P Erhaps the Only Thing We Can Safely Say Ab out "Culture" Is That It Is a Word
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ApPENDIX " CULTURE" P erhaps the only thing we can safely say ab out "culture" is that it is a word. l Mter that simple statement comes disagreement. Such disagreement, in fact, may have been behind Raymond Williams's characterization of "culture" as "one of the two or three most com plicated words in the English language."2 Williams's characteriza rion is well known, has often been repeated, and may seem uncontroversial. But this way of putting it risks confusing things, for, contrary to Williams's claim, could it not be argued that "culture" is actually a simple word? If it did not strike so many users as sim ple-in the sense of its meaning seeming transparent, even obvi ous-how could so many people use it in so many different ways?3 I do not mean for this last to be a facetious question; I hope, instead, that it points at a simple truth. A word's ability to produce "com plicat[ions]" of meaning can be inversely related to its surface diffi culty: The more complicated a word, the less likely it may be to figure into complex interpretive situations. We could offer, there fore, that "culture" can be used in complicated ways, ways that pro duce ambiguity and disagreement, precisely because it is so simple. Although he was only following William Empson in seeing as com plex or "complicated" those words which faciIitate ambiguity, Williams confuses a material thing (a word) with the ways in which that thing has been used. 4 What Williams could have said, in the pursuit of accuracy, is that culture is a short word whose simplicity has enabled it, over time, to be used in extremely complicated ways. Williams was of course as weH aware as anyone of the various and competing uses of words. His celebrated book Keywords, in fact, begins with an anecdote about the various senses of "culture" 212 SHAKESPEARE AND THE QUESTION OF CULTURE he encountered when returning to Cambridge after World War H. Williams relates how the "formations of the 1930s" had changed while he was away, and how surprised he was to meet those who did not "speak the same language" that had been spoken before the war. As Williams teIls it: I found myself preoccupied by a single word, culture, which it seemed I was hearing very much more often: not only, obviously, by compar ison with the talk of an artillery regiment or of my own family, but by direct comparison within the university over just those few years. I had heard it previously in two senses: one at the fringes, in teashops and places like that, where it seemed the preferred word for a kind of so cial superiority, not in ideas or learning, and not only in money or po sition, but in a more intangible area, relating to behaviour; yet also, secondly, among my own friends, where it was an active word for writ ing poems and novels, making films and paintings, working in theaters. What I was now hearing were two different senses, which I could not really get dear: first, in the study ofliterature, a use ofthe word to in dicate, powerfully but not explicitly, some central formation ofvalues (and literature itself had the same kind of emphasis ); secondly, in more general discussion, but with what seemed to me very different impli cations, a use which made it almost equivalent to society: a particular way oflifß--"American culture," "Japanese culture."s Whereas Williams elsewhere describes "culture" as a complicated word, here he explains his entry into the subject that became Keywords by recounting his equally complicated personal relationship to and ex perience of a word. Biographical details given earlier in his introduc tion convey the pervasive dislocations of those years, induding the movement of a youth from his place of upbringing in Wales to Cam bridge University, his subsequent service in an artillery regiment of the British Army on the Kiel Canal, and his return to school at Cam bridge in 1945. Yet in this paragraph it is perhaps not Williams who is his story's protagonist but the word "culture." Indeed, we could note that his initial description of the word comes dose to personifying it. When he describes the first two "senses " of the word that he heard, for instance, he does so by painting a dramatic scene: "one at the fringes, in teashops and places like that ... yet also, secondly, among my own friends, where it was an active word ..." (emphasis added). As if a companion that he knows and trusts, "culture" was at this time vital and energetic ("relating to behaviour ... working in theatres"), a word connected with certain locations ("at the fringes, in teashops and places like that") and persons ("among my own friends"). "CULTURE" 213 If "culture" be comes the lead actor of this biographical story, however, we need to recognize that the traditional narrative pattern is reversed: We know less and less about its protagonist as we go along. Williams's comfortable notions of "eulture" were shattered when he returned to Cambridge after the war. Gone is the "culture" ofthe "fringes," the "teashop[sJ," and the "theatres" ofthe 1930s. What replaces it is a somewhat globalized "culture" that strikes him as strange if not uncanny ("two different senses, which I could not really get dear"). This "culture" is no Ion ger a friendly and dose lad but a thing of the printed page ("the study of literature") and of "general discussion" that seems to take place in no specific location, and among unidentifiable parties. It is also not English. That the paragraph turns for its definition to two nations that took a promi nent role in the war Williams had just fought ('''American culture,' 'Japanese culture''') hints that, like Williams himself and like so many of his contemporaries, the word "culture" has been dislocated from its ho me and absorbed into an unanticipated world dynamic. With the ward "eulture" as its protagonist, this remarkable para graph reads like a miniature history of the mid-twentieth century. Its narrative of change asks us to acknowledge that the weight Williams puts on "culture" has if anything been increased by our own time an increase that is by no means peculiar to Shakespeare studies. As we have seen, the dose of the twentieth century produced an abun dance of "culture talk." So widely has the discourse of culture spread, in fact, that writers of very different political orientations have recently called for its restrietion. For instance, in Culture: The Anthropologists) Account) Adam Kuper confesses that "the more one considers the best modern work on culture by anthropologists, the more advisable it must appear to avoid the hyper-referential word al together.,,6 Likewise, in a stimulating essay titled "What We Talk About When We Talk About Culture," Matthew Greenfield offers "the perhaps counterintuitive suggestion that the concept of culture no longer does the work that literary critics want it to, and that in fact the concept exists in an uneasy tension with much of our think ing ab out literary texts and historical processes.,,7 Terry Eagleton comes to a similar condusion, but for other reasons, when he ends The Idea of Culture by saying, of his tide subject, that "It is time, while acknowledging its significance, to put it back in its place."8 Similarly, J acques Barzun pauses in the prologue of From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life to let out the rhetor ical equivalent of a sigh: "Culture-what a word! Up to a few years ago it meant two or three related things easy to grasp and keep 214 SHAKESPEARE AND THE QUESTION OF CULTURE apart. Now it is a piece of all-purpose jargon that covers a hodge podge of overlapping things.,,9 As we will observe, Barzun is mis taken to claim that "culture" has ever had meanings "easy to grasp and keep apart." But he is right in suggesting, with Kuper, Green field, and Eagleton, that we have witnessed aremarkable prolifera tion of the word's use. This proliferation has had consequences. As is the case with all inflationary situations, for instance, abundance can diminish value: The mare that "culture" is used, the more that it is asked to mean, the less it actually seems to me an in any single instance of its use. To the scholars quoted above, as weil as to oth ers, "culture" has been used to the point of abuse. How did we get to this point? "Culture" is a ward, after all, that does not appear in the Shakespeare concordance between "culpable" and "culverin." Where did this piece of "all-purpose jargon" come from, and how has it come to serve so many purposes? Investigating a word's origins means inquiring about a history that may or may not have relevance for its current usage. 10 Certainly we need to keep in mind the ways in which words can stray greatly from their onetime range of meanings. Yet care of another sort is called for as weil, as one of the problems with examining earlier patterns of ward usage is the urge to see previous moments, and other lan guages, as simpler than they actually were. Perhaps we are tempted to do so because this allows us to explain the complications of the present through a narrative of accumulated difficulty. (Here we could note Barzun's exaggerated "Up to a few years ago it meant two or three related things easy to grasp and keep apart"). Whatever the cause, critics who have talked about the history of "culture" have tended to simplifY that histary by concentrating almost solelyon its English contexts.