“To practice Religion is no less absurd a claim than to speak Language. Max Müller announced our professional motto in his Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873): ‘He who knows one, knows none.’

Against those who believe that ‘religion’ resides in ‘eternal verities’: There is no reducibly essential religion any more than there is such a person. Religion is a function of folks meeting other folks—contact—and folks maintaining their old ways—continuity. There is no essence to be sought.
Religion is always inter-religion.”

—Steven M. Wasserstrom, Nine Theses on the Study of Religion[1]

1.     

The study of culture is what it is—and more. So, what is the study of culture? And what is Cultural Studies? To my peers and I it seems we spent the whole year begging this question of ourselves, of the world, of our discipline, of one another. In this way, the study of culture is a weak discipline because it means so little, yet is infinitely presumptuous in its aims and scope. One may be inclined to judge the task of organizing cultural data into discreet units of language, life, praxis, and community as absurd and impractical—never mind the possibility of affecting Mikhail Bakhtin’s distant ideals of cross-cultural dialogue. If an assumption of the ideal subject is the liberal failing of studying cultural then Sam Huntington’s legacy of civilizational clash is certainly the conservative one, seizing upon hasty reifications of identity to proclaim irreconcilable difference. This sort of rigidity does not explicitly lead to violence—nor does the clean liberal subject-object division—but it certainly suggests a contradictory disciplinary desire for perpetual peace, or moreover a continuity of understanding, which cannot be affected without organizational bloodshed.

Within this paradox, the distinction between Cultural Studies and the study of culture deserves attention. Few recognize that Cultural Studies has distinctive roots as a field in itself. It was in the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies that Stuart Hall, Richard Hoggart, and E.P. Thompson laid the foundations for an interdisciplinary combination of history, philosophy, ethnography, literary study, aesthetics, art criticism, and theory amidst a changing imperial context and its shift in academic priorities. Cultural Studies might best be understood as the study of sub-cultures and their systemic interrelation. Working through a cross-section of society, scholars of Cultural Studies are keenly aware of existing inequalities—we must note the discipline’s definitively Marxist roots—and of constant societal friction, through which they discuss existential rationales for the emergence of cultural practices. Amidst its diverse origins and its various utilities Cultural Studies is most often confused with two parent fields—the social sciences of anthropology and sociology—and with a sibling field, the interdisciplinary critical theory. Generally speaking, anthropological and sociological approaches to culture represent opposite directions of data collection: while the anthropologist addresses an excessive materialism by locating meaning in symbols, the sociologist identifies symbols as the conditions of cultural production through which meaning is generated.

In this way every student of culture is closely concerned with questions of representation, or how reality is abstracted through layered understandings and systems of meaning. Culture’s remarkable capacity for representation creates a space which sponsors the competing claims of science and art, of real and ideal, of truth and of power, of politics and possibilities, of religion and philosophy. But cultural studies always begins with a subject—a source, an artefact, a performance, a story, an account, a conviction—which is then understood as an object. At heart, the study of culture is the study of things that have value within collective systems of meaning. While the English and French terms for ‘culture’ are so unspecific that they must refer both to symbols and structures, this ambiguity speaks to a much greater question of dilation and aspiration in critical history, better brought into focus by comparison with critical theory. What is the historical objective of cultural studies? If the pragmatic English roots of cultural studies evaluate the normative tension of embedded cultural production, regarding members of a culture as both participants and consumers, critical theory’s German origins endow it with the idealist aspirations to functional critique and take up a task no less than that of human liberation. Critical theory offers an (admittedly incomplete) analysis of societal process to try and disclose the immanent in search of emancipation, exemplified by the works of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and other members of the Frankfurt School. In contrast to Cultural Studies and its horizontal investigation of the new, the different, and the rebellious as embedded within a system, critical theorists are more inclined to engage in criticism of culture and society from a transhistorical or ideological perspective.

But these distinctions are somewhat misleading. Marx was the first critical theorist, in his articulation of critiques of total society, and cultural studies would be naïve to pretend it does not share greatly in the functionalist aspirations of continental critical theory. But just as critical theory has been derided for its totalizing work that leaves little place for individual cultural accomplishment, cultural studies has in many ways lost its sense of incisive critical direction by virtue of its expansive subject material. To consider everything ‘cultural’, as my next thesis argues, is at once a great achievement and so too a dangerous displacement. But so too is the construction of a uniformly fragmented, alienated social world that must be made whole in some distant utopia…

2.     

To study culture is to study everything that is narrowly specific. Most accepted notions of culture today are radically inclusive of all things produced by humans with a cultural product being, in the expansive sense, a creation of humanity born of traditionally distinct enterprises of science, morality, and art—and thus enveloping all of them. This account is premised upon a long-running Western epistemological distinct here between nature and culture, natural and civil history, which I will return to in thesis five. For now, in resolving the question of ‘what is cultural?’ the more effective approach is to ask: ‘what is not cultural?’ What today does not belong to a culture of value or operate with particular cultural symbols, what is not a commodity? The invisible late modern ideology of neoliberal market capital has subsumed all logics of cultural production through its own value systems and schizophrenic fixation on the new. It is not prudent to follow Heidegger and ask: “why is there something rather than nothing?” but instead necessary to follow Whitehead and ask: “how is it that there is always something new?”[2] The cultural sphere has experienced a growing dilation, at times steady and at other times explosive in fits and starts. Despite its extended process, this dilation should be considered a gradual displacement of real history by the history of aesthetic style(s). This accounts to historically original acculturations of the real, an aestheticization of reality and a product in its own right. While we should note Williams’ distinction between fresh forms of cultural experience and unities of collective conscience (the former being generated more readily than the latter), the reencoding of reality that accompanies the expansion of culture suggests a transience of modern cultural productions and understandings of self that is ill at ease with its being outside of historical time.

Keeping in mind a focus on creation rather than reification, let us return to the discussion of basic elements of culture. Here I prefer Swingewood’s definition of culture as “the realm of meaning, of values, and of symbols located in specific structural contexts.”[3] From this definition we must distinguish between cultural products or artefacts[4] (i.e. a painting)—which are events— and cultural systems, which are aggregate formations of events that incorporate change and complexity at larger scale (i.e. an artistic movement). Such difference comes to light because culture concerns meaning shaped by societal systems of value, meaning which is by no means essential in itself. However, it is not too far-fetched to claim that cultural systems designate and develop their own essences in service to their conceptions of history—which is what distinguishes humanistic events of cultural production from natural creative generation of nonhuman being. This poses the question of substantive end, or in other words, questions of progressive history. Such sense of direction appears to be a function of instrumental reason but is also wholly inseparable from myth and progress, two particularly persistent expressions of cultural expectation. The roots of the English and French terms culture (as both noun and verb) encode a broader notion of materialist development through which creations of a product that will inform a system of value or of meaning. Their Latin origins—the noun cultura and the verb colere—indicate a sense of cultivation that survives in the English to acculturate and the French acculturer. Amongst English cultural theorists of the 19^th century E.B. Tylor was the first to suggest that all civilizations possess culture at all times, leaving us to consider cultural products not in terms of material meaning and action, but in idealist notions surrounding the question of making and the understanding of systemic cultural progressions.

Material conditions, of course, do not exist without ideological character. And it is precisely this sense of continuity but also the power to preponderate—to draw the specific from the general or the abstract—that defines the symbol and the system’s cycle of creation. It may be mistaken to label this as dialectical, which is a source of cultural relativism when the perfectability of creation is made falsely comparative to veil an argument for a ‘superior’ culture. But to study culture and indeed to recognize culture as such does not necessitate this judgment. Rather, to study culture is to undertake a study of functional change that has managed to retain core elements for the cultivation of humanity, which frequently occur throughout broad cross-sections of humanity. To do so necessarily broadens the prospective sway of even the most expansive notions of culture, paradoxically encouraging the recognition of broad strokes of human cultivation within a canvas of constant change—and vigorously disproving claims of essentialism.

3.     

The study of cultures is never singular and is always plural. In Religion After Religion, his comparative study of Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin’s collective influence on Religious Studies, Steven Wasserstrom famously argued that all religion is inter-religion.[5] To know one is to know none, and to tell stories of one is to ignore the reality of ‘other’ that is ever-present. To make this claim is not to invalidate references of self-knowledge, but rather to understand the necessarily expansive orders of magnitude in which meaning is coded throughout the human and natural worlds. It is not simply to say that everything is what it is and nothing else, but rather to say that everything is what is.

This is the ontological premise upon which the study of culture always begins.

If Wasserstrom takes Max Müller’s motto, ‘to know one is to know none,’ as the basis of religious studies, I am inclined to adopt for cultural studies Gilles Deleuze’s assertion that pluralism = monism. Recall the contradiction inherent in my second thesis, where the coexistence of a monist market value and varied events of plural expressionism sit ill at ease with one another, particularly given culture’s nuanced understandings of self and other, and its ability to endow itself with self-direction. I say this less to raise the liberal question of ‘what is culture’, and certainly not the conservative question of ‘what previous definitions of culture do new ones discard.’ Rather, I mention it to open discourses on the ethical commandments of particular cultures and the consequences of the self-reflexive situation of culture within a world of inescapable moral, ethical, and aesthetic pluralism. What is at stake in reading difference within the scope of this claim? It is neither a superficial claim of universal cultural desire for harmony nor a disavowal of genuine realities of conflict. Rather, an intercultural location of inescapable difference is what Wasserstrom refers to as deep pluralism. Any study of deep pluralism must take intercultural and intercultural antagonism seriously, without making inherent value-judgments between opposing revelations. For Wasserstrom, this is as simple, and as impossible, as studying enemies without reifying enmity. To assert a perspective of deep pluralism is to argue both historically and philosophically, and it is a perspective I extent to all fields of cultural study. To understand is less so to accept, but rather to want what is understood. It is an acknowledgment of perspective with a desire for wholeness. This desire is born from nothing less than fragmentary, alienated, isolated experience. The scientist, today’s modern expert par-excellence, asks why the world is the way it is. But it is the mystic who asks not only why but how—how to live within the world, having better understood it. To be understood is to be a part of who understands.

4.     

To study culture is to relate the fragment to the whole. Understanding the forest as such cannot be attempted from the outside alone, nor indeed solely from the inside. Culture, insofar as we encounter it as a meaning, a practice, or a ritual comprised of symbol and system, must offer inner and outer meanings translated by their respective agents—Stuart Hall’s theory of encoding. This binary of participant and observer structural to an event is akin to the difference between grammar and rhetoric confronting one for whom language is a mother tongue and one for whom it is a second nature. The former’s proximity to every element of systemic culture, expressed in ritual participation and lexical richness, offers such proximity to semantic logic that we consider action divorced from logic; he is a bird in flight seemingly unaware of the laws of gravity. However, it is this distance that creates the foundation for politics, static representation, and the alienating claim of l’art pour l’art. In contrast, the stranger—who is always a member of the group just so much as he is always on its periphery—is reflexively aware of the grammar of his foreign situation and thusly hypersensitive to it. While his distance from self-referential rhetorical creation almost always hobbles his ability for expression in the language of ritual itself (insofar as conditions of freedom are regulated by standards that govern expression), it is precisely this alienation that gifts him with extraordinary interpretive power.

This distinction between emic and etic is by no means a stable dichotomy. Consider a shattered mirror which even in its partialness offers endless reflective viewpoints. Who is to say where a fragment ends and a totality begins? Take the moment as a pure expression of irreducible meaning, the single unit of value in a world emptied of meaning by commodified exchange value. Specifically, consider culture and poetry among forms of knowledge and art as the purest modes of deconstruction for fragmentary analysis by virtue of their disruption of inner and outer dualism. This tense opposition is the basis for constructive aesthetic interpretations of culture; meaning is created by the outer reception of inner significance. When we speak of poetry we are speaking of that which is worth translating, although the question of a thing’s translatability remains unanswered. Walter Benjamin posed two questions here: firstly, can an adequate translator be found and secondly, does the nature of the art form lend itself to translation? Poetry is also that which cannot be translated by virtue of its perfectability—a poem is never intended for the reader and is itself untranslated. But yet, it may be translatable.

Both translation and interpretation promise to unite outer meaning with inner meaning—action with reflection, word with thought. But translation can never make meaning. Rather, it orders and organizes a collection of interpretations which are called metaphors, each of which contains their own understanding of Alpha and Omega, beginning and end. To interpret a cultural artefact, an element of practice, ritual, habit, or experience, is to interpret into a larger context of meaning and understanding whose boundary has just been enlarged by the interpretation. If we are inclined to understand culture as text, what Geertz refers to as ‘the said’, we must always understand it within “a prescribed structure of rituals, symbols, and practices existing through space and time.”[6] Culture, insofar as it is comprised of aesthetic expression at its base level, derives meaning through the impossible act of interpretation—never simply of observation. There is nothing inherent to aesthetic expression that delineates its interpretation with certainty. Perhaps the most poignant metaphor for the near impossibility, yet absolute necessity, of fragmentary translation concerns the emotion of love. To love something is to endow it with meaning through an assertion of specialness. But while many kinds of love exist (I believe it to be the most overused word in the English language) the intimate physical and emotional chemistry of peer lovers requires the affirmation and resonance of experiences which are inherently fragmentary and ought never to be expected otherwise. And I must hasten to illustrate the double-bind of the lover: to profess one’s love is to risk the tyrannical imposition of emotion and expectation, while to love in silence is a terrible restraint that can only spawn destructive, megalomaniac distortions of reality—unless it is mediated through the other. Love, Zarathustra’s fourth divine emanation that gives meaning to creative action, seeks connection—which succeeds only through resonance. So too, the study of culture is the fragmentary study of contact that demands temporal affirmation to fulfil itself.

5.     

To study culture is to study autonomy, the central problem of modernity. The conviction of this final thesis first came about through a belief that freedom was the universal most succinctly suited to frame the study of culture within a late-modern suspicion of universals. To be a scholar today all but implies a deep distrust of the universal and of rational positivism. Dipesh Chakrabarty famously claimed that the onset of the climate crisis and the so-called Anthropocene era spells the collapse of the traditional European distinction between natural history and human history, and for others, this collapse extends to the very divide between epistemology and ontology. However, this perspective cannot be maintained with a simultaneous disavowal of human freedom as the pearl of Enlightenment modernity. While the free exercise of reason may have led us into this crisis, it is only by the continued exercise of reason—with strong visions of liberation in mind—that we have any possibility of progress. Hence the doomed conviction of Goethe’s lover: “I have no hope, and yet I proceed…” For Marx, this autonomy was fundamentally problematic as he observes in Capital that the state has lost its authority as ethical legislator and exists only to fulfil functional imperatives in the modern world. This rupture was the first expression of a paradox later articulated more fully by Weber, Simmel, and Durkheim respectively: while society in its transition to modernity has become increasingly interdependent and thus requires contingent social regulation, modern and late-modern politics remain liberal and individual with a minimal moral code of ethics.

There is no better maxim for this problem than Deleuze’s: pluralism = monism. Despite every notion of collapse in the sense of the human, the rational, the historical, and the directive, the notion of autonomous culture and its transcendence of cultural reality that has replaced anachronistic monisms is inescapable. Its substance is that which underlies the very question of modernity’s claim to achievement—but where does the acculturation of the real begin? Late 19^th century theorists of Orthodox Marxism, Leninism, and vanguardism (I specifically refer to Plekhanov and Lenin) were notable for their interpretation of Marxist economics as ‘iron laws of history,’ a notion that Marx himself repudiated and indeed abhorred. Their reading is entirely material: an economic base influences ideological superstructure to create a dialectic of historical transformation. Beyond this interpretation’s outsize influence on Marxist thought, the ‘iron laws’ designate culture as a pure function of economic production. The essentialist culture created therein bears witness to the self-proclaimed necessity of its birth and its unapologetic moral positivism is neatly summarized by the phrase “by any means necessary”. What ironic oversight of the subtle combination of economic, political, and cultural forces in Marx, which produce historical situations but do not in any way determine their outcome a priori! Marx’s history produces dialectical conditions where no outcomes are assured and randomness is inescapable: in his own words, men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.[7]

Such conceptions of culture could not reconcile subjective dispositions with objective socio-economic conditions until Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and theory of autonomy brought Marxist cultural thought fully into dialogue with modernity.[8] His basic argument divides culture into fields, rather than unities, shaped directly by historical circumstance. For Gramsci, societal power is never the product of a single group, culture, or ideology, but rather is reflected in the nexus of control knitting them together (the concept of hegemony—another iteration of monism=pluralism). Gramsci’s theory of social change, whereby elites appeal not to exploitative capital but rather to established connections with popular culture, consciousness and revolutionary change, means that cultural evolution and the process of history is ultimately a capacity of the working class and its generative potential to create—when properly harnessed by utopian visions. This concentration of creative power derived from the brutal realities of subjugation was mostly famously expressed by the early Marx of direct anti-capitalist revolution and most clearly spelled out in a contra-colonial manner by Fanon. And just as Gramsci expanded the intellectual, aesthetic, and cultural limitations of this material struggle for autonomy it was Said who accomplished this for postcolonial studies.

To this end we return to what I dub the central paradox of worldwide cultural modernity/modernities: we have become more free than we have ever been, yet we remain increasingly unfree in obvious ways. Is it thusly a reasonable claim to center the promise of human freedom as the endpoint to modernity and, moreover, to history? Weber argued that it was. The entirety of postcolonial scholarship and a great many other academic disciplines exist upon the raison d’être of disentangling plural conceptions of multiple or alternative modernities from lingering senses of Western hegemony. These logics cannot exist without the notion of a yet-unfulfilled Enlightenment promise of liberation, yet such scholars and activists will be the first to claim a wariness of this progress, and undoubtedly its historical impossibility. Need I refer you any further than the ironic, endlessly restated claim that ‘all men are created equal’?

So is the search for autonomy inevitable? Is it necessary? To ask this is to return to the problem of history bound up in modernity and its cultural autonomy. More specifically this is a question of historical change in an irreducible plural world. To exist in this world demands serious reckoning with the question of ethical autonomy—which Isaiah Berlin referred to as value pluralism. What criteria do we use to choose between values and value systems? Although Machiavelli is typically (and unfortunately) read one-sidedly as a teacher of evil, Berlin suggests that his true value as a thinker comes from his commentary on the duel between the Roman Empire and early Christianity: two imperial, absolute belief systems and their world-pervading characters. Machiavelli articulated the fundamental conundrum of monism when he noted that there are no legitimate criteria for affecting a choice between two totalizing systems of moral belief that cover the entire scope of human life and offer equally motivating arguments for their respective defenses of human freedom. Historically this discourse has begun and ended with Berlin’s figure of the armed prophet, gifted with the greatest of insights that is always final and seeking to establish a utopia in our time. Under this banner of purpose, culture’s passage from anonymity to universalism can only become bound up in politics because it seeks universalism and, every step of the way, it is ethical and moral relativism that ensures this journey. Recall that Christianity began as an individual, anti-political, even quasi-anarchical faith committed at first to the original equality of all souls, under siege as it was by Roman and Jewish worldviews. To affect their faith’s development alongside its internal aspiration to the universal and to seize the chance to fulfil its promise of uniqueness, Matthew, Mark, John, and Luke could only believe in this special essence. And while their success destroyed the ancient freedom of enquiry and its comparative religious tolerance, Christianity as a newly enshrined, fully complicated universal would birth the individualism and universalism of later Roman traditions and ultimately of Western liberalism.

The complexity of our own world of deep pluralism, and its undeniable situation within a secular materialist ideology of market value, suggests that only within sweeping articulations of monist pluralism can generative forms of self-expression emerge, and it is only within such a world that they can exist. Emerging at first as but one monist system among many, Christianity because a universal cultural and religious system that birthed a set of plural traditions, only to realize its own relativity centuries later and it must still reckon with the Death of God, the same task bequeathed to every comparable universal system of religious conviction. And what good can a modern break from tradition bring without a serious revision of the expansive, all-consuming logic of plural cultural expression within a reality of autonomy, what if Deleuze and Guattari’s promise of reterritorializing cannot follow the brutal deterritorialization of industrial capital? Does freedom mean anything as the functional and metaphorical end of political, economic, and aesthetic human development if it leads to the suicidal self-negation of our very existence?

In closing, and in homage to the etymological origins of culture, I am inclined to reiterate Voltaire’s conviction that, even so, we must cultivate our garden.

The question is—Who?

  [1] GhaneaBassiri, K. & Robertson, P. (2019), All Religion is Inter-Religion: Engaging the Work of Steven M. Wasserstrom, Bloomsbury Press, London: pp. 9-14.

[2] Shaviro, S. (2009), Without Criteria: Kant, Deleuze, Whitehead, and Aesthetics, The MIT Press, Cambridge MA and London: pp. 3.

[3] Swingewood, A. (1998), Cultural Theory and the Problem of Modernity, St. Martin’s Press, New York: pp. xiii.

[4] I use the two terms interchangeably.

[5] Wasserstrom, S.M. (1999), Religion After Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ.

[6] Geertz, C. (1973), The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Books, New York: pp. 19.

[7] Tucker, R. (1978), The Marx-Engels Reader “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis-Napoleon,” W.W. Norton & Co. London and New York

[8] Gramsci, A. (2007), Prison Notebooks (three volumes), Columbia University Press, New York.