Culture, Notions of

Culture, a Floating Signifier

The various usages of the term culture permeate the social realm worldwide. As Fredric Jameson observes, a vast range of phenomena—from economic value and state power to the configuration of individual psyches—are considered cultural or at least endowed with a significant cultural dimension. In the process, the term culture has also become a floating signifier: With no single definition generally accepted, semantic differences, overlaps, and nuances make it difficult to attain analytical rigor. Different perspectives and disciplines deploy distinct ideas of culture, each functioning as an intellectual “silo” as it were.

Both the “ways of life” understanding and the “arts and heritage” understanding of culture have given rise to global scripts that are prominent in rhetoric, policy, and practice. In many of these instances, the two meanings are conflated; out of this conflation has emerged different expectations, anxieties, and illusions. The expectations are tied to what Stuart Hall called the “centrality of culture.” The anxieties develop from the large-scale use and frequent abuse of culture, both as a concept and as a reality. The illusions are the result of overblown visions, of simplifications that are reductive, and of readings that are instrumental.

Many discussions of the concept hark back to the decades-old genealogy of the British cultural historian Raymond Williams, who also observed how complicated and protean the word was. Although the terminological tangle has if anything [Page 337]worsened since then, Williams's three meanings, which were a simplification devised for heuristic purposes, still provide a useful starting template. These were the following: (1) a general process of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development (as when one talks of a “cultured” person)—the sole usage until the late 18th century); (2) a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group, or humanity in general; and (3) the works and practices of intellectual, and especially of artistic, activity, which was originally an applied form of the first sense and also the most recent understanding to emerge.

In the now globalized popular usage, the ways of life notion has become paramount; it has also become a leading term in discussions pertaining to globalization and globalism. It is followed closely by the arts and heritage understanding, which for most of the 20th century was the leading usage. This usage tends increasingly to see culture as a resource or instrumentality. In the process, it positions cultural expression as the embodiment of a particular way of life that needs to be “protected” or “promoted” in the name of that way of life. Interestingly enough, as the ways of life meaning have become dominant, people have forgotten its pre-20th-century history, so much so that cultural activists as well as international organizations such as UNESCO now take credit for having fixed this broader meaning in popular usage.

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