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have modified the picture. Still, the basic impetus remains valid, and related ideas
42
have been formulated in many parts of the world. The discussion of citizen rights
may be criticized from a position inspired by Foucault’s preference for conceptual-
izing power/resistance in terms of struggle and war rather than contracts and rights. 43
However, we have already questioned that substitution, arguing instead for a need to
see power and resistance as multidimensional and thus allowing a place for the rights
dimension, too. If a cultural dimension is acknowledged, seated in the intersubjec-
tive lifeworlds, then it may need to be secured by certain communicative rights.
Culture is constructed and reproduced by processes of communication. In his
early work, and in opposition to an elitist conception of culture as confined to the
fine arts, Williams had chosen to define culture as ‘a whole way of life’. 44 This
formula soon became widespread in cultural studies. By the end of his life, however,
Williams became convinced that this definition, ‘derived primarily from anthro-
pology’, was not really useful, at least not for ‘highly developed and complex soci-
eties’, in which ‘there are so many levels of social and material transformation that
the polarized “culture” – “nature” relation becomes insufficient’, and where culture
has been differentiated and ‘embedded in a whole range of activities, relations and
institutions’. Instead, he preferred to see culture as a ‘realized signifying system’. 45
This is in line with the concept of culture that since the 1960s had already been used
in hermeneutics by Paul Ricoeur, among social anthropologists by Clifford Geertz
and others, and also in cultural studies by Williams’s successor in Birmingham,
Stuart Hall.
Culture is thus a matter of signifying processes, through which people making and
using texts in contexts shape meaning, identity and power. It is the capability to enter
such interaction that is the key, rather than the resulting forms of meaning, identity
or power as such. Cultural citizenship should therefore not be too strongly bound to
cultural identities. Identities are constructed in communication processes that are the
mediating linkage mechanism of culture. Identities are always provisional, relative
and transient products of identification practices, anchored in intersubjective
processes of interaction. Partly in response to the implied Western ideology of linking
rights to single individuals, various forms of identity politics and ‘communitarian’
theories strive to base civil rights in traditional customs, self-understandings and
collective identities of social groups such as families, clans, nations or subcultures. 46
However, this tends to freeze and reify social groups or ‘cultures’ into rather fixed
units whose borders are taken for granted, thus giving rise to a problematic kind of
‘culturalism’. It is difficult to subsume individuals under such collectivities automat-
ically and treat them as given entities. In modern societies, collective identifications
are increasingly dynamic and polymorphic. Homi K. Bhabha has, for instance, crit-
icized that Article 27 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ‘emphasizes the
need for minorities to “preserve” their cultural identities, rather than to affiliate across
emergent minority communities. For all its good intentions, such rights neglect the
“inter-cultural” political existence and ethical imperative’ that are crucial to a glocal-
ized post-colonial situation. 47