Culture: Conceptual Clarifications

Abstract

Raymond Williams (1976) informs us that “culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language,” which is a good place to begin. Despite the contemporary upsurge of interest in the idea – what Chaney (1994) refers to as the “cultural turn” in the humanities and social sciences – culture is a concept with a history. One compelling account is that the idea of culture emerged in the late eighteenth century and on into the nineteenth century as part of (and largely as a reaction to) the massive changes that were occurring in the structure and quality of social life – what we might also refer to as the advance of modernity. These changes at the social, political, and personal levels were both confusing and disorienting, and at least controversial. Such changes, through industrialization and technology, were unprecedented in human experience: they were wildly expansionist, and horizons were simply consumed; they were grossly productive, for good and ill; and they were both understood and legitimated through an ideology of progress. The social structure was politically volatile; being increasingly and visibly divisive. This was a situation brought about through the new forms of social ranking and hierarchy that accompanied the proliferating division of labor, being combined with the density and proximity of populations, through urbanization, and the improved system of communications. In one sense the overall aesthetic quality of life, compared with the previously supposed rural idyll, was threatened by the machine‐like excesses of industrial society. There was an increasing gap between the creative and the productive, formulated for materialism by Marx as “alienation,” and for the Romantic‐idealist tradition by Carlyle as a loss of the folk purity of a past era. The machine was viewed as consuming the natural character of humankind, a call to be later echoed in the work of the Frankfurt School, Benjamin's “Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” even Marcuse's sense of one‐dimensionality, and finally the crie de coeur of Baudrillard's evocation of postmodernism with its horror of simulacra. Whereas we began with “culture” mediating between humankind and Nature, it can now be seen to mediate between humankind and Machine. This provides us with several available “meanings” of culture.