Meaning in Action

Outline of an Integral Theory of Culture

Rein Raud

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781509511259, 9781509511242
• eBook ISBN: 9781509511280
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this important new book Rein Raud develops an original theory of culture understood as a loose and internally contradictory system of texts and practices that are shared by intermittent groups of people and used by them to make sense of their life-worlds. This theory views culture simultaneously in two ways: as a world of texts, tangible and shareable products of signifying acts, and as a space of practices, repeatable activities that produce, disseminate and interpret these clusters of meaning. Both approaches are developed into corresponding models of culture which, used together, are able to provide a rich understanding of any meaning in action.

In developing this innovative theory, Raud draws on a wide range of disciplines, from anthropology, sociology and cultural studies to semiotics and philosophy. The theory is illustrated throughout with examples drawn from both ?high? and popular culture, and from Western and Asian traditions, dealing with both contemporary and historical topics. The book concludes with two case studies from very different contexts – one dealing with Italian poetry in the 13th century, the other dealing with the art scene in Eastern Europe in the 1990s.

This timely and original work makes a major new contribution to the theory of culture and will be welcomed by students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities.

1
LOOKING FOR CULTURE, LOOKING AT THINGS

‘Culture’ is a notoriously ambiguous concept with hundreds of definitions, and its very use has been criticized by a number of researchers (Abu-Lughod 1991; Fox 1985; Kuper 1999, and many others) because of its allegedly totalizing nature. Indeed, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was often hastily assumed that cultural systems are in complete correlation with communities, and people’s life-worlds are inescapably shaped by them (Frobenius 1921; Tylor 1871). If that were true, then all the carriers of a given culture would somehow intrinsically have to share the same values and norms, even if they contradicted them with their actions. This is obviously false. However, the concept of culture still continues to be plagued by the ontologizing character of language. The prototype of the referent of any noun is imagined to be a particular thing, self-identical throughout, continuous in time and fully contained within its borders. But culture is not such a thing, and to conceive it as such is misleading. As Marilyn Strathern puts it, speaking about the analogous concept of society:

To think of society as a thing is to think of it as a discrete entity. The theoretical task then becomes one of elucidating ‘the relationship’ between it and other entities. This is a mathematic, if you will, that sees the world as inherently divided up into units. The significant corollary of this view is that relationships appear as extrinsic to such units: they appear as secondary ways of connecting things up. (1996:61)

In fact, such relationships are actually what these ‘things’ consist of.

Thus, sentences such as ‘the sky is blue’, built on the same structural pattern as ‘the rose is red’, imply a similar existence for things such as ‘the sky’ and ‘the rose’ and that they have properties in the same way, which is not true – there is no such object as ‘the sky’. Nonetheless, the difference in ontological status does not mean things of the non-rose category do not exist at all. For example, they can enter chains of causal relations. ‘The flight was cancelled because of the weather’ describes a real situation: ‘the flight’ (itself a non-rose) did not take place because of a number of conditions, such as poor visibility, probable turbulence, heavy rainfall, etc., which collectively make up another non-rose called ‘the weather’. Analogically, it would make things clearer if we think of entities such as ‘culture’ as unstable sets of heterogeneous elements, processes, environments, webs of relations similar to the weather, rather than, for example, the statutes of a legal entity. The same is indeed true for ‘societies’. ‘Cultures’ share a certain amount of encompassing characteristics, although this does not mean that the results of their study can describe their individual carriers with precision. In such investigations, as in many soft sciences in general, the object of research does not necessarily exist independently of the research, but comes into being, in a Heisenbergian way, only in and through the language with which it is spoken about. Thus, in the paradigmatic case, it is not a discrete object or category of objects, but rather a group of similar, though not necessarily connected, things, relations, activities, or of all these linked together, either on a more or less permanent basis or just for a brief moment. Nevertheless, such phenomena – called ‘hybrids’ by Bruno Latour (1993:10–11, 41–3) – are no less real than concrete, physical things, because they, too, have the capacity to shape the life-world of human beings as conscious social agents moving around in it. To de-ontologize culture – to remove it from the group of self-identical and non-fuzzy things – thus does not mean to dismiss it. On the contrary, this is the prerequisite of seeing it clearly. A more flexible approach makes it possible to think about culture not as a strictly tangible object, but as a loose network of heterogeneous, at times contradictory, phenomena that is nevertheless essential for each single person in her efforts to make sense of her world, as well as for integrating such persons into groups capable of communication and collaboration. And this is the approach I am going to adopt. Nearly all phenomena under scrutiny in this book are ‘non-roses’ – not tangible, not self-identical, not graspable as wholes – but nonetheless constantly affect what we are and what we do.

Social/cultural

For the purposes of this book, ‘culture’ embraces all those and only those phenomena that involve a certain degree of expression and are open to interpretation, or different interpretations – in other words, that are definable by their meaning. This is a distinction made already back in the 1970s by scholars such as Clifford Geertz (1993:144–5) and Michel de Certeau (1993:121–2), for whom ‘social’ referred to the relationships and ‘cultural’ to the meanings that link subjects with each other. The distinction still remains highly useful, although the borders between social sciences and the humanities are today even more blurred than then. Obviously, relationships depend on meanings and meanings only function in relationships.¹ The overlap is not quite complete, however. Analogous or structurally similar relationships of power can take place in different cultures, having been encoded in completely different ways and therefore having different meanings for their participants. Conversely, people may well be involved in ritualistic or bureaucratic relationships which they fail – or at least have to make considerable effort – to understand. These are cases where the cultural and social aspects of one particular situation are not in accordance with each other, and it is in such spots that the tension between them becomes visible. Jeffrey Alexander has neatly captured this dialectic in his discussion of Geertz: ‘social facts as events, institutions, and collective actions are like art in the sense that they do their work as art does – via the imagination’, he writes, but reminds us immediately that it is a mistake to reduce the effect of such phenomena to their artistic significance (2011a:61). And neither should cultural phenomena be read solely as aestheticized social meanings. I quite agree with Alexander when he writes that ‘in order to understand power, we must give relative autonomy to culture’ (2011b:107) – a statement I take to mean simultaneously that the mechanisms of culture can and should be analysed for their own, autonomous principles of operation. Social relations and mechanisms of power are just one aspect of the basic ways of being human in the world, as are the repertoires of making sense of oneself as well as reality, and navigating that reality on all its levels. ‘Culture’, in the sense in which the word is used in this book, is a collective designation for all phenomena, stable and momentary, that take place in order to facilitate this task. In short, I take the social and the cultural to be two heterogeneous, but strongly overlapping, spheres of human activity, both of them dependent on the other, and of equal standing.

Moreover, cultural phenomena are characteristically able to survive their original context and the power-games that have shaped them. A language (as a system of meanings) does not completely cease to be a language when it dies out. The texts surviving in it continue to mean after their initial practical relevance is long forgotten. The same is even more true of rituals that continue to perform social functions after their meaningful content is lost or has ceased to be relevant to their participants. Old rituals may even acquire cardinally new symbolic content when their cultural environment changes, and thus, in a sense, become new rituals. This is how Christmas and Easter have evolved into Christian religious holidays from pagan calendric feasts and, in the contemporary world, developed into commercial events that also influence the behaviour of consumers in countries where Christianity is not very widespread. These are examples of the internal distance cultural languages may take from the social reality they are describing.

Following Lotman (2010a:144), I am going to use the term ‘cultural languages’ in a broad sense, as a category that enables us to group together specific uses of natural languages, artificial symbolic codes (such as traffic signs or dress codes) and a large variety of other means of self-expression, such as artistic practices. However, this will be done with Zygmunt Bauman’s warning in mind:

the logic of culture is the logic of the self-regulating system rather than the logic of the code or of the generative grammar of language . . . we are justified in extrapolating (to the non-linguistic spheres of culture) only the most general features of language; exactly those features, which characterize the linguistic interaction in its capacity as a case of a more inclusive class of self-regulating systems. (1999:77)

Thus, the generic use of the word ‘language’ does not imply that there is a deep unity between all the signifying systems of a culture that is patterned on natural language and allows its users to ‘read’ dance in a way that is somehow fundamentally the same as the way they read newspapers. A cultural language is never a straightforward code, as traffic lights are, but a much more complicated affair within which several signifying systems of different types normally operate at the same time. This is, in fact, also true of a natural language to a certain extent. To be sure, a natural language is describable in terms of vocabulary and grammatical structure, but in any event where it is actually used there are several other signifying systems simultaneously in operation, without which it does not really work. Socially endorsed codes such as rules of etiquette or significant registers of style, ‘body language’ and repertoires of rhetoric are always there. Any practical use of language is also informed by other significatory devices pertaining to aspects of the speech situation, whether it be a long-distance telephone call, an abdication speech of a monarch, or a simulation of an abdication speech by a monarch, performed by an actor in a theatre play. In real-life situations, expression is produced at the same time on different levels, which support each other when the underlying impulse is itself more or less unambiguous, but may also contradict each other, creating tensions and confusion. This is what always makes the use of ‘natural’ languages in practice already cultural, and the same applies to all cultural languages – much more strongly, most of the time.

Cultural phenomena are produced as results of self-expression, conscious or unconscious, purposeful or random. All human beings constantly produce cultural phenomena, even if very short-lived ones, such as conversations with neighbours or order on our desks. From the position of the recipient, however, a ‘cultural phenomenon’ is any delimited slice of the culturally mediated reality that she tries to interpret. Ancient Romans examined the livers of sacrificed animals for purposes of divination, thus converting them to cultural phenomena. Most of the time, however, people define and construct for themselves only such ‘texts’ as actually help them to get a better grasp of things. This constructedness is characteristic of all texts and practices, regardless of how distinctly visible it is to the naked eye. A text, as is well known, is not simply the material surface of the cultural product, but contains trails of signification chains, allusions, influences and so forth, which connect it to other texts of different kinds. It is also accompanied by explicitly indicated or implicitly assumed ways of access that make it possible for its recipients to partake of it. By actualizing other layers of its significance and making use of some particular ways of access, recipients construct the text as it is ‘for them’, and produce interpretations that are actually representations. Such modes of reception may also differ among groups and individuals as well as change over time. The same applies to practices. Together, texts and practices form the bulk of cultural phenomena and, as we saw earlier, each phenomenon normally contains some of both.

A cultural text or practice can never occur alone and in isolation, but is necessarily linked to others through what will here be called ‘cultural systems’. This term has a history in the older anthropological tradition and its critics (see Bauman 1999:xx–xxix), but will be used here in the sense Geertz gives to it, when he defines culture as ‘an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life’ (1993:89). In a particular timespace, cultural phenomena may be related to each other either directly (one film parodies another), indirectly (avant-garde art and experimental poetry share the same critical attitude towards the establishment) or obliquely (the physically same CD player may be used to play the music of the parents and the children). What will here be called ‘cultural systems’ consist of everything that is involved in such relations, within the completely hypothetical outer limits to which they reach. Cultural systems do not have universal structural patterns, because they arise in particular environments wherein certain groups of people live, and they build on the knowledge and understanding these people have. Even if they might be reasonably graspable in their institutional power-centres, they become ambiguous and vague and tend to fade away at the edges. There, they either fall apart or fork into countless specialized or subcultural streams less accessible to the statistically average inhabitant of the cultural space, and yet remain capable of unnegligible input to some salient ‘central’ cultural practice or another. Needless to say, the statistically average inhabitant of a cultural environment is herself a complete abstraction, because the cultural identities of each particular person are necessarily constructed at the converging point of heterogeneous streams. Everybody is an exception to general rules in some respect. Nobody is ever in full control of their cultural resources, and nobody can survive with the help of one specific, homogeneous and unambiguous set of cultural resources alone. There is no ‘pure’ culture – and never has been. No community of people has ever invented and designed absolutely everything they use in order to interact meaningfully with each other and their environment, materially and mentally. Every language contains loan-words and bears traces of syntactic influence from other languages, and similarly the invention of a useful tool or the discovery of the intoxicating properties of a plant hardly ever remain the intellectual monopoly of those who first came by them. Efficient gods win new worshippers, and cardinal beliefs about the structure of the universe spread likewise. ‘Cultural purity’, wherever and whenever proclaimed as a value, has not necessarily been very beneficial for the well-being of a community, although it can be an effective means of control and domination. This is why descriptive myths of original cultural purity are willingly taken up by politicians of a certain sort in order to use them to bolster their own agendas. Despite the simplifying traditionalist (or tradition-bashing) claims to the contrary, a completely homogeneous, isolated and unchanging cultural system with no memory of its past is simply not possible.

Of course, it also has to be noted that the relations between different cultural systems, although inevitable and necessary for their maintenance, are rarely just, equal and innocent interactions. It is typical of a culture to assume initially that its own view of the world is the basically ‘correct’ one – otherwise it has simply failed in its primary task to explain the world to its carriers. This is why a cultural system also normally sees no problem in trying to spread itself, imposing itself even by force on others, if need be. There is a certain dose of imperialist ambition in the core of every culture, but only some have actually historically had a chance to act on it. Much has been written on how colonial empires have raped and disfigured all the cultural systems they came into contact with, creating a mythology of their own superiority and culturalizing mission in the process.² The cultural mix resulting from such interaction is clearly of a different kind from the mélange that emerges in a cultural system that adopts and adapts foreign elements suited to it and on its own terms. There is, of course, a degree of affinity to be found between brutal imperialist domination and the more covert cultural imperialism based on techniques akin to Baudrillard’s ‘seduction’ (1990). Ways of imposing one’s systemic characteristics on other cultures with the help of powerful methods of persua...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• An outline of the theory and the book
• 1 Looking for culture, looking at things
• 2 Meaning and signification
• 3 Culture as textuality
• 4 Culture as a network of practices
• 5 Case study I: the metaphysics of love and the beginnings of Italian vernacular poetry
• 6 Case study II: art and politics in Eastern Europe in the 1990s
• 7 Concluding remarks
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement