Culture in the Communication Age

James Lull

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134598601
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

What does it mean to live in the Communication Age? What has happened to culture in the Communication Age? What is the nature of culture today?
Culture in the Communication Age brings together some of the world's leading thinkers from a range of academic disciplines to discuss what 'culture' means in the modern era. They describe key features of cultural life in the 'communication age', and consider the cultural implications of the rise of global communication, mass media, information technology, and popular culture. Individual chapters consider:
* Cultures of the mind * Rethinking culture in a global context * Re-thinking Culture, from 'ways of life' to 'lifestyle' * Gender and Culture * Popular Culture and Media Spectacles * Visual Culture * Star Culture * Computers, the Internet and Virtual Cultures * Superculture in the Communication Age

Section Two
MAKING SENSE OF CULTURE

4
FROM WAYS OF LIFE TO LIFESTYLE

Rethinking culture as ideology and sensibility

David C. Chaney

I begin with the proposition that the concept of cultur e has been a key invention of social thought in the modern era; but I shall argue that, in the course of being extensively used, it has acquired new meanings. I shall further argue that as part of this process implied relationships between cultural forms and social forms have also necessarily changed. I shall argue that the concept of lifestyle is a good example of a new social form. Quite what we mean by lifestyles and some of the implications of this social form will be briefly explored. In particular I will suggest that a key element in the traditional discourse of culture, the value of authenticity, is now being understood less as an inherent quality of objects or actions and more as something produced in lifestyling. I will further suggest that these arguments are more generally an exploration of the implications of recognizing that the discourse of culture has been popularized.

I hope it is uncontroversial to begin by claiming that the concept of cultur e has been one of the fundamental building blocks of the social sciences. In trying to develop a language of social order and difference, social theorists have found it essential to think of a structure of attitudes, values, and normative expectations that lay behind or were implicit in the patterns of behavior that were characteristic of life in a community.

In order to see the strength of this idea, three points need to be emphasized. The first is that the orientations I have summarized as attitudes, values, and normative expectations were not peculiar to individuals but were shared within a community and formed a more or less coherent structure. That is, they existed somehow independently of actors’ minds and persisted through generations. The second point is that, although these orientations primarily determined forms of social interaction, they were also made visible or expressed in other aspects of communal life. These include religious ceremonies and symbolism, patterns of embellishment of elements of material culture such as clothes, food, and utensils, and were celebrated in customary dances, songs, and festivals. Third, what I have called the structure of values that informed behavior, or the sorts of reasons that could be given, was not explicit or selfconsciously discussed within the community. Structures of values and interpretations might indeed depend upon the analysis of an external observer in order to become apparent.¹

Culture thus becomes essential to the basic perspective of the human sciences. Culture provides a way of framing individual experience and action so that it can be understood indexically (that is actions can be linked to a context). Distinctive patterns in the organization of local customs can be recorded as ways of life that display the persistence of culture through generations; a notion of culture that is ‘descriptive of the whole pattern of representations of a recognizable and coherent group of people’ (Jenks 1993: 159). Cultures and communities are therefore mutually constitutive terms – each is established, if need be, by reference to the other. The same process holds true for individuals. Thus we find instances of culture in the performances and artifacts local actors produce, and we are able to explain their productions by reference to a culture that makes sense of what might otherwise seem irrational. Ways or forms of life are an essential bridge between individuals and culture that enable us to tell stories about the diversity and continuity of experience. When I say ‘us’ here, I do not mean just those of us involved in studying contemporary society, but all of us who are members of modern societies. The idea of culture becomes part of a general modern consciousness so that we all know how to use cultural themes to make sense of a puzzling world.²

I will now briefly describe some examples of the use of culture, plucked almost at random, to illustrate how flexibly it can be used. I will then suggest that this very flexibility disguises a crucial movement in the use of culture in an era of mass communication and entertainment.³ The first concerns a relative of mine who was married for some time to a Nigerian man. The family was distressed to discover that there had been some domestic tension leading to incidents of physical assault by the husband on his wife. In seeking to explain these incidents it was pointed out that the female partner was very independent. She was used to making her own judgments and then following them. Some family members felt that such independence was foreign to marriage customs in Nigerian culture, in particular the deference due to the status of the male head of household, and therefore that the husband had felt threatened. While it was agreed to be deplorable, his behavior was rendered less alarming, less shameful, by a context of imputed cultural tradition.

A second example concerns the story of an undergraduate student at my university who had been struggling for some time with an eating disorder. She had been unable to maintain her studies, or, more accurately had approached them with too high standards so that she couldn’t complete projects. Eventually the tension of struggling to keep up with academic expectations while becoming increasingly seriously undernourished had become so great that she had been forced to withdraw. When I discussed this case with colleagues it was suggested that her problem with food, her obsessional fear of obesity, was a consequence of cultural expectations. Cultural norms of slimness were displayed in advertisements, fashion photographs, and generally in the discourse of magazines so that a gullible reader, as perhaps this student was, felt forced to control and drive down her body weight.

The third example has become very familiar in most European cities. This is the situation of entrepreneurs creating ‘Irish’ drinking houses, pubs, as places that are attractive particularly to young people. I have put ‘Irish’ in quotation marks because the pubs are themed environments. They are built, or existing places are adapted, to represent an iconography of a traditional Irish village pub. The simulation is conveyed through seating, decor, signs, drinks, and possibly appropriate music played over a sound system. The pub may employ people who speak with an Irish accent, and occasionally sponsor live performances of traditional Irish songs and dances. These places are then offering a dramatization of a particular strand of Irish culture. While clearly not the real thing, as they are not located in an Irish village, they purport to be authentic. They employ a number of devices to represent or simulate an Irish cultural form that is recognizable and attractive to customers.

Each of these uses of culture can be criticized as not being very sophisticated and indeed could be condemned as superficial or even patronizing. The instances work though, it seems to me, as representative of the sorts of ways culture can be invoked in everyday life as a sense-making resource. Such a practical use is, however, not constrained by the way they also suffer from the more serious flaw that the culture that is invoked in each case has a curious status. It exists as something that is there, recognizable, has an existence – even effects – in the world and yet its power works for some and not others. The culture that is employed in these sorts of situations is a collective entity that is not co-terminous with a distinct social group. The umbilical link between culture and community that I mentioned above has been broken.⁴ In mass societies it has become apparent that there are a multiplicity of overlapping cultures with differing relationships with social actors, and with the further consequence that they can make sense in a number of different ways.

What I mean by this is that, as is evident in the examples briefly described, the sorts of ‘explanation’ culture can provide have different ramifications. For instance, the culture of slimness affecting the anorexic girl operates as a myth of a certain sort of beauty that idealizes largely unattainable norms for a majority of women. It therefore can be seen to have the effect of requiring women to strive against inevitable failure so that they fail to see or understand themselves as they really are. It therefore works as an ideological strategy that underpins male supremacy or patriarchal social relations (on ideology in a culture of mass communications, see Thompson 1990).

In contrast, the conceptualization of Nigerian, or perhaps more widely African or even black, masculinity trades on traditions of exploitation between white colonial powers and client Third World cultures. In these traditions natives are less civilized, certainly more traditional, than their colonizers so that, although one can pay tribute to the strength and autonomy of their culture, in doing so we are also covertly congratulating ourselves on our superiority. This type of cultural account can also be described as ideological in that it systematically distorts our perception of social relationships, but here we (I am writing as a white, middle-class academic) are not so much victims as beneficiaries – bolstered, rather than threatened, by culture as ideology.

In some respects the case of an Irish pub overlaps with Nigerian masculinity, particularly for a British customer, as it is impossible to separate perceptions of Irish culture from a history of colonial exploitation. That said, though, the international success of these themed environments suggests they are more usefully seen as instances of ‘McTourism’ (see Ritzer 1997 for his extension of the McDonaldization thesis to tourism). Carefully packaged and sanitized versions of other cultures can be employed, as in theme parks, to give an illusion of difference. Once again I suppose it is a form of ideology except that here the distortions primarily serve commercial ends.

The point I am making here is that the concept of culture acquires further layers of meaning as it is used in a multiplicity of sometimes contradictory ways in mass societies. As we develop and adapt an understanding of culture as something constitutive of a tribal or communal identity, or as equivalent to a national identity, then the idea loses its power to interpret social life as a totality. Culture becomes partial or, more accurately, it goes to work at a number of levels simultaneously. Cultural characteristics have become both how we identify ourselves and members of other social groups, and how those identities are replayed or re-presented in media discourse as prejudices rooted in the competing interests and socio-structural formations of privilege and disadvantage.⁵ I do not want to be side-tracked here by the associations of the term ‘ideology’ with Marxist traditions to concentrate on the extent to which contemporary cultural forms work to stabilize and perpetuate capitalist hegemony. Indeed much of what I am saying about the new social forms of late modernity implicitly rejects the presumptions made in those traditions about competing class interests locked in structural conflict. Instead, I want to emphasize the idea that, in adapting notions of culture to the dramas and entertainment of a mass-mediated environment, culture has become in effect a symbolic repertoire.

What I mean by this is that the signs, symbols, images, and artifacts through which the different cultures of late twentieth-century life are recognized and deployed in mundane interpretations of social life are grouped into genres or repertoires as particular sorts of performance – that is performances associated with particular groups or settings or ways of life. A repertoire is then a set of ways of symbolically representing identity and difference, with implied associations of characteristic attitudes, values, and norms, that form, if you like, a terrain for competing expectations. What is important is that the repertoire exists as a resource at a number of levels (that is individual perceptions as well as group prejudices as well as media stereotypes) simultaneously. It is in the interplay and contrasts between these levels that culture becomes ambiguous; something to be exploited in everyday life and not just used by ‘external’ analysts.

It may be objected that culture, at least in certain traditions of anthropological theorizing (see, for example, Geertz 1973), has always been understood as a symbolic repertoire. While this humanist interpretive tradition is still a valuable guide to research practice, Geertz could assume that in village societies the culture, or symbolic repertoire, was reasonably homogeneous and the boundaries of culture and community were largely co-terminus. The novelty I seek to describe is that not only are mass societies multicultural but the repertoires are used in different ways in different institutional contexts. The shift in the nature of the repertoire can be clarified by situations when ‘traditional’ cultures come into contact with the consumption of culture. When Balinese village dancers perform a ceremony not at a traditional location or on a traditional occasion but as a performance for tourists, or even more when they tour Europe and North America staging theatrical performances, the same symbolic event changes its meaning. It becomes a commodity, a source of entertainment, maybe even spiritual enhancement, for anonymous audiences. It becomes part of, or an element in, mass culture possibly appropriated randomly or unpredictably.

If one left it there the conclusion would be that contemporary culture is increasingly dominated by qualities of fragmentation and pastiche in ways that are often condemned as the superficiality of postmodern life. In this account the symbolism of Balinese religious traditions is able to be bracketed with the symbolism of Irish drinking traditions in a virtual cultural supermarket. I will go on to argue though that the burden of the supermarket metaphor is that, as with everyday shopping where people do not buy goods at random but put together distinctive sets of items, cultural choices are put together as styles.

Language and cultural symbolism

In order to bring out more fully what is involved in rethinking culture, I will explore the idea of symbolic repertoires of cultural heterogeneity by turning to an analogy between language and culture. I think it can be argued that throughout the twentieth century theorists used a model of language as a way of understanding how a culture ‘works’ although the relevance of language has been understood in a number of quite different ways. I have previously suggested (1996) that one can distinguish three main perspectives on how an analogy with language can be used to interpret the use of symbols as cultural artifacts. The first I have called symbolic exchange. From this perspective symbols (including the words of a language) are initially seen as types of representations of meanings and values in much the same way as units of currency are commonly taken to represent economic value. But meanings and values for the social theorist Georg Simmel and those influenced by him have vitality only in networks of relationships. The circulation of fashionable items is a way of marking inclusion as well as exclusion. It is therefore a way of playing with creativity that is equivalent to the creativity of language use (on Simmel and fashion see Gronow 1997).

In the second perspective, most commonly associated with the French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, a symbolic repertoire is approached as a form of capital (Bourdieu 1984). In the same way that mastery of a language is associated with high status and is a means of aggressively reminding inferiors of their lack of skills, mastery of cultural or symbolic capital enables high-status groups both to display their privileges and to manipulate cultural vocabularies to the continual disadvantage of those with fewer cultural resources. The metaphor of cultural capital can therefore be used to explain the persistence of established structures of privilege through generations, and to illuminate the distinctive expertise of new strata of intellectuals who have been generated by shifts in the dominant modes of production from industrial goods to information and design skills (Lash and Urry 1987, 1994).

The third perspective begins one can say with the deficiencies of language. In the same way that in mass society we do not have a single culture, neither do we speak a single language. Within a general group such as English we are forced to recognize a variety of styles and variants colored by borrowings and adaptations so that English speakers comprise a number of speech communities. And again these communities are no longer clearly distinct or homogeneous. It is clear that whether or not we possess an innate linguistic competence that enables us to grasp rules of grammar and structure, in everyday interaction we display a communicative – or in this context we could say a ‘cultural’ – competence so that the process of symbolic use is patterned by loose forms or styles (the title of this third perspective is then ‘symbolic styles’). The crucial feature of this perspective is that cultural symbols are used more or less self-consciously in the course of which they are adapted and transformed. It follows that meaning is not something ‘there’ in what we say or do or in the world around us to be appreciated correctly or not, but is something made in the politics of social practice. Although the cultures of mass society frequently concern ‘material’ entities, for example the goods of mass consumption, in the process of using these entities they are in important ways ‘dematerialized’, destabilized, made into forms of representation (Chaney 1998).

The perspectives on the analogy with language for cultural symbolism I have just outlined are not mutually exclusive. They are not set out as a set of choices but rather to indicate how we might begin to understand the relationships between culture and society in an era of mass communication and entertainment. On the one hand I have noted how cultural symbols have become commodities marketed as decor and taste as well as experience (the most elaborate and possibly the most developed form this marketing takes is in the various modes of the tourist industry; see for examp...