CULTURE

The production and circulation of sense, meaning and consciousness. The sphere of meaning,
which unifies the spheres of production (economics) and social relations (politics). In other
words, culture is the sphere of reproduction not of goods but of life. If you are planning to use
the term culture as an analytical concept, or if you encounter its use, it is unlikely that you
will ever be able to fix on just one definition that will do for all such occasions. However, it
will often be possible to use or read the word clearly and uncontroversially: Welsh culture,
youth culture, a cultured person, Victorian culture, working-class culture, intellectual culture;
or even a cultured pearl, bacterial culture, agriculture, cultivation of the soil. The trouble arises
when you notice that even in these examples the term culture seems to mean half-a-dozen
different things. What on earth do all these things share that can be encompassed by the single
term?
The answer is that there is no necessary connection. The term culture is multi-discursive;
it can be mobilised in a number of different discourses. This means you cannot import a fixed
definition into any and every context and expect it to make sense. What you have to do is
identify the discursive context itself. It may be the discourse of nationalism, fashion,
anthropology, literary criticism, viticulture, Marxism, feminism, cultural studies or even
common sense. In each case, cultures meaning will be determined relationally, or negatively,
by its differentiation from others in that discourse, and not positively, by reference to any
intrinsic, self-evident or fixed properties.
Culture as a concept is historical: its established senses and uses result from its usage
within various discourses. It stems, originally, from a purely agricultural root: culture as
cultivation of the soil, of plants, culture as tillage. By extension, it encompasses the culture of
creatures from oysters to bacteria. Cultivation such as this implies not just growth but also
deliberate tending of natural stock to transform it into a desired cultivar a strain with
selected, refined or improved characteristics.
Applying all this to people, it is clear that the term offers a fertile metaphor for the
cultivation of minds the deliberate husbandry of natural capacities to produce perfect rulers.
It is not without significance that this usage of the term roughly coincided with the
establishment of the first stage of the modern market economy early agrarian capitalism in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The production of a strain of men who are not
naturally (by divine right of succession) fitted to rule but who are nevertheless powerful is
made sense of, by those men themselves and for the benefit of others, by the systematic
dissemination of the metaphor of culture.
However, the early hegemony of the aristocratic land-owning capitalists was subjected
by the nineteenth century to the altogether more disruptive development of urban, industrial
and commercial capital. No sooner was culture established as a term that referred freely to
rulers without echoes of rhizomes than economic and political changes began to challenge the
naturalised right of the cultured to rule. Entrepreneurial and imperial capitalism appeared to be
no respecter of culture. Instead, the term was denounced by Marx (culture which means works
of wonder for the rich also means rags and corruption for the poor), and apparently ignored by
the capitalist and middle classes alike. It was left to the intelligentsia, especially its liberalconservative, moralist-humanist literary element, to take up the concept. Here, during the midnineteenth century, it began to be honed into a quite precise notion, one which is still
influential today.
Culture was established, especially by Matthew Arnold and his followers, as the pursuit
not of material but of spiritual perfection via the knowledge and practice of great literature,
fine art and serious music. Since the goal was perfection, not just understanding, and

spiritual, not material, culture was seen as the training of discrimination and appreciation
based on responsiveness to the best that has been thought and said in the world. The cultural
critics strove then to prescribe and establish a canon of what exactly could be counted as the
best. But such critics also tended to see themselves as an embattled community struggling
against the encroachments of material civilization and scientific technology to preserve the
sweetness and light of culture and disseminate it to the benighted denizens of mass society. In
such a climate it is not surprising to find that the treasures of culture are assumed to belong to
a pre-industrial past and a non-industrial consciousness. Modern proponents of this concept of
culture as embattled perfection have been influential in offering an ideology to highly placed
elites in government, administrative, intellectual and even broadcasting circles within which
their sectional interests can be represented as general interests.
Culture has not yet recovered from this history. The concept itself has undergone a
period of decolonisation. It is argued by those who object to the elitist notion of culture that it
dispossesses most people, leaving a cultured few and an uncultured majority. Further, there
seems to be an uncanny degree of fit between this division of culture and other social divisions
for instance, those of class, gender and race. It seems that the cultural critics discourse of
excellence works not so much to preserve timeless and universal treasures but, much more
immediately albeit less obviously, to translate class and other kinds of social primacy into
cultural capital. The struggle to dismantle the supremacy of elite, high English culture was
championed first by Hoggart (1957) and Williams (1958). Their initiative has been taken up in
the form of cultural studies, in which the concept of culture has undergone a radical
transformation, moving towards the formulation offered at the beginning of this entry. Since
the late 1960s the notion of culture has been reworked largely in terms of Marxist, feminist and
multiculturalist approaches. Although the issues have by no means been clarified, let alone
resolved, they can be stated. Culture is now seen as a determining, not just a determined, part
of social activity, and therefore culture is both a significant sphere for the reproduction of
social power inequalities and a major component of the expanding world economy.
NATURE
The material world as a whole together with its determining forces; the inherent or essential
qualities of an object which determine its form, substance and behaviour. Because it is a
multidiscursive concept which defies attempts to give it a precise referent, the term should be
used with care in analytical work. At the very least the nature of an object, or the material
world of nature, or the word nature itself, should not be taken as self-evident with respect to
any qualities, properties or characteristics whatsoever: these natures are the object of study, not
the premise.
Nature is often contrasted with culture; the non-human as opposed to the human.
However, this non-human nature is often taken to be an inherent or essential quality of the
human itself as in human nature. In such usages the concept appears ultimately to be a
secularisation of the category of God a non-human agency which is beyond our control but
which determines our characteristics and behaviour. In this sense, nature is an ideological
category.
The other main way in which nature is used in analytical discourses is as the material
properties of an object. Hence the nature of something is contrasted with whatever conceptions
of it might be available (the nature of the planet earth is contrasted with conceptions of it as
flat). Nature in this sense is the proper object of study for science: the attempt to reveal or
discover by analysis the true nature (determining properties) of an object of study.
[John Hartley, 2002, Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The Key Concepts, London & New York, Routledge.]