Page 66 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

CULTURE

CULTURE

The production and circulation of sense, meaning and consciousness.
The sphere of meaning, which unifies the spheres of production
(economics) and social relations (politics). In other words, culture is
the sphere of reproduction not of goods but of life.
If you are planning to use the term ‘culture’ as an analytical
concept, or if you encounter its use, it is unlikely that you will ever be
able to fix on just one definition that will do for all such occasions.
However, it will often be possible to use or read the word clearly and
uncontroversially: Welsh culture, youth culture, a cultured person,
Victorian culture, working-class culture, intellectual culture; or even a
cultured pearl, bacterial culture, agriculture, cultivation of the soil.
The trouble arises when you notice that even in these examples the
term culture seems to mean half-a-dozen different things. What on
earth do all these things share that can be encompassed by the single
term?
The answer is that there is no necessary connection. The term
culture is multi-discursive; it can be mobilised in a number of different
discourses. This means you cannot import a fixed definition into any
and every context and expect it to make sense. What you have to do is
identify the discursive context itself. It may be the discourse of
nationalism, fashion, anthropology, literary criticism, viti-culture,
Marxism, feminism, cultural studies or even common sense. In each
case, culture’s meaning will be determined relationally, or negatively,
by its differentiation from others in that discourse, and not positively,
by reference to any intrinsic, self-evident or fixed properties.
Culture as a concept is historical: its established senses and uses
result from its usage within various discourses. It stems, originally,
from a purely agricultural root: culture as cultivation of the soil, of
plants, culture as tillage. By extension, it encompasses the culture of
creatures from oysters to bacteria. Cultivation such as this implies not
just growth but also deliberate tending of ‘natural’ stock to transform it
into a desired ‘cultivar’ – a strain with selected, refined or improved
characteristics.
Applying all this to people, it is clear that the term offers a fertile
metaphor for the cultivation of minds – the deliberate husbandry of
‘natural’ capacities to produce perfect rulers. It is not without
significance that this usage of the term roughly coincided with the
establishment of the first stage of the modern market economy – early
agrarian capitalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The

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