Culture is not our nature but of our nature

(Continuation from last issue)

To the liberal cultural heritage, culture was important because it represented some fundamental, universal values ​​as a possible common ground for those who are otherwise divided. On that ground we could all meet simply because of our common humanity; in that sense it was an enlightened idea; you didn't have to be a viscount's son to participate. But since our common humanity was a rather abstract concept, something was needed to bring it back to lived experience, something that could be touched and weighed in the hand: that something was known as art or literature. If someone asked you what you live by, you wouldn't list a religious sermon or a political pamphlet, but, for example, Shakespeare's acts. The interest behind this project, as indeed behind all those who call for unity, is quite obvious: culture, just like the bourgeois state, for Marx it represents an abstract community and equality that compensates for existing antagonisms and injustices. In the presence of the essential and the universal, we are invited to ignore superficial class, gender, ethnic and other differences. Liberal humanism, however, has understood one truth, albeit in a form that is profitable for it: what human beings have in common is ultimately more important than their differences. Only, politically speaking, that end cannot be reached.

Starting from the late 60s of the 20th century, the vision of culture as a common ground was challenged by a series of events. Students came to institutions of higher learning from backgrounds that made them reluctant to join that consensus. The concept of culture began to lose its innocence. It was already compromised by the link with racist ideology and imperialist anthropology in the 19th century and polluted by political conflicts in the context of revolutionary nationalism. Since the end of the 19th century, culture has been a very lucrative activity since cultural production is increasingly integrated into production in general; the manufacture of mass fantasy becomes very profitable. Note that it is not yet postmodernism. Postmodernism appears not only with the arrival of mass culture but with the aestheticization of social existence, from design and advertising to branding, to politics as spectacle, tattoos, purple hair and ridiculously large glasses. Culture, which was once the antithesis of material production, is now drawn into it.

With modernism, which is a whole century behind us, culture presented itself for the last time as a full-blooded critique of society, which was mainly initiated by the radical right. But it no longer does, just like culture in the sense of a particular form of life. Most of such forms of life today do not seek to question the framework of modern civilization, but to join it. Inclusion, however, is not good in itself any more than diversity is. With tenderness we mean a shout Samuel Goldwyn: “Turn me off!” (Include me out!) All this is sometimes known as cultural politics and in our time it has given rise to the so-called culture wars. For Schiller i Arnold the term "culture wars" would be an oxymoron, as would, for example, "business ethics" (they say Beckett said he felt a great weakness for the oxymoron). In their view, culture was a solution, not an example of conflict. Now it is no longer a way to overcome the political, but the language in which some key political demands are formulated and in which they are fought for. Culture used to be a spiritual solution, but today it is part of the problem. In the process, we moved from culture (singular) to cultures (plural).

Both types of culture are threatened today by various forms of leveling. Reflections on aesthetic culture are increasingly influenced by the form of goods, which suppresses all differences and equalizes all values. In some postmodern circles this is celebrated as anti-elitism. But differences in values ​​are a routine part of life, if not differences between Dryden i Fruit Pulp , then between Morrissey i Liam Gallagher. This is where the anti-elitists, who like to see themselves as people close to ordinary life, are mistaken. At the same time, developed capitalism homogenizes cultures in terms of different forms of life; every hair salon and every Korean restaurant on the planet looks like everyone else despite the talk of difference and diversity. In an age when the power of the culture industry is at its peak, culture in both its main meanings is pushed into crisis.

In our time, culture has become nothing less than a full-blooded ideology, commonly known as culturalism. Along with biologism, economism, moralism, historicism and so on, it is one of the greatest reductionisms of today. According to this theory, culture permeates everything. Human nature itself is culture. Behind that doctrine is an aversion to nature (one of the traditional antitheses of culture) as rigid, inflexible, brutally given and resistant to change. At a time when nature is capricious, unpredictable and moving with alarming speed, culturalism insists on seeing it as inert and immobile.

Culture is not our nature but of our nature. It is both possible and necessary because of the type of body we have. It is necessary because there is a gap in our nature that culture in terms of physical care must quickly overcome in order to survive as infants. It is possible because our bodies, unlike the bodies of snails and spiders, are capable of extending beyond themselves thanks to the power of language or conceptual thinking, as well as the way we are built to act on the world through work. That prosthetic addition to our bodies is known as civilization. As Greek tragedy was aware, the only problem is that we can stretch ourselves too far, lose touch with our sensual, instinctive being, run over ourselves and come to nothing. But that's another story.

(Lecture held on March 27.03.2024, 25.04.2024; London Review of Books, April 17.06.2024, XNUMX; Translated by Slavica Miletić; Peščanik.net, June XNUMX, XNUMX)