Page 12 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Cultural studies and cultural theory

usage, grouping it together with the second and third as ‘general’,
and contrasting these with the fourth, more specifically ‘anthro-
pological’ meaning (Williams, 1981, p. 11). Williams distinguished
between the word’s physical and human applications; its
positive and negative connotations; its use as a noun of process
and as a noun of configuration; its politically radical and polit-
ically reactionary applications; and so on. He was clear, however,
that these confusions and complications belonged to our ‘culture’
itself, rather than to any fault either in his analysis or in the term:
‘These variations... necessarily involve alternative views of the
activities, relationships and processes which this complex word
indicates. The complexity, that is to say, is not finally in the word
but in the problems which its variations of use significantly
indicate’ (Williams, 1976, p. 81). The range and the overlap of
meanings, the distinctions simultaneously elided and insisted
upon, are all in themselves ‘significant’ (p. 80).
More recently, Geoffrey Hartman, Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at Yale University, has observed that
culture is ‘an inflammatory word’, which in some circumstances
can even kindle ‘actual wars’ (Hartman, 1997, p. 14). Culture is
a good thing, then, but also a dangerous thing. Hartman notes
the same complexity that Williams observed, and the way the
word’s use proliferates—‘camera culture, gun culture, service
culture, museum culture, deaf culture, football culture’—so that
it becomes a kind of ‘linguistic weed’ (p. 30).
Both Williams and Hartman attempted to trace the intellec-
tual history of the concept. In its earliest meanings, in English and
in French, it had referred to the tending of natural growth, either
in animals or in plants. Williams dated the word’s extension to
include human development from the early sixteenth century in
English usage; and its earliest use as an independent noun, to
refer to an abstract process, from the mid-seventeenth century
(Williams, 1976, pp. 77–8). His version of this history remained
overwhelmingly English in focus, leading to Eliot, F.R. Leavis,
Orwell and, by implication, himself. Hartman’s version (which
includes Williams) is more cosmopolitan and leads to Spengler,
Benda, Nazism and Heiner Müller. For Williams, the idea of
culture held out the promise of emancipation; for Hartman, ‘the

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