CULTURE: FROM INTEGRATION TO DISINTEGRATION
The same kind of emphasis on bounded and coherence traditionally
dominated the sociological treatment of the idea of culture, even though this was
potentially, and indeed has become, the idea through which the transitory nature
of social arrangements can most easily be represented. Indeed ‘culture’ has become something of a watchword for those who document the decline of
recognizable social entities and the disintegration of society itself.
The source of the shift in the sociological interpretation of culture can be
found in the inherent tension which was at the heart of Raymond Williams’
project, namely ‘to reconcile the meanings of culture as “creative activity” and
“a whole way of life”’ (Williams [1961] 1984:56). In the functionalist paradigm
of sociology ‘the way of life’ tracked the course of community and became its
ideal counterpart.
This paradigm was reinforced by its incorporation in a dichotomy which was
celebrated in German social theory, namely between Kultur and Zivilisation. The
latter paralleled the development of Gesellschaft and was associated with
technical progress. As one much read theorist of the 1920s put it when
commenting on Oswald Spengler: ‘civilisation is a gift which may pass to
unworthy generations, culture is a realisation which none can share but those to
whom it really belongs’ (Maclver 1928:437). The creative aspect of culture was
thus linked with the essential characteristics of a group, embedded in a group,
separating it from the wider world, where rationality held sway. Even an
iconoclast like McLuhan (1962) could not resist exploiting the parallelism of
community and culture when he invoked the ‘Global Village’.
Margaret Archer (1988) argues that culture has been, and still is, one of the
vaguest and most vacillating of concepts in sociological analysis. None the less
the ‘myth of cultural integration’ (to be seen in an archetype of culture as
perfectly woven, all-enmeshing web) she states has: ‘Projected an image of
culture which proved so powerful that it scored the retina, leaving a perceptual
after-image, which distorted subsequent perception’ (Archer 1988:2). The myth
was nurtured above all by the assimilation of anthropological perspectives into
the functionalist paradigm for modern societies. The result was that where
instances of minority detachment from mainstream culture were manifest, the
paradigm was preserved by engaging in the ethnography of the ‘sub-culture’ in
which the assumptions of separateness, boundaries and essential nature were
reproduced. Integration remained the core issue as this definition of sub-culture
suggests:
a sub-division of a national culture, composed of a combination of factorable
social situations such as class status, ethnic background, regional and rural
or urban residence, and religious affiliation, but forming in their
combination a functioning unit which has an integrated impact on the
participating individuals.
(Gordon [1944] in Gould and Kolb 1964:167–8)
In other words ‘sub-culture’ is offered as a device to recognize diversity, whilst
reducing the pluralism of its possibilities, by making it an integrated part of an
integrated whole (cf. Boudon and Bourricaud 1989:95–6).
More recent work in the cultural studies tradition has tended to focus upon
‘popular culture’ defined not (just) by what sells, but by a sense of the
oppositional, which can easily be coded, for example, into the street style of subcultural
groups. In the much more ‘mobile’ streetwise world of Dick Hebdige
(1988) we are offered a definition of culture that challenges the myth of cultural
integration. In part of an essay devoted to an analysis of the rapid turnover of
consumption of musical styles and forms he argues that:
It no longer appears adequate to confine the appeal of these forms… to the
ghetto of discrete, numerically small subcultures. For they permeate and
help organise a much broader, less bounded territory where cultures,
subjectivities, identities impinge on each other.
(Hebdige 1988:212)
This is an important break away from the notion of culture as a way of life. Hebdige
criticizes the use of the idea of mass culture and is more likely to use notions of
youth cultures or (more especially) popular culture. But a recent article shows
how difficult it is to avoid introducing the idea of cultural integration by default.
Frow has thoroughly criticized the concept of popular culture as conceived by
practitioners in the cultural studies field. He argues that the concept of ‘the
popular’ actively elides the distinction between three different senses of the
popular. The first being the ‘market notion’ of what we might call capitalist
common sense, the second a ‘descriptive notion’ being all the things that ‘the
people’ do or have done, the third is the sense favoured by cultural studies. Frow
describes the essential features of this favoured notion as ‘the relations which
define “popular culture” in a continuing tension (relationship, influence,
antagonism) to the dominant culture’ (Frow 1992:26–7).
That ‘continuing tension’ is still defined in relation to a dominant culture. But
the other two notions Frow mentions potentially escape this context. The
development of the market and modern media technology partake of the creative, disruptive connotations of the old notion of culture. Linked with the
idea of the active initiatives of ordinary people, culture takes on an unbounded
quality in which media, rather than essence, shapes the object of intellectual
interest. The way is open for new, non-integrative formulations of the idea of
culture. We have an example in John Thompson’s Ideology and Modern Culture
(1990): ‘Cultural phenomena, according to this conception, may be understood
as symbolic forms in structured contexts; and cultural analysis may be construed
as the study of the meaningful constitution and social contextualisation of
symbolic forms’ (Thompson 1990:123). By recognizing the mobility of symbolic
forms Thompson has started to articulate a critique of the integration myth, as he
had earlier done of the ‘fallacy of internalism’ in relation to ideology (ibid.: 24).
Effectively he is reducing the meaning of ‘culture’ to an empty label since it
adds nothing to an analysis which is entirely adequately conducted in terms of
the ideas of meaning, symbolism, symbolic form, and by relating those concepts
to the social contexts in which meaning is encountered, produced and so on. At
the same time Thompson recognizes that such an analysis must be seen in
relation to the history of the production and circulation of symbolic forms, by
now a global operation. This disaggregation of the concept of culture means that
its elements can be separable components in a commercialized media production
process on a world scale.
Globalization or globalizing practices mean changes in social and material
existences of the modern world such that new connections between places are
forged and the world as a whole is articulated as the appropriate arena in which
to pursue marketing, intellectual, environmental and other practices. There are
profound implications for the notion of culture.
Mike Feathers tone in his introduction to the collection Global Culture (1990)
speculates about the possibility of a global culture, the existence of ‘third
cultures’, and trans-societal cultural processes, all of which challenge lazy
associations of culture and national identity and simple associations of culture
and territoriality. Globalizing processes have raised to the forefront of our
thought experiences of borders, ‘multi-culturalism’ within a locality, and hybrids
as products of post-coloniality (Gupta and Ferguson 1992:7–8).
These changes in social and material existences demand new forms and modes
of analysis, and to some extent this is being achieved. When Ulf Hannerz assents
to there being a world culture he means that it has become ‘one network of social
relationships’ (Hannerz 1990:237). This world culture is created, he argues,
‘through the increasing connectedness of varied local cultures, as well as
through…cultures without a clear anchorage in any one territory’ (ibid.). These are
all, he asserts, ‘becoming subcultures…within the wider whole; cultures which
are…better understood in the context of their cultural surroundings than in
isolation’ (ibid.)
But we can still see the problem here that these ‘cultures’ seem to remain
untouched by an internal problem, any recognition of the pluralism within a
‘culture’. Rather, they merely respond to a wider cultural framework, within which they have their operation and gain their meanings. In the same volume
Appadurai (1990) is more successful in moving us away from the realm of
cultures qua culture by exploring a framework for the disjunctures between
economy, culture and politics. He analyses global cultural flows in terms of five
perspectival dimensions called ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes,
finanscapes and ideoscapes and develops ideas whereby the speed and
hallucinatory quality of some aspects of modern societies may be articulated.
Near the end of his essay he argues that the central feature of global culture today
is: ‘the politics of the mutual effort of sameness and difference to cannibalize
one another and thus proclaim their successful hijacking of the twin
Enlightenment ideas of the triumphantly universal and the resiliently particular
(Appadurai 1990: 307–8). What is most interesting about this is that, what John
B.Thompson (1990) called the classical conception of culture is the origin of our
modern senses of culture and has set the agenda for all discussions of and ‘in’
culture. As Darcy has argued of the Enlightenment origins of the concept of
culture:
the individuals’ world was expanding along the axes of both space and
time; the environment was becoming more complex, and l