Page 92 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

FROM WAYS OF LIFE TO LIFESTYLE

and possibly the most developed form this marketing takes is in the various
modes of the tourist industry; see for example Rojek and Urry 1997). On
the other hand cultural symbolism works to negotiate social processes and
structures as a distinctive means of expression. The sort of things we refer to as
culture in this account are clearly not representing the social in any epi-
phenomenal or superstructural sense; with the further implication that the
social groups and individuals whose identity is to at least some extent expressed
and defined through symbolic repertoires are themselves destabilized. These
social groups and individuals lose the coherent integrity of rationalist tradition
and lack the stability of more traditional social forms, becoming in e ffect new
social forms articulated through cultural symbolism in the play of association
and meaning.
It is common to acknowledge that post-industrial societies are multicultural,
and therefore national cultures no longer exist (if they ever did), but I am going
further and argue that any idea that these multiple cultures are each a shared
framework of norms, values, and expectations is unsustainable because the ways
of life exemplifying this framework are no longer stable and clear-cut. In con-
trast, culture has to be appreciated as a self-conscious repertoire of styles that are
constantly being monitored and adapted rather than just forming the
unconscious basis of social identity. The approach I seek to make here is to
move away from the idea that even within a speech community members speak
a common language. Culture is more appropriately imagined as a polyphony of
ways of speaking. Rather than just thinking of speech competence as some-
thing members have when knowing how to go on, any language is better
understood as a family of games. Playing within the spaces they constitute is
always and necessarily an ironic performance, much as any other improvisation
with the signs of material culture. It is more helpful to think of culture as the
sorts of embodied, inscribed skills that enable us to improvise on a musical
instrument or draw an image (think here, for instance, of David Sudnow’s 1978
self-exploratory study of learning how to improvise on the piano). If all forms
of social performance are improvisations, then culture is displayed in character-
istic dialogues between actor and resources at hand.

Lifestyle
I have suggested that the ways in which actors in everyday life use notions of
culture should make us deduce that traditional conceptions of culture in social
theory are no longer sustainable. I have further suggested that the forms of
social life (the social institutions) that were given order and meaning in terms
of cultural traditions have changed and are being changed by new cultural
forms (the circularity here between social and cultural change is inescapable –
mutual reciprocity means that one-sided change is impossible). I will go on
now to suggest that one example of a new social form, a mode of institutional-
ization, that exemplifies cultural change has been the development of lifestyles.

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