourselves and our surroundings, just as the word ‘culture’ serves to highlight the difference. Humans and nature In this process of self-shaping, action and passivity, the strenuously willed and the sheerly given, unite once more, this time in the same individuals. We resemble nature in that we, like it, are to be cuffed into shape, but we differ from it in that we can do this to ourselves, thus introducing into the world a degree of self- reflexivity to which the rest of nature cannot aspire. The necessity of culture But the very need for culture suggests that there is something lacking in nature – that our capacity to rise to heights beyond those of our fellow natural creatures is necessary because our natural condition is also a good deal more ‘unnatural’ than that of our fellows. Culture and politics Cultivation, however, may not only be something we do to ourselves. It may also be something done to us, not least by the political state. For the state to flourish, it must inculcate in its citizens the proper sorts of spiritual disposition… Culture and politics In civil society, individuals live in a state of chronic antagonism, driven by opposing interests; but the state is that transcendent realm in which these divisions can be harmoniously reconciled. For this to happen, however, the state must already have been at work in civil society, soothing its rancour and refining its sensibilities; and this process is what we know as culture. Culture is a kind of ethical pedagogy which will fit us for political citizenship by liberating the ideal or collective self buried within each of us, a self which finds supreme representation in the universal realm of the state. Culture and politics The state incarnates culture, which in turn embodies our common humanity. Culture and politics To elevate culture over politics – to be men first and citizens later – means that politics must move within a deeper ethical dimension, drawing on the resources of Bildung and forming individuals into suitably well- tempered, responsible citizens. Culture and politics Culture, or the state, are a sort of premature utopia, abolishing struggle at an imaginary level so that they need not resolve it at a political one. Culture and politics Those who proclaim the need for a period of ethical incubation to prepare men and women for political citizenship include those who deny colonial peoples the right to self-government until they are ‘civilized’ enough to exercise it responsibly… it is political interests which usually govern cultural ones… The danger is What culture does, then…. and plucking unity from diversity….. our fractious, sublunary selves are not abolished, but refined from within by a more ideal sort of humanity. Culture is a form of universal subjectivity at work within each of us.. Friedrich Schiller (1795) ‘’Every individual human being, one may say, carries within him, potentially and prescriptively, an ideal man, the archetype of a human being, and it is his life’s task to be, through all his changing manifestations, in harmony with the unchanging unity of this ideal. This archetype, which is to be discerned more or less clearly in every individual, is represented by the State, the objective and, as it were, canonical form in which all the diversity of individual subjects strives to unite’’ Friedrich Schiller Indeed culture for Schiller is the very mechanism of what will later be called ‘hegemony’, moulding human subjects to the needs of a new kind of polity, remodelling them from the ground up into the docile, moderate, high-minded, peace-loving, uncontentious, disinterested agents of that political order. Raymond Williams distinguishes three meanings in the history of ‘culture’: First meaning: (Rural labour): Civility (politeness/ manners)  Raymond Williams distinguishes three meanings in the history of ‘culture’: (The eighteenth century ): Civilization (intellectual, spiritual and material progress (French Enlightenment)) # French ‘civilization= culture’ included political, economic and technical life # German ‘ culture’ has religious, artistic and intellectual references Tension between ‘culture’ and ‘civilization: ‘Civilization’ played down national differences, whereas ‘culture’ highlighted them Raymond Williams distinguishes three meanings in the history of ‘culture’: the nineteenth century (Historical momentous): Culture begins to veer from being a synonym of ‘civilization’ towards being its antonym. Because ‘ If civilization means the arts, urban living, civic politics, complex technologies and the like, and if this is considered an advance upon what went before… but also suggests that it is superior to barbarism…’ ‘And if civilization is not only a stage of development in itself, but one which is constantly evolving within itself, then the word once more unifies fact and value. Any existing state of affairs implies a value-judgement… ‘ Culture and imperialism by the end of the nineteenth century, ‘civilization’ had also acquired an inescapably imperialist echo… Kultur or Culture thus became the name of the Romantic, pre-Marxist critique of early industrial capitalism Culture become political Whereas civilization is a sociable term, a matter of genial wit and agreeable manners, culture is an altogether more portentous affair, spiritual, critical and high-minded rather than cheerfully at ease with the world. Kulturkritik is at war with civilization Culture vs civilization One reason for the emergence of ‘culture’, then, is the fact that ‘civilization’ was beginning to ring less and less plausible as a value-term. Culture vs civilization Civilization was abstract, alienated, fragmented, mechanistic, utilitarian, in thrall to a crass faith in material progress; culture was holistic, organic, sensuous, autotelic, recollective. The conflict between culture and civilization thus belonged to a full-blown quarrel between tradition and modernity. Culture vs civilization civilization was bourgeois, while culture was populist. Raymond Williams: Second meaning From the German Idealists onwards, culture comes to assume something of its modern meaning of a distinctive way of life.  Herder, this is a conscious assault on the universalism of the Enlightenment. Culture, he insists, means not some grand, unilinear narrative of universal humanity, but a diversity of specific life-forms, each with its own peculiar laws of evolution. Culture and colonialism But Herder explicitly links the struggle between the two senses of the word ‘culture’ to a conflict between Europe and its colonial Others. He is out to oppose the Eurocentrism of culture-as-universal-civilization with the claims of those ‘of all the quarters of the globe’ who have not lived and perished for the dubious honour of having their posterity made happy by a speciously superior European culture. Culture and colonialism The origin of the idea of culture as a distinctive way of life, then, is closely bound up with a Romantic anti- colonialist penchant for suppressed ‘exotic’ societies. Culture and postmodernism Herder proposes to pluralize the term ‘culture’, speaking as he does of the cultures of different nations and periods, as well as of distinct social and economic cultures within the nation itself. Culture and postmodernism - culture is now also almost the opposite of civility. It is tribal rather than cosmopolitan, - Ironically, it is now a way of describing the life-forms of ‘savages’ rather than a term for the civilized - Whereas culture as civilization is rigorously discriminating, culture as way of life is not. Culture and postmodernism Culture as civilization had borrowed its distinctions between high and low from early anthropology, for which some cultures were plainly superior to others; but as the debates unfolded, the anthropological sense of the word became more descriptive than evaluative. Simply being a culture of some kind was a value in itself; but it would no more make sense to elevate one such culture over another than to claim that the grammar of Catalan was superior to that of Arabic. Culture and postmodernism For the postmodernist, by contrast, whole ways of life are to be celebrated when they are those of dissident or minority groups, but to be castigated when they are those of majorities. Culture and postmodernism Pluralism presupposes identity, rather as hybridization presupposes purity. Edward Said argues ‘all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic’ Raymond Williams: Third meaning -Gradual specialization to the arts: ‘imaginative’ pursuits such as music, painting and literature. -‘Cultured’ people are people who have culture in this sense. dramatic historical development? It suggests, for one thing, that science, philosophy, politics and economics can no longer be regarded as creative or imaginative. ‘civilized’ values are now to be found only in fantasy Modernism and art Art used to represent God, happiness or political justice What is the Enlightenment? Revolution against Religion (Church) What is the philosophy of Enlightenment? Reason Science Knowledge Enlightenment and art ? Scientific Representation/ imitation of life Beauty Postmodernism and art if the whole point of art was its pointlessness, then the most flamboyant aestheticist was also in a sense the most dedicated revolutionary, pledged to an idea of value as self-validating which was the very reverse of capitalist utility Postmodernism and art Art could now model the good life not by representing it but simply by being itself, by what it showed rather than by what it said, offering the scandal of its own pointlessly self-delighting existence as a silent critique of exchange-value and instrumental rationality. Art for art’s sake For culture to become associated with justice for minority groups, as it has been in our own time, is thus a decisively new development. Celebration of pluralism Culture, ‘because it takes under its protection no single one of man’s faculties to the exclusion of the others … favours each and all of them without distinction; and it favours no single one more than another for the simple reason that it is the ground of possibility of them all’ Conflict? If the word ‘culture’ is an historical and philosophical text, it is also the site of a political conflict. Raymond Williams As he puts it: ‘The complex of senses (within the term) indicates a complex argument about the relations between general human development and a particular way of life, and between both and the works and practices of art and intelligence’ Comlexity of culture One might see this current of thought as struggling to connect various meanings of culture which are gradually floating apart: culture (in the sense of the arts) defines a quality of fine living (culture as civility) which it is the task of political change to realize in culture (in the sense of social life) as a whole. What is it that connects culture as utopian critique, culture as way of life and culture as artistic creation? all three are in different ways reactions to the failure of culture as actual civilization – as the grand narrative of human self-development.  The three distinct senses of culture are thus not easily separable.  Summary As an idea, culture begins to matter at four points of historical crisis: when it becomes the only apparent alternative to a degraded society; when it seems that without deep-seated social change, culture in the sense of the arts and fine living will no longer even be possible; when it provides the terms in which a group or people seeks its political emancipation; and when an imperialist power is forced to come to terms with the way of life of those it subjugates. Of these, it is probably the latter pair which have put the idea most decisively on the twentieth-century agenda.  culture is vital to nationalism in the way that it is not, or not so much, to, say, class struggle, civil rights or famine relief = Unity As we have seen already, culture as civility is the opposite of barbarism, but culture as a way of life can be identical with it. The Other Culture, in short, is other people. As Fredric Jameson has argued, culture is always ‘an idea of the Other (even when I reassume it for myself)’. One’s own way of life is simply human; it is other people who are ethnic, idiosyncratic, culturally peculiar. In a similar way, one’s own views are reasonable, while other people’s are extremist.  Sub-human Otherness If the science of anthropology marks the point where the West begins to convert other societies into legitimate objects of study, the real sign of political crisis is when it feels the need to do this to itself. For there are savages within Western society too, enigmatic, half-intelligible creatures ruled by ferocious passions and given to mutinous behaviour; and these too will need to become objects of disciplined knowledge. The Romantic version of culture thus evolved over time into a ‘scientific’ one. Culture culture was a quasi-determinist concept, meaning those features of social life – custom, kinship, language, ritual, mythology – which choose us far more than we choose them. Ironically, then, the idea of culture cut both above and below ordinary social life, at once incomparably more conscious and considerably less calculable. Civilization ‘Civilization’, by contrast, has a ring of agency and awareness about it, an aura of rational projection and urban planning, as a collective project by which cities are wrested from swamps and cathedrals raised to the skies. the anthropologist E.B. Tylor Culture can be loosely summarized as the complex of values, customs, beliefs and practices which constitute the way of life of a specific group. It is ‘that complex whole’, …, ‘which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’ Stuart Hall offers a similarly generous view of culture as the ‘lived practices’ or ‘practical ideologies which enable a society, group or class to experience, define, interpret and make sense of its conditions of existence’.  On another view, culture is the implicit knowledge of the world by which people negotiate appropriate ways of acting in specific contexts. … it is more know-how than know-why, a set of tacit understandings or practical guidelines as opposed to a theoretical mapping of reality. Raymond Williams he offers four distinct meanings of culture: as an individual habit of mind; as the state of intellectual development of a whole society; as the arts; and as the whole way of life of a group of people. Raymond Williams Williams’s definition of culture includes ‘the organisation of production, the structure of the family, the structure of institutions which express or govern social relationships, the characteristic forms through which members of the society communicate’. This is no doubt excessively generous, leaving almost nothing out. Raymond Williams the complexity of the idea of culture is nowhere more graphically demonstrated than in the fact that its most eminent theorist in post-war Britain, Raymond Williams, defines it at various times to mean a standard of perfection, a habit of mind, the arts, general intellectual development, a whole way of life, a signifying system, a structure of feeling, the interrelation of elements in a way of life, and everything from economic production and the family to political institutions. Local/ limited notion of culture As Geoffrey Hartman points out in The Fateful Question of Culture, we now have ‘camera culture, gun culture, service culture, museum culture, deaf culture, football culture … the culture of dependency, the culture of pain, the culture of amnesia, etc.’.A phrase like ‘café culture’ means not just that people visit cafés but that some people visit them as a way of life… Culture and crisis go together Culture and culture  The transition from Culture to culture solved this problem by preserving a dissident stance but combining it with a populist one. It was now a whole subculture which was critical, but within that way of life the arts played a largely affirmative role. Culture & religion But if religion is losing its grip on the labouring masses, Culture is on hand as a second-rate surrogate; and it is this historic turning-point …. if religion offers cult, sensuous symbolism, social unity, collective identity, a combination of practical morality and spiritual idealism, and a link between the intellectuals and the populace, so does culture postmodernism opts for culture as actual conflict rather than imaginary reconciliation.  Culture in this lower-case sense, as identity or solidarity  Culture is no longer, in Matthew Arnold’s exalted sense, a criticism of life, but the critique of a dominant or majority form of life by a peripheral one.  Culture for postmodern theory may now be a dissident, minority affair,  And while culture in its most virulent forms celebrates some pure essence of group identity, Culture in its more mandarin sense, by disdainfully disowning the political as such, can be criminally complicit with it. As Theodor Adorno remarked, the ideal of Culture as absolute integration finds its logical expression in genocide.  Western civilization is not constrained by the peculiarities of a culture. It transcends all such cultures by having the capacity to understand them from the inside – understand. them, like Schleiermacher’s hermeneuticist, better than they do themselves – and so has the right to intervene for their own well-being into their affairs.  The phrase ‘culture wars’ suggests pitched battles between populists and elitists, custodians of the canon and devotees of difference, dead white males and the unjustly marginalized. The clash between Culture and culture, however, is no longer simply a battle of definitions, but a global conflict. It is a matter of actual politics, not just academic ones.  The boundary between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture has also been eroded by such genres as film, which has managed to chalk up an impressive array of masterpieces while appealing to almost everyone.  it is not the content of such culture which matters, but what it signifies. And what it signifies today, among other more positive things, is the defence of a certain ‘civility’ against fresh forms of so-called barbarism. But since these fresh forms of barbarism, paradoxically, can also be seen as particular cultures, the Culture versus culture polarity comes into being.  The point about Culture is that it is cultureless: its values are not those of any particular form of life, simply of human life as such. It may well be that a specific historical culture known as Europe is the spot where this humanity chose to incarnate itself most fully  since the values of Culture are universal but not abstract, they could not thrive without some kind of local habitation. In this sense one can contrast Culture with Reason,  Like all the most effective forms of power, high culture presents itself simply as a form of moral persuasion. It is, among other things, a way in which a governing order fashions an identity for itself in stone, script and sound, and its effect is to intimidate as well as to inspire…. High culture is one of the least significant of ideological weapons Ruth Benedict there are many cultures for which the stranger is defined as non-human  …being French is no more inherently desirable than being Chilean. Culturally speaking, however, belonging to one nation rather than another is so vitally important that people are quite often prepared to kill or die over the question. If politics is what unifies, culture is what differentiates. This preference for one cultural identity rather than another is a-rational, in the sense that opting to belong to a democracy rather than a dictatorship is not. Racism and chauvinism, which try to justify such a preference on the grounds of the superiority of one cultural identity over another…  Secure in their singular cultural identity, nation-states created colonial subjects whose descendants then joined them as immigrants, thus jeopardizing the cultural unity which had helped to make empire possible in the first place. The unified culture of the nation-state was thus endangered from ‘below’ just as it was being simultaneously assailed from ‘above’. Transnational capitalism weakens national cultures, just as it does national economies, by cosmopolitanizing them  As Jean-François Lyotard writes: ‘one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and “retro” clothes in Hong Kong’. Whereas the migrant travels the world, the world travels to the cosmopolitan. The migrant cannot go home, whereas the cosmopolitan has no home to go to.  If migration is the popular form of multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism is its elitist version. Both are products of the same global economic system. But since transnational capitalism also breeds isolation and anxiety, uprooting men and women from their traditional attachments and pitching their identity into chronic crisis, it fosters, by way of reaction, cultures of defensive solidarity at the very time that it is busy proliferating this brave new cosmopolitanism  Culture as civility is not just an aesthetic affair: it holds, rather, that the value of a whole way of life is embodied in certain accomplished artefacts... It is not a question of art usurping social life, but of art indicating a fineness of living to which society itself should aspire. Art defines what we live for, but it is not art for which we live.  Western civilization, which has now embarked on a more ambitiously aggressive foreign policy, needs some spiritual legitimation for this project at just the time when it is threatening to come apart at the cultural seams. The more it uproots whole communities, breeds widespread poverty and unemployment, undermines traditional belief systems and creates great tidal waves of migration, the more these predatory policies throw up a series of defensive, militant sub-cultures which splinter Western society from within.  It is hard for a way of life whose priorities are secular, rationalist, materialist and utilitarian to produce a culture adequate to these values.  Alliances like NATO and the European Union usually need to cement their bonds with something a little thicker than bureaucracy, common political goals or shared economic interests, not least when they are facing Islamic enemies for whom culture in the spiritual sense is utterly vital... And religion, after all, is the single most powerful ideological force which human history has ever witnessed.