Culture: contested!

An unusually fast follow-up; naturally, it’s exam time and anything to procrastinate. Not even a cancelled internet connection keeps me from spending my time in any other way than reading inconclusive and irrelevant articles about the theatre of Genet by some random French sociologist.

Screencap is courtesy of guardian.co.uk. I couldn't write something like that.

 Anything to keep me from taking notes about the nature of culture and the cultivated nature, webs of significance, passive consumers, active authors and dead cocks, in the literal sense. I do not see the point in learning something that by definition, cannot be defined, or has at least, so far, not been defined by anybody in a satisfying way. Essentially, I team up with Sisyphus and help him push his stone up the mountain, with the added bonus of having my liver eaten out every now and again – or was that Prometheus. My Greek mythology like my theory of culture is a site of convergence, like culture itself, according to Stuart Hall. Everything merges and flows and escapes (most of it escapes my memory, actually) to leave me with the prevailing sentiment of despair. I am not alone: Facebook tells me that my fellow students suffer equally as hard as I do, albeit in a more public way than I, excluding this rant, which I expect no one to read. Communal suffering than links perfectly with one of the many theories of culture: rumor has it that cultural texts are not created by the one, but by the many. Social practices are interrelated and together form what we understand as culture. Perhaps. The main reason for my despair lies in the ‘perhaps’ that precedes and follows every single theory I encounter – theories of culture come with a reservation, like Euromillion numbers, the reservation that there might be a mistake in the theory and that the lot could be deconstructed within the blink of an eye. Haha, very funny. I look at the pile of paper that is ten weeks worth of cultural bullshitting, and counting, and wonder whether this exam is not a way of justifying ourselves. Like lawyers and doctors, we are forced to write exams because it makes culture and theories of culture quantifiable. We finally can translate culture into marks and grades, mistakes and definitions and thereby legitimize it within the numerous fields of academic practice. We are told that the exam is not about expression, quotations or perfect knowledge; nor is it about grammar; it is about our understanding of culture.

Marshall McLuhan - The Medium is the Message

My understanding is that we’re given a couple of vague questions and have to formulate equally blurry answers to those, while remaining close to the canonical texts – and despite of what they say, they want clear formulations of what we’ve read. Generally I like incoherent, messy, and pointless tasks, but this exam seems a first class example in pointlessness. What they want us to reproduce is what Stuart Hall has called theoretical noise, a sort of Bee Gees-techno mash-up of Beethoven’s Ninth with vocals provided by Andrea Boccelli and a guitar solo by Eric Clapton. Not that I wouldn’t want to hear it, but the task seems futile and the assembly of the different components rather difficult. Mind you, Eric Clapton would do anything for money. The resulting noise then is nothing more than one strand of the culture theories, a speck in the landscape of philosophizing sociologists, literary ethnographers, empirical critics, and clueless students. The irony is that in a different context, namely my academic career, this exam is more than just a speck – it is the make or break of 5 years of academia. Everything I’ll do in the future, whether I graduate or not, depends on this exam. In a way, I’m being very barbarous about it, to say it with Bourdieu. I concentrate on the small details of my life and want to see every single one of my actions justified, so that I can feel better about my lower middle-class existence. So, where does this leave me? I have to write this exam if I want to gain my degree – I have a choice to not write it, but it is a false choice, to say it with Benjamin, I could not write this exam, but that would mean that I’d isolate myself and I’d loose all the privileges tied to my status as a student, and possibly a lot of people would just forget me without questioning that I ever existed. I’d have to find my way for myself, without the help of fellow students. Great, so it’s either exclusion or two hours of my life trying to figure out what on earth they want me to write.