CULTURE

Cul-ture n. commonly rendered as the sum of the customs, ideas, arts, 
patterns, etc. of a given society. Civilization is often given as a 
synonym, reminding us that cultivation - as in domestication - is right 
in there, too. The Situationists, in 1960, had it that "culture can be 
defined as the ensemble of means through which society thinks of itself 
and shows itself to itself." Getting warmer, Barthes remarked that it is 
" a machine to showing you desire. To desire, always to desire but never 
to understand." 


Culture was more respected once, seemingly, something to "live up to." 
Now, instead of concern for how we fail culture, the emphasis is on how 
culture has failed us. Definitely something at work that thwarts us, 
does not satisfy and this makes itself more evident as we face globally 
and within us the death of nature. Culture, as the opposite of nature, 
grows discordant, sours, fades as we strangle in the thinner and thinner 
air of symbolic activity. High culture or low, palace or hovel, it's the 
same prisonhouse of consciousness; the symbolic as the repressive. 

 It is inseparable from the birth and continuation of alienation 
surviving, as ever, as compensation, a trade of the real for its 
objectifcation. Culture embodies the split betveen wholeness and the 
parts of the whole turning into domination. Time, language, number, 
art-cultural impositions that have come to dominate us with lives of 
their own.

Magazines and journals now teem with articles lamenting the spread of 
cultural illiteracy and historical amnesia, two conditions that 
underline a basic dis-ease in society. In our postmodern epoch the faces 
of fashion range from blank to sullen, as hard drug use, suicide, and 
emotional disability rates continue to soar. About a year ago I got a 
ride from Berkeley to Oregon with a U.C. senior and somewhere along the 
drive I asked her, after talking about the '60s, among other things, to 
describe her own generation. She spoke of her co-students in terms of 
loveless sex, increasing heroin use, and "a sense of despair masked by 
consumerism."

Meanwhile, massive denial continues. In a recent collection of essays on 
culture, DJ. Enright offers the sage counsel that "the more commonly 
personal misery and discontent are aired, the more firmly these ills 
tighten their grip on us." Since anxiety first sought deliverance via 
cultural form and expression, in the symbolic approach to authenticity, 
our condition has probably not been this transparently bankrupt. Robert 
Harbison's "Deliberate Regression" is another work displaying complete 
ignorance regarding the fundamental emptiness of culture: "the story of 
how enthusiasm for the primitive and the belief that salvation lies in 
unlearning came to be a force in almost every held of thought is 
exceedingly strange."

Certainly the ruins are there for everyone to see. From exhausted art in 
the form of the recycled mish-mash of postmodernism, to the 
poststructuralist technocrats like Lyotard, who finds in data banks "the 
Encyclopedia of tomorrow...'nature' for postmodern man," including such 
utterly impotent forms of "opposition" as 'micropoliticS' and 
"schizopolitics," there is little but the obvious symptoms of a general 
fragmentation and despair. Peter Sloterdijk (Critique of Cynical Reason) 
points out that cynicism is the cardinal, pervasive outlook, for now the 
best that negation has to offer.

But the myth of culture will manage to survive as long as our 
immiseration fails to force us to confront it, and so cynicism will 
remain as long as we allow culture to remain in lieu of unmediated life.

