The Sadness of America

[Dave Monroe]

My current reading de toilette, by the way ...

Williams, Raymond.  Keywords: A Vocabulary of
   Culture and Society. Rev. ed.  NY: Oxford UP, 1985.

Culture is one of the two or three most complicated
words in the English language. This is so partly
because of its intricate historical development, in
several European languages, but mainly because it has
now come to be used for important concepts in several
distinct intellectual disciplines and in several
distinct and incompatible systems of thought....

[...]

There was then a decisive change of use in Herder. In
his unfinished Ideas on the Philosophy of the History
of Mankind (1784--9 1) he wrote of Cultur: 'nothing is
more indeterminate than this word, and nothing more
deceptive than its application to all nations and
periods. He attacked the assumption of the universal
histories that 'civilization or culture -- the
historical self-development of humanity -- was what we
would now call a unilinear process, leading to the
high and dominant point of C18 European culture.
Indeed he attacked what be called European subjugation
and domination of the four quarters of the globe, and
wrote: 

Men of all the quarters of the globe, who have
perished over the ages, you have not lived solely to
manure the earth with your ashes, so that at the end
of time your posterity should be made happy by
European culture. The very thought of a superior
European culture is a blatant insult to the majesty of
Nature. 
  
It is then necessary, he argued, in a decisive
innovation, to speak of 'cultures in the plural: the
specific and variable cultures of different nations
and periods, but also the specific and variable
cultures of social and economic groups within a
nation. This sense was widely developed, in the
Romantic movement, as an alternative to the orthodox
and dominant 'civilization. It was first used to
emphasize national and traditional cultures, including
the new concept of folk-culture (cf. FOLK). It was
later used to attack what was seen as the MECHANICAL
(q.v.) character of the new civilization then
emerging: both for its abstract rationalism and for
the 'inhumanity of current Industrial development. It
was used to distinguish between 'human and 'material
development. Politically, as so often in this period,
it veered between radicalism and reaction and very
often, in the confusion of major social change, fused
elements of both. (It should also be noted, though it
adds to the real complication, that the same kind of
distinction, especially between 'material and
'spiritual development, was made by von Humboldt and
others, until as late as 1900, with a reversal of the
terms, culture being material and civilization
spiritual. In general, however, the opposite
distinction was dominant.) 

On the other hand, from the 1840s in Germany, Kultur
was being used in very much the sense in which
civilization had been used in C18 universal
histories.... It is along this line of reference that
the dominant sense in modern social sciences has to be
traced. 

The complexity of the modern development of the word,
and of its modern usage, can then be appreciated....
But once we go beyond the physical reference, we have
to recognize three broad active categories of usage.
The sources of two of these we have already discussed:
(i) the independent and abstract noun which describes
a general process of intellectual, spiritual and
aesthetic development, from C18; (ii) the independent
noun, whether used generally or specifically, which
indicates a particular way of life, whether of a
people, a period, a group, or humanity in general,
from Herder and Klemm. But we have also to recognize
(iii) the independent and abstract noun which
describes the works and practices of intellectual and
especially artistic activity. This seems often now the
most widespread use: culture is music, literature,
painting and sculpture, theater and film. A Ministry
of Culture refers to these specific activities,
sometimes with the addition of philosophy,
scholarship, history. This use, (iii), is in fact
relatively late. It is difficult to date precisely
because it is in origin an applied form of sense (i):
the idea of a general process of intellectual,
spiritual and aesthetic development was applied and
effectively transferred to the works and practices
which represent and sustain it. But it also developed
from the earlier sense of process.... The decisive
development of sense (iii) in English was in lC19 and
eC2O. 

Faced by this complex and still active history of the
word, it is easy to react by selecting one 'true or
'proper or 'scientific sense and dismissing other
senses as loose or confused.... It is clear that,
within a discipline, conceptual usage has to be
clarified. But in general it is the range and overlap
of meanings that is significant. The complex of senses
indicates a complex argument about the relations
between general human development and a particular way
of life, and between both and the works and practices
of art and intelligence.... Within this complex
argument there are fundamentally opposed as well as
effectively overlapping positions; there are also,
understandably, many unresolved questions and confused
answers. But these arguments and questions cannot be
resolved by reducing the complexity of actual
usage....

http://pubpages.unh.edu/~dml3/880williams.htm

--- Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> Yes,  we can go ahead and eliminate the
> distinctions, but we run the risk of "there is no
> culture" or "all is culture." It's all equal....


		
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