Monday, January 30, 2012

Culture and Reality

So I'm taking a Cultural Studies class in Graduate School. And so far the class is wonderful, but nothing frustrates me more than the concept of "Culture."

My favorite professor in Graduate School - well at least this go around (I did MA work in Boone where I met the incomparable Orus Barker) - is Dr. Stephen Yarbrough, who I think is brilliant. He has a wonderful book called After Rhetoric. In this book, well he does a lot of things, he takes Donald Davidson's critique of language, at least as understood by a certain brand of postmodernists and applies it to culture.

Okay, so here's Davidson's quotation.

"I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases. And we should try again to say how convention in any important sense is involved in language; or, as I think, we should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions."

Now, what Yarbrough does is substitute the word "Culture" for "Language." So he thinks neither Culture nor Language is what a group of Post-Moderns thought it was. That is to say, there is no medium between you and the world, between you and the Real.

So why does this matter? Well, it seems to me that if we assume a medium, whether it be language or culture, what you are ultimately saying is that Reality takes place inside your noggin. And that means you're a Cartesian. And well, that means your wrong.

Our reality is, OF COURSE, conditioned by culture, but to suggest that that means we have no access to The Real is really problematic.

I experience Reality. I don't experience a Representation of Reality. And that simple fact makes this whole thing quite a pickle.


3 comments:

  1. I assume you'll be reading Adorno at some point in your cult studies course. His essay with Horkheimer on "The Culture Industry" is canonical for the field. Unfortunately, you probably won't be reading his critiques of Kierkegaard, Husserl or Kant, which explicitly address the question your raising. I'll try to sum up his critique, but you're much better off going to the source on this one.

    Adorno approaches the issue of culture from the standpoint of the classic problematic of modern German philosophy: what is the relation between Subject and Object? With the exception of Hegel, German philosophers bracketed culture and history when attempting to answer this question. They believed that philosophy could discover the nature of this relationship as it exists for all time, irrespective of history and other external contingencies. Adorno, taking his cue from Marx's early writings and their later interpretation by Georg Luckacs, reads these ahistorical approaches to the subject/object question as expressions of a certain cultural/historical mode of production - with which he associates an attendant mode of cognition. He reads the problematic of subject/object and its interpretation in a fully abstracted, ahistorical context as the attendant philosophy of Bourgeois Capitalism: the true agent is the isolated, abstract individual, making rational choices with respect to an array of objects which exist in order to be manipulated/consumed by him. There's a more subtle and persuasive dialectical critique there that I'm missing so, again, you'll have to go to the source for that.

    To summarize, Adorno doesn't say that Kant misses reality because he fails to notice that his perspective is mediated by his culture. It's not a gotcha critique. His position is much more radical than that. He's saying that entire modes of subject/object relation emerge within distinct cultural/historical circumstances. There can be no consideration of reality or its mediation outside of a consideration of culture. In other words, the critique of culture - like the critique of pure reason in Kant - must be an immanent critique because culture is immediate, not mediate. By finding the antinomies in our practices, the logics of our era, we can trace the limits of our culture and its attendant epistemologies and even ontologies.

    Hopefully that's provocative enough to get you to check out Adorno's work. Obviously, I can't do his critique justice here.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for the thoughtful comments. Seriously. I'll reply at length tomorrow after some sleep.

      But yeah we read Adorno - I'd actually read Culture Industry years ago, but apparently forgot most of it. We just read Bordieu's Distinction and I really loved that - reminded me in some ways of Heidegger and Merleau Ponty if they were sociologists. And then in other ways not - I don't know if P.B believes in a direct, phenomenological interaction with art not mediated.

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  2. Oh and I really disagreed with Adorno's take on Jazz - I'm a musician, even played in a Jazz guitar duet a few years ago. I get what he's saying about the form being repetitive, but I think that's about the most reductive way to listen to jazz. A Charlie Parker solo is different than a Coltrane solo. That's where the difference comes in, even if it is usually an A-B-A form.

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