The autonomy of culture

Lecture №14

In a famous definition of culture the nineteenth-century anthropologist E.B. Tylor proposed that culture is:

that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.

This doesn’t leave much which is not either mentioned or implied. It speaks of society and, since it talks of capabilities and habits acquired in it, presumably will also include politics, economics, religion, and so on.

And yet there is a special slant to this definition. We may note it refers to a ‘complex whole’, to what is ‘acquired in society’ and so seems to allow that not all is acquired in society. ‘Capabilities and habits’ is not quite as comprehensive as might appear at first sight either. We have often spoken of social space, position and status. They are occupied by people to be sure, but are not exactly capabilities, more facilities or resources. So society and culture are not the same.

Another anthropologist writing in the middle of the twentieth century brings out the difference in this way. He calls society the ‘aggregate set of social relations’ and culture ‘the content of those relations’. Society then appears as a kind of container for culture. This distinction between form and content, with social relations being the form and culture the content, has a strategic place in the history of sociology. We may recall the Chicago School and Simmel, who was the most influential theorist at the beginning of the century for professional sociology, and he made it a central element of his work.

But form and content is a metaphor from geometry or art and can be misleading. Social relations are also learned and conducted within frames of meaning. We can just as easily say that language is the form and social relations the content. The most misleading direction this metaphor takes is to suggest that social relations must be to culture like the structure of a building is to its materials. Then we find that the boundaries of the one set the limits of the other. This is indeed is the thrust of nation-state ideology, which seeks to ensure closure of its borders to foreigners and to isolate its culture from foreign influences.

Simmel insisted usefully that form and content could vary independently of each other. So did Weber. He insisted that capitalist organisation could be associated with many different beliefs and motives. There is a direct line from this to contemporary management’s concern for getting organisational culture right—which means the same organisation has different cultural possibilities.

Simmel and Weber stressed the diversity of culture and cultures and the widespread use of the concept. Later scholars have under-written this. One study collected 160 definitions of culture from a variety of disciplines. The separation of culture and society, and the generic nature of the issue of culture across disciplines, has resulted in a new discipline: cultural studies with many affinities and links with sociology. Thus cultural studies treats popular culture as equally worthy of academic study as elite culture and refuses to take sides on their worth.

Whereas at one time culture was thought of as the property of those with a privileged education, the new discipline particularly focuses on culture as a pervasive everyday thing, on television, fashion, advertising, consumer products, lifestyles. So the outlook and habits of a group of school rejects which Paul Willis studied in an English industrial town are just as suitable for cultural studies as the topic Georgina Born took: how the musical avant-garde works around Pierre Boulez.

For the general public the difference between cultural studies and sociology may not appear so important. But the background to the divide is complex and goes to the heart of some of the most important debates in Western intellectual history. In many respects it is the continuation of a nineteenth-century debate which raged between idealists and materialists, those who argued that ideas directed the course of history and those who asserted the prime importance of material forces. Professional sociology, with Weber a leader in this with his emphasis on religious ideas, struggled to settle the debate by giving both ideas and the material world a place in shaping society.

For the followers of Marx’s historical materialism this made sociology itself an ideology, an expression of class interest. Academic disciplines were clearly also part of culture. So by the 1960s the debate had shifted to focus on the relation of intellectual life to capitalism and how it might serve or undermine those interests.

Effectively that very shift signalled the defeat of historical materialism. Evidently it did matter which ideas intellectuals promoted and Marxists were among the most ardent intellectuals. Post-colonial conditions after the withdrawal of Western states from direct control also forced recognition that new nationalisms rather than international solidarity asserted themselves on historical cultural and linguistic lines and not just on the territorial boundaries Western states left behind. It was not possible to attribute linguistic boundaries in new states to capitalism.

In the late twentieth century the nation, as much as class, has been the focus for the debate about culture. But this shifting base for culture—class or nation—in itself emphasises its independence from any given set of social relations. So we have the paradox that the most influential figures within cultural studies, who treat culture as a topic for independent study, have been successors to the great advocate of historical materialism. But no one seriously advances the view that ideas are unimportant as historical forces.

The big debate is about how they are generated, spread and influence people. In this respect Marxists, precisely because they resisted the over-ambitious claims of sociology, were in the best position to advocate the case for cultural studies. For although sociologists have acknowledged the importance of ideas they have often been more deterministic than the Marxists, tending to treat ideas as determined by society, the position known as sociologism.

We have now to get away from the crude determinisms of the past. The contest between Marxism and sociology was a clash of ideas, not class interests, though politics may have made it appear so, and sociology benefited accordingly. The exchange with cultural studies is equally provocative because for the first time there is a broad-based and systematic approach to the question of just how ideas might help to constitute and change society.

No sociologist now can ignore the importance of the representation of society and social relations through symbols and signs. Anthropologists and philosophers in particular have emphasised this for generations. Early in the century, Thorstein Veblen, a sociologist and economist, pointed out the importance of lavish spending or ‘conspicuous consumption’—not for use but to display one’s status. Later the idea of the ‘status symbol’ became commonplace.

But it is largely the new cultural studies which have refocused sociological interest on consumer culture. So is this interest in consumption and fashion as signifying practices just a fashion? No, first of all there are real changes in social relations, in the new variability and flux in people’s membership of groups. This clearly brings the focus of attention on to signs of identity. In a crowd you can’t tell everyone who you are by speaking to them. There are other ways: the holiday resort T-shirt, the earring, the Rolex watch. Capitalism has geared itself to the consumer and the manufacture of signs is at the centre of advertising. Second, interest in signs may have come into vogue recently but the idea of a science of signs goes back at least to the seventeenth century when it was called semiotics for the first time by the philosopher John Locke.

In the end cultural studies depends on the reality of culture as a life-sphere, where people exercise skills, solve technical problems and develop ideas. It depends on there being occupations in the mass media, museums and galleries, advertising and literary prizes, musicians and theatres. As Max Weber insisted, these have their own directions and logics, which in extreme cases are capable of revolutionising social relations.

There was a time when it was felt that industrial society would eventually generate untold leisure. That optimism changed to gloomy forecasts of mass unemployment. But as Charles Handy pointed out economic and technological change take us beyond employment. Personal, especially cultural, capital increases the chances of moving between employers, and also the possibilities to work on one’s own account. But cultural capital, like all aspects of culture, belongs also to constituted groups, and association with them brings its own advantages. It is not accidental that so many doctors come from medical families, or that people seek schools in ‘good areas’.

The big political issues of our times concern the extent to which individual educational chances, and hence the opportunity to work, require the state management of collective cultural capital. In studying hard at school or university we make use of collective provision for people to work. The culture of groups is based in facilities and institutions like computers, books, schools and universities which are regularly publicly owned. The politics of education rather than of the workplace has become the arena for social conflict in a society looking beyond employment.

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