66 lines
3.6 KiB
Plaintext
66 lines
3.6 KiB
Plaintext
CULTURE
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Cul-ture n. commonly rendered as the sum of the customs, ideas, arts,
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patterns, etc. of a given society. Civilization is often given as a
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synonym, reminding us that cultivation - as in domestication - is right
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in there, too. The Situationists, in 1960, had it that "culture can be
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defined as the ensemble of means through which society thinks of itself
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and shows itself to itself." Getting warmer, Barthes remarked that it is
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" a machine to showing you desire. To desire, always to desire but never
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to understand."
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Culture was more respected once, seemingly, something to "live up to."
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Now, instead of concern for how we fail culture, the emphasis is on how
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culture has failed us. Definitely something at work that thwarts us,
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does not satisfy and this makes itself more evident as we face globally
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and within us the death of nature. Culture, as the opposite of nature,
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grows discordant, sours, fades as we strangle in the thinner and thinner
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air of symbolic activity. High culture or low, palace or hovel, it's the
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same prisonhouse of consciousness; the symbolic as the repressive.
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It is inseparable from the birth and continuation of alienation
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surviving, as ever, as compensation, a trade of the real for its
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objectifcation. Culture embodies the split betveen wholeness and the
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parts of the whole turning into domination. Time, language, number,
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art-cultural impositions that have come to dominate us with lives of
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their own.
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Magazines and journals now teem with articles lamenting the spread of
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cultural illiteracy and historical amnesia, two conditions that
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underline a basic dis-ease in society. In our postmodern epoch the faces
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of fashion range from blank to sullen, as hard drug use, suicide, and
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emotional disability rates continue to soar. About a year ago I got a
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ride from Berkeley to Oregon with a U.C. senior and somewhere along the
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drive I asked her, after talking about the '60s, among other things, to
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describe her own generation. She spoke of her co-students in terms of
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loveless sex, increasing heroin use, and "a sense of despair masked by
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consumerism."
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Meanwhile, massive denial continues. In a recent collection of essays on
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culture, DJ. Enright offers the sage counsel that "the more commonly
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personal misery and discontent are aired, the more firmly these ills
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tighten their grip on us." Since anxiety first sought deliverance via
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cultural form and expression, in the symbolic approach to authenticity,
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our condition has probably not been this transparently bankrupt. Robert
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Harbison's "Deliberate Regression" is another work displaying complete
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ignorance regarding the fundamental emptiness of culture: "the story of
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how enthusiasm for the primitive and the belief that salvation lies in
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unlearning came to be a force in almost every held of thought is
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exceedingly strange."
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Certainly the ruins are there for everyone to see. From exhausted art in
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the form of the recycled mish-mash of postmodernism, to the
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poststructuralist technocrats like Lyotard, who finds in data banks "the
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Encyclopedia of tomorrow...'nature' for postmodern man," including such
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utterly impotent forms of "opposition" as 'micropoliticS' and
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"schizopolitics," there is little but the obvious symptoms of a general
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fragmentation and despair. Peter Sloterdijk (Critique of Cynical Reason)
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points out that cynicism is the cardinal, pervasive outlook, for now the
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best that negation has to offer.
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But the myth of culture will manage to survive as long as our
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immiseration fails to force us to confront it, and so cynicism will
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remain as long as we allow culture to remain in lieu of unmediated life.
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