Contemplating culture

According to Raymond Williams, the word 'culture' falls among one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. Academicians of different disciplines in humanities and social science are at daggers drawn describing 'culture', bestowing little mercy on this seemingly innocent entity.

To get into the meaning of culture, one has to have nerves strong enough to listen to quarrels among experts who seem to relish the act of digging up meaning after meaning. The case is probably most tedious in the world of cultural studies, a recently developed multi-disciplinary area of academic study. Once you drop into the territory, one will find that pages after pages dedicated to the definition of 'culture', only to inform readers the very word eludes any definite meaning.

It’s not that help is not available. The only problem being they speak a vocabulary to which often the common dictionary is quite unfamiliar. To make matters worse, the word ‘culture’ is now rarely uttered without being preceded by an adjective like ‘high’, ‘folk’, ‘popular’, ‘mass’, ‘youth’ and so on.

That being said, we may dare peep into some happenings in the field of cultural studies. In the world of cultural studies, culture is defined and debated on various grounds and from different perspectives, for any study of culture requires an interdisciplinary approach.

As such, cultural studies raises issues like subject, identity, power, representation, meaning and so on.

Matthew Arnold, one of the best minds of nineteenth century England, happens to be famously known as the classic custodian of what has later come to be termed as ‘high culture’. He is also credited as the first intellectual to raise questions about the health of culture of his own time. At the advent of industrialisation, Aronld could well smell that a troubled time of cultural disintegration was approaching. Being dissatisfied, he dispensed a considerable amount of energy to produce his seminal work 'Culture and Anarchy' first published in 1869.As the title suggests, what is not culture is anarchy to Arnold and for culture he understands, 'the best that has been said and thought in the world'.

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, the dissatisfaction of Arnold was carried forward by a group of British intellectuals with FR Leavis at its head, this time the reason of dissatisfaction being more prominent.

The enemy the Leavisites identifies is none other than the cultural voice of the newly emerging working class. Eventually their discourse invites debates on issues like the threat of capitalism, even of democracy and the impacts of mass society. However, Leavisism basically laments over the loss of a Golden Past when there were organic relations between populace and culture. With the advancement of urbanisation and mass society, those relations are no more. People who have hithero enjoyed the classics without questioning are now turning towards a culture which, according to Leavisian belief, is debased, trivialised, a culture of 'standardisation and leveling down', a culture known as ‘mass culture’.

A similar concern also occupies the work of Richard Hoggart, a later generation British cultural theorist. Hoggart, himself being of working class origin, in his book ' The Uses of Literacy' regretfully observes how the harmony of a communal culture of the 1930s - he enjoyed in his childhood- has degenerated into what he calls ' shiny barbarism' in the 1950s. So what we are left with finally is mass culture, a formidable force to ignore easily.

It can be well argued that the pace of mass culture has quickened over times at lightning speed. With technology, we have now entered into a world where reality has been lost into hyper-reality, as suggested by Jean Baudrillard. According to Baudrillard, our post modern cultural world is a world of mass media and media culture has notoriously eliminated all the hitherto valid differences between a signifier and the signified. We have lost sense altogether of the meaning of the original and the copy, the center and the periphery. Like selfies, we only live by signs produced and distributed by mass media.

There are counter-arguments, of course, where mass culture turns into a terrain of negotiations between producers and consumers. In this bottom-up approach, it is consumers who determine the final use value of cultural artifacts thereby posing a continuous threat to the all engrossing move of capitalist dominance. Sounds good but without an extensive study of the consumers' age, sex, race, income, beliefs and more, this kind of approach has little chances to come to any conclusions.

The question is, why raise all this rubbish? My answer is to point towards the need of building a body of cultural knowledge of our own. Do we have anything classic in us? If yes, how is the theory formulated? How and on what grounds is our folk culture confronting the over-imposing mass culture? How is our culture read by women? Is our youth culture blindly following the signs made by others? Being positioned in a global participatory context, what roles are our consumers playing in negotiating meanings? Are we satisfied with what we have or are we in need of better alternatives?

The questions can be many more, hinting only at the truth that culture is as important for a nation as breathing for a living being. Before we dream of a fourth generation industrial revolution, it is imperative that we take notice of our culture with due priority, otherwise everything will be lost in the nonsense of machines, leaving no human traits behind.

Abdur Rob Prodhan is an assistant professor of English at Mohammadpur Kendriya College. He can be reached at [email protected]