The notion of culture is, of course, central to cultural studies, but getting cultural studies scholars to define, much less agree on a definition of, culture is much like getting communication researchers to agree on a definition of communication. The slipperiness of the concept is part of its mystique, and ultimately struggles over the meaning of culture are one of the main drives not only of cultural work but of society itself (cf. Williams, 1958 et al.). So not pinning the term down in an operative definition is productive, ultimately, but damned frustrating. Partly this is because it is very easy to define culture circularly or to skip the definition and keep the term as "understood." There are at least two ways that we can approach a theory of culture: one is an analysis of the current and historical uses of the term "culture" in social discourses, opening them up to reveal the workings of society, and so to intervene in them; a second approach would be to produce uses of the term "culture," concept creation. By this latter I do not mean concepts as abstractions or ideas, but concepts in a more deleuzoguattarian sense as events. Both approaches have their place, and are not as different as they might seem.

But the purpose of this column is not to parse this difference, it is, rather, to put out there a definition of culture, say why I like it, see what people think and to start a dialogue on the listserv. What works, what doesn't, where is it off track, where is it too banal for words, where does it stop being recognizably about culture, where does it stop being productive, etc.?

The definition comes from articulating Raymond Williams and Henri Lefebvre (Raymond, meet Henri; Henri, Raymond). I've just finished teaching (again) Williams' 1958 essay, "Culture is Ordinary," an essay I find quite evocative and unabashedly hopeful and I am always pleased to return to it. The essay is Williams' impassioned argument against the reification and stratification of culture by (and through) higher education, which assumes that just a few are chosen to have the ability to understand and take advantage of culture, and the rest (the masses) are uncultured and unprepared, and simply unable to deal with poetry, criticism, etc. Williams, coming from a working class background, takes this personally as the elite "cultured" in society calling his friends and family stupid. He also argues, though more peripherally, against what he terms a dangerous new class of men, advertisers, who likewise see that masses as easily manipulated dupes. Williams is insulted. "There are in fact no masses," he famously intones, "but only ways of seeing people as masses" (1989/58: 11).

To argue against these ideas of high, elite culture, he boldly (for the time) states that "culture is ordinary." In saying this he is not falling into a romanticism of the popular, holding up as equal or better to high culture either folk or mass culture because he says culture is two things which must be grasped together: culture is a tradition which we are handed, and a whole way of life (what we do with the tradition that we are handed, what we take up, what we get rid of). Culture is inherently creative; it is the making of minds. The tradition's half of the balance may be simply the traditions of family and community which we are born into ("the known meanings and directions, which its members are trained to" [4]), but these traditions may also include "the best that has been thought and said," as Matthew Arnold put it, though crucially Williams argues that such creations are "a common inheritance" and not to be restricted by any means (7). "These are the ordinary processes of human societies and human minds, and we see through them the nature of a culture: that it is always traditional and creative; that it is both the most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings" (4).

Now, there are certainly issues with Williams, and with this definition of culture, and with "culture is ordinary." How representative was Williams of working class experience, is "a whole way of life" inherently resistant and creative, when Williams calls the purpose of education the production of a common culture, whose culture becomes common, etc.? But let me take from Williams the following: culture is texts (thought broadly; arts and learning, known meaning and directions) and what is done with those texts (how they are lived and therefore tested against experience).

Enter Henri Lefebvre. In his book, The Production of Space, Lefebvre presents three ways of thinking about space: spatial practice, representations of space, and representational space (or, more briefly, space as it is perceived, conceived, and lived.) Spatial practice "embraces production and reproduction, and the particular locations and spatial sets characteristic of each social formation. Spatial practice ensures continuity and some degree of cohesion. In terms of social space, this cohesion implies a guaranteed level of competence and a specific level of performance" (1991: 33). We might hear in this the echoes of the first half of Williams' definition. Representations of space are abstract, conceptualized space, a plane of concepts (i.e., modern social space is constructed around concepts of efficiency, newness/revolution, technicism, etc.). Representational space (or, better and more literally, spaces of representation) is "space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of inhabitants and 'users'" (39). Thinking this arrangement, or triad, of overlapping spaces back through Williams we could say that culture is the particular arrangement of relations between these three concepts in any particular social space. Culture is not a symbolic structure (i.e., a text) and is not solely "meaning making," which is what it is commonly reduced to. Culture exists in that symbolic structure's links with social spatial practices and the way that symbolic structure is articulated with the dominant conceptual scheme (i.e., is it resistant to or resonant with that scheme? And are either or both the practiced and symbolic resistant? Etc.). The same text (i.e., Mah Jongg) might circulate in different ways under different conceptual skies. Lefebvre says that representations of space are the dominant space, perhaps because concepts, rather than being detached from context are embedded and embodied in social space and are crucial in shaping our epistemic horizons. Spaces of representations are more passive spaces (we move through spaces of symbols which are not necessarily of our own making) within which we struggle.

I've said all this before (1997), but only peripherally, as a gesture on the way to talk about technology, or social space more generally, but not so much about culture itself. What I like about this configuration is that it ties culture to ideas of habit and space, to the living of broader structures of practices, concepts, and symbols, but recognizing that these broader structures only exist in these individual iterations, in the moment of the lived, as repetitions and habits, as a bringing into resonance of disparate events. Culture as residual and emergent (Williams, again) spaces, and so on.

But all this makes culture more elusive than ever. We have returned to some of the earlier definitions of culture (cf. Williams, 1983), since it is no longer a thing (a noun) but a process. But it is not a process of cultivating, because that old term is too intentional, deterministic, and teleological (and passive, if you are what is being cultivated). Culture is a process of becoming, a shared habit of becoming in world which is both symbolic and not, corporeal and incorporeal. Culture is a habitual relation between (at least) three processes (perceived, conceived, lived space), a complexity which Williams would appreciate and which he tried to build into his definition of cultural theory work: "the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life" (1961: 46). A key to this study is the discovery not only of "the nature of the organization which is the complex of these relationships" but of patterns (46-47) (in more deleuzian language, fields of resonances, repetitions, rhythms, which could lead us back through Lefebvre's more directly spatial notion of rhythmanalysis [1996], and so on).

So where do we go from here? We could begin with a question that one of my students asked at the end of my recent class on "Culture is Ordinary." That question, prompted by a discussion of Williams' borrowing of the connection between economics and culture from the Marxists, was this: "What would Williams have thought of Las Vegas?" My flip answer was that if, as Williams states at one point, he got headaches from being inundated by advertising and the symbols of consumer culture when passing through London in the mid-1950s, he would hardly have survived the trip. A more considered answer would begin by avoiding the quick and easy dismissal of Las Vegas as a playground for the masses (there are in fact no masses, after all) and focusing on the multiple triangulations (for there are many, many cultures to Las Vegas) of practices, conceptions, and symbols. To consider how people move through and make sense of those spaces.

That's something to think about, at any rate.

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References

Lefebvre, Henri (1991). The production of space. Trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

_____ (1996). Writings on cities. Trans. & Ed. By Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Williams, Raymond (1961). The long revolution. New York: Oxford UP.

_____ (1983). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society (rev. ed). New York: Columbia UP.

_____ (1989). Culture is ordinary. In Resources of hope: Culture, democracy, socialism. Robin Gable (ed.). New York: Verso, 3-18. Originally published 1958 in Norman Mackenzie, MacGibbon and Gee (eds.) Convictions.

Wise, J. Macgregor (1997). Exploring technology and social space. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.