The Thing of Culture

Abstract

While cultural studies is fond of ruminating over its deinition of itself, perhaps the prior problem is the definition of its presumed object: culture. Raymond Williams once wrote famously, if a bit obviously, that 'culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.' The sea-changes in anthropology since the 1960's and the rise of cultural studies and postcolonial theory have only complicated things much further. Today, the erstwhile notion of culture as a shared thing—a sysetm of customs, vaues, pratices, beliefs, symbols, or meanings, or a whole way of life subsuming all of these—appears both politically naïve and poltically suspect. Consequently, this paper's ultimately Lacanian critique of that beleaguered notion must at first glance seem a quintessential instance of eating a dead horse. However, the disquieting and illuminating thing about the Lacanian dead is that they always come back. This essay is about how the shared thing of culture does indeed uncannily return, and how it returns in the end as a Lacanian Thing.