Culture Club

Do you really want to hurt me?

“It's like a movement / Without the bother of the meaning

It's like a culture / Without the culture of all of the culture” - Oswald Spengler

Over on the Wisdom of Crowds Substack, they like a mass debate public discussion*. And they had one about “culture” recently. Some people said that culture was “stuck” or “stagnant”. Then someone said “Oh, no it isn’t”. “Oh yes, it is”. “Hmmm I’m not sure”.

Of course, I had to join the debate like the uninformed doofus that I am. And continue to be here. I want to squint at the word “culture” with all the awkward intensity of a middle-aged man who needs multifocals.

But first: a true story. I used to work at one of Australia’s biggest commercial TV stations**. During the orientation workshop, someone from Programming came in and asked the assembled newbies: “Who here watches Netflix?” Lots of hands went up. “Who here watches the ABC (a public broadcaster)?” Lots of hands. “Who here watches us?” Fewer hands. “That’s right, we don’t make TV for us. We make it for the people our advertisers want to reach. We make it for Irene in Parramatta. Early 40s. Husband’s a tradie. Couple of teenagers. We like what Irene likes and we give Irene what she wants. Never forget that.”

Now, back to culture. In all this debate, no one seems to have started with a definition of what culture is. Yes, it’s movies and TV and books and plays and music and art and stuff. But really culture is how a particular group of people make sense of the world. It is the artifacts that they create as part of that mutual meaning making. It is the stories they tell and the relationships that tie them together. The word originates in the Latin word colere, meaning to tend or cultivate. This sense highlights the extent to which culture is shaped by its environment and climate, its vital role in sustaining humanity, the way it can be fashioned by human will (but only to an extent), and the importance of continuous attention (untended crops die).

What this sense missed out is the extent to which culture is a collective effort. One person can tend a garden. One person cannot create a culture.

If we understand that a culture is a collective endeavour between a group of people, then we know that the most important question to ask of any culture is who? Who makes things. Who uses things. Who decides what things are good and bad. Unless we are constantly asking who, we will not get sensible answers.

The Substack debate I link to above sometimes seems to mistake culture for the products of the entertainment industry. That’s like mistaking the stage for the theatre. Or the visible part above the water for the whole iceberg you are just about to hit. Sure these are the most visible parts of culture. But it’s not the whole story.

TBF to Katherine Dee, she recognizes that culture is not defined by a specific pull-out section of a Sunday newspaper. Culture is how people make sense of the world. Entertainment is how they bear being in the world. Art is how they change the world and themselves. Of course, culture happens on TikTok. Whether we like that culture is a different matter.

“In history as in cinema, every close-up implies an off-screen scene”

Throughout history, culture has largely been invisible. We had some indicators of the rich, the powerful, and the literate. But the cultures of most of humanity were only legible in the meagre artifacts they left behind. The work of microhistorians like Carlo Ginsberg aimed to unearth those cultures that were not so much lost as never kept.

Ginsberg would have no such challenges trying to reconstruct the culture of the present. In fact, he has the opposite problem - there is too much culture visible to us. He scours the archival records for clues. Now people… just… people just tweet it out. The blessing and the curse of the last 20 years is that now we can see the cultures of communities at a scale, and in ways, we never could before.

Despite all this data, there remains a problem: How can we tell if our cultures are getting better or worse? We can assemble data on movies and music (which Ted Gioia does). We can compare the entertainment products of one era with another. We can fashion narratives of decline or vitality. But we end up making subjective judgments about what we prefer. Is culture declining or is it simply not for you?

One of the books that first tackled this topic (and did so over a decade ago) was Simon Reynolds’ Retromania. Innovations in pop music have tended to be tied to technology and these technological developments either play out in production (e.g. the electric guitar, the synth, the sampler) or in distribution (records, cassettes, CDs, mp3s). We used to live in a world where the past was inaccessible. Records would be deleted. Labels would go bust. What you could listen to was defined by your radio station and your local record shop. Now you can have it all. And yet. Perhaps that is bad for artists - who tend to thrive on constraints and subject to the paradox of choice. To create the future, we need to forget the past. or at least creatively misremember it. But I do not see there is a way of going back.

However the purpose of a culture is not to provide works of art for future generations. By that measure, nearly all cultures have been failures. It is to enable a community to make sense of the present.

In terms of my position, I suspect that I see culture differently to some of these other writers. I do not make my living from the Entertainment / Arts sector therefore I don’t have the same emotional and material attachment to it. I come from that lower middle / upper working class greyzone in the UK, where you sit outside of high culture but not fully at home in working class culture. And I’m in my 50s - I can remember how naff the 80s actually were. Sturgeon’s law states that “90% of everything that's published is crud, regardless of the genre”. But the wonders of memory are such that we (both individually and collectively) forget the crud. Sometimes cultural critics imply that everyone was reading Horace in the original Latin before the internet. Whereas actually we were watching Bullseye.

There’s a whole bunch of things here that I might tackle in future posts (the complex relationship between high and low culture, Matthew Gasda’s comment that vertical cultural exchange requires a strong middle class, the coming deglobalization of culture). But for now I just want to open up the conversation and to encourage people to think about culture beyond their patch. Beyond the flower bed, there is a whole garden.

As for no art on TikTok, I can’t comment on that. But here are a couple of things I have seen on YouTube that I count as art:

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*Yes, that is the level of humour here. Deal with it.

**Turned out that one of my colleagues was a war criminal. And he wasn’t even close to being the most obnoxious executive there.