Am I a Part of Culture?

Another question related to what it means to be 'part' of a culture is that of what it might mean to be a 'member' of a culture: this usage can be seen, for example, in Young ('Object appropriation occurs when the possession of a tangible work of art... is transferred from members of one culture to members of another culture' (Cultural Appropriation and the Arts, p. 6)) and in an introductory anthropology textbook by Jerry D. Moore ('For Kroeber... [c]hanges in some dimensions of a culture... may actually be governed by a superorganic oscillation that occurs unbeknownst to the individual members of a culture... For Benedict, cultures... have a distinctive essence because key values are learned by individuals as members of particular cultures.' (Visions of Culture, p. 63)). If cultures have parts, and cultures have members, then it seems natural to infer that a member of a culture is a part of that culture; but it seems also plausible that here we have become entangled in the multiple ways in which the word 'culture' may be used. Perhaps to refer to a group as a culture is a way of saying that it has a 'culture' in another sense of the word: that the group is defined culturally.

Do I, then, wish to say that a culturally defined group is distinct from the culture that defines it, or that the 'parts' of that culture include not only what the group's members do that characterises 'their' culture, but the doers themselves as well? When I try to bring to mind particular persons whom we might wish to say were constitutive of British culture, I find myself coming up with people whose 'cultural' credentials seem defined by their public roles: the Queen qua Sovereign; Churchill qua historical figure; Shakespeare qua author of the set of plays and sonnets we group together as 'the works of Shakespeare'; Morecambe and Wise qua much-loved comedians; and so on. These people – like artefacts, practices and so on – seem 'cultural' by virtue of the role they play for others, rather than on account of qualifying for 'membership' of British culture in the sense that Britons generally may be said to—British culture being shared amongst the population at large, including the altogether less famous majority of us.

Yet on the other hand, the place of Morecambe and Wise in our culture is clearly bound up with their particular personalities and accomplishments in a way that cannot be reduced to the role of 'comedian': nobody would say that another professional comedy duo was interchangeable with Eric and Ernie. That sort of inescapable particularity, moreover, seems to saturate the ways in which we encounter 'cultural' things generally: take this copy of The Book of Disquiet next to me, for example, which I know Jeff didn't care for but have suggested to Amanda that she might enjoy, wonder occasionally how Maria might appraise, and so on. It's such local reactions in aggregate, in which experience of the work itself is in no way divorced from one's particular situation and relations with other people, that make up the 'popular response' to a work. Of course, often it's the aggregate response with which we are concerned, and so we recall how Hume's Treatise 'fell dead-born from the press' as most of the world ignored it, and how Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther was received with a 'Werther fashion..., a Werther fever, a Werther epidemic, a longing for suicide' (Unseld & Northcott, Goethe and His Publishers, p. 21); but none of this goes on apart from individual responses to works and to each other.

If we want to say – and presumably we do – that what we understand 'culture' to be includes not only creative works themselves but also how a community defined by its culture receives, interprets, reinterprets, appraises, recommends, criticises, exchanges and otherwise uses them, then we do have a lot to say about how 'culture' includes the ways in which people whose culture it is live their lives—and I haven't even begun on practices not connected to the arts. Hence, of course, the diversity of usages which makes this enquiry problematic to begin with:

If you ask a simple question such as 'is toothpaste part of culture?' then [Johann Gottfried] Herder would say 'definitely not, though maybe it is part of civilisation'. [Matthew] Arnold would also say no, adding, however, that the toothpaste deployed by Pam Germ in her prize-winning 'Portrait of a Tape-Worm' is part, though perhaps a regrettable part, of the national culture. The professor of cultural studies will probably reply 'of course toothpaste is part of culture', since after all toothpaste is a way in which people form and express their social identity and the decision to use or not to use it is a decision directed towards others. (Imagine America without toothpaste!)
Roger Scruton, Modern Culture, p. 4

If it is an argument for the status of toothpaste as part of 'culture' that if we imagine a place, such as America, without it then we shall perceive such differences in people's ways of forming and expressing their social identities, then it seems to follow that we have an even stronger case for considering people themselves to be part of culture: imagine America without people! (Or merely – a Berkeleian restriction – without other people.) There is clearly a significant place for other people in our ways of forming and expressing our social identities, from family identity onwards.

So we have a prima facie case, if not yet a watertight one, for thinking 'culture' may not be wholly distinct from persons. It seems unlikely, however, that we shall soon see the Waverley Criteria invoked to impose an export ban on Alan Bennett, even though

[h]e is, according to the papers, a national treasure. Also a 'national teddy bear' (Francis Wheen), 'prose laureate' (David Thomson), 'curmudgeon laureate' (Mark Jones), and Oracle of Little England (Matthew Norman).
Guardian

Obviously, we have independent grounds for not treating people like artefacts (and perhaps a slave-owning society would take a different view); but it is precisely the fact that we do resist treating people merely as resources – but can extend the title of 'national treasure' to Mr. Bennett nevertheless – that makes me continue to wonder whether our conceptions of personhood are indeed reconciliable with a view of people as parts of the stuff of culture. Although on the other hand, I'd be among the first to deny that cultural heritage in general amounts merely to a kind of resource.

Penumbra Policing

• Wednesday, 27th August 2008: Civilian policing 'is half-baked'

  A scheme which gives "policing" powers to civilians in England and Wales has been described as "half-baked" by the Police Federation... And the Tories said the government was obsessed "with policing on the cheap".

• Monday, 10th November 2008: Human trafficking unit to disband

  A London police unit dedicated to tackling human trafficking will close after the Home Office withdrew £2.3m funding support... Critics say the unit is vital to protecting vulnerable men, women and children who are sold or lured into the sex trade, slavery or illegal working.

• Tuesday, 25th November 2008: WI asked to help tackle sex trade

  The minister for women has asked Women's Institute (WI) members across England to help root out sleazy adverts in their local newspapers... The WI is encouraging its members to pass on details to the organisation, although it has yet to decide what it will do with the information... Spokeswoman Ira Arundell said the WI had the option to "name and shame" newspapers which published such adverts...

About These Parts

I've been putting off defining 'culture', for the purposes of my research, for long enough; I need a minimal account of what it is, since with so many competing conceptions of 'culture' it would clearly be foolhardy to rely on any one of them, but I can hardly rely heavily on the term without offering some explanation of what I understand it to imply, and over a year into a three-year research project I ought to be able to offer a reasonable account of it. My attempt to approach the matter through the question of what it means to be 'part' of a culture has been, thus far, less revealing than I'd hoped, but it's still probably the most promising option for my non-lexicographical requirements, so I'm going to look at some neighbouring questions.

Hypothesis: if x is 'part' of culture C, material about x is also part of culture C.

One of my tendencies has been to treat reports about x, commentary on x, etc., where x is a 'cultural item', as themselves cultural items by virtue of their connection to x, and indeed as not wholly distinct from x. This will appear more immediately plausible in some cases than in others: I think it will be generally agreed that the place of Shakespeare in our culture, for example, is heavily structured and perpetually modified in part by the huge array of critical work which surrounds the plays. (This plausibly applies irrespective of where a given item of criticism was written and what the critic's cultural background was.) We don't have access to some kind of raw essence of the works of Shakespeare, but we do have the ability to engage in practices of critique. On the face of it, then, it seems an attractive inference that not only Shakespeare's corpus but the surrounding critical corpus, too, is part of British culture. (That Shakespeare's writings are 'part' of British culture is for the purposes of the argument taken as a given, hopefully a plausible enough one.)

Matters look less intuitively plausible if we move to a cross-cultural example. Suppose a British anthropologist writes, as an academic visitor from outside, on the culture of a people native to the Amazon basin. The anthropological writing will be about a culture (D), but any suggestion that the anthropology is itself part of D seems on the face of it to conflict with the express status of the anthropologist as a visitor from outside and a member of a quite different cultural group. (Here I assume that during his stay the anthropologist did not, according to his hosts' conception of what counts as membership of their people, do anything which might have led him to qualify as even an honorary member.) One might perhaps agree with Cuno that 'every nation's culture... includes elements of foreign cultures with which its peoples have come into contact' (Who Owns Antiquity?, pp. 117 – 8) and nevertheless doubt that a work about D is part of D, despite the central role of contact between cultures in the work's creation.

Perhaps the accessibility to the Amazonian people of the anthropological work is significant: if they never discover what was said of them, their culture remains insulated from the anthropologist's publication, whereas if they do read it their self-image is potentially affected. (Their own self-understanding will presumably be adequate for their purposes without additions from outside. For that matter we should not feel, if Coleridge had never branded Iago a 'motiveless malignity', that our understanding of Shakespeare was lacking just such a contribution; but since we do have it, the suggestion is established as part of the critical corpus.) They may come to see themselves through the prism it offers. If they criticise it, the relationship may nevertheless be further cemented: the Amazonians perhaps come to understand their culture in certain ways as opposed to the errors sadly popularised by that British anthropologist.

However, in other scenarios I don't find myself so inclined to think people need knowledge of a thing for it to be part of their culture: for example, I'm happy to call Sidrak and Bokkus (a mediæval English translation of a French dialogue) 'part of British culture' rather than 'part of the culture of people [in Britain?] who know about Sidrak and Bokkus'. Most of us get our acquaintance with the British Middle Ages in broad strokes, rather than the fine detail involved in first-hand scholarship, but that doesn't present an obvious barrier to our calling little-known texts part of British cultural heritage generally.

Even in the case of some item which everyone has forgotten about altogether, it may be arguable that it's still part of someone's culture: that some newly discovered Roman remains in Britain, for example, were part of our culture all along by virtue of the fact that they fell under the category 'archæological evidence of Roman Britain' (and the past role of the Romans in Britain is of cultural significance), rather than that they became part of our culture on being brought to light and interpreted in light of modern archæological thought. Certainly, it looks rather onerous to demand that some item be well known amongst a population in order for it to qualify as a part of that population's culture: it would lead us to conclude, against expectation, that the culture of children within that population is vastly more limited than that of adults, being limited to what a child knows about.

Perhaps, then, what matters is not the audience but the authorship: writings produced by British anthropologists are products of British culture (and also Western culture, academic culture, etc.), and so if there is any sense in which something of the Amazonian culture is present in the anthropological report, far from making the report part (or partially part) of the Amazonian culture it potentially represents appropriation of that culture by the Briton (what Young terms 'subject appropriation', although his categorisation was devised to apply to the arts rather than to academic writing). As an outsider relative to the Amazonian culture, perhaps the Briton simply cannot create something which is, or which contains, 'part' of that culture.

I can certainly think of cases in which my intuitions run otherwise: for example, the Statue of Liberty, a gift to the U.S. from France, of French design and (apart from the base) French manufacture, must be assumed to be a part of French culture, not American, if one's creations can never become part of a culture relative to which one remains an outsider. Certainly it would be controversial to take the position that nothing created within one culture could become part of another distinct culture. The question, rather, is that of whether being about a culture (or parts thereof), as the British anthropologist's writing is about the Amazonian culture, can on its own be a sufficient condition for being 'part of' that culture (though not necessarily part only of that particular culture).

It is the affirmative response that seems implied by my comments earlier about the place in British culture of Shakespeare scholarship: a critic's having a background in a culture other than British poses no obvious difficulty for the incorporation of that critic's commentaries into the scholarly mélange that helps to structure our understanding of Shakespeare, and hence to define his place in British culture. It would be very strange if we sealed our culture off from the observations of foreign Shakespeare scholars (if that were even possible); and as such it seems that it is sufficient for their work's being part of British culture that the topic is a part of British culture (or at least, jointly sufficient with other conditions, since we might still want to stipulate that the outsider critic's scholarship should actually be publicly disseminated).

At this stage, despite having rejected some possible objections to the conclusion that the anthropological work would not be part of the Amazonian culture, I'm not sure I have grounds for concluding that it would be part of that culture either. Perhaps it would help me to introduce a related question now: that of whether an item inspired by a given culture is thereby a part of that culture.

Too Many Bills to Pay?

What is going on, or not, with the Heritage Protection Bill? At the end of July the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee was complaining that it hadn't been fully available for scrutiny; at the end of October there were further awkward questions about the costs to be incurred; and after suggestions earlier this month that the Bill was one of those likely to be dropped from what may be a slimmer Queen's Speech than originally planned, in order to make way for possible financial legislation (although as of the 10th the Government was declining to comment on the Queen's Speech in Parliament ahead of its publication), it now seems from a Building Design story posted yesterday that the political argument surrounding the matter is heating up further.

What naturally isn't clear is whether the Government's possibly weakening commitment to the Bill arises purely from a need to allocate more time and other resources to the present economic situation, or whether the alleged problems with the Bill also made it an attractive choice for the backburner. Vaizey's description of 'a really uncontroversial Bill', though probably accurate in terms of voters' overall priorities, doesn't altogether coincide with the tone of some previous reporting on the matter.

Official Solutions

Homeless people wanting ID cards may be able to give their home address as a bench, bus stop or park where they are often found.
BBC News

Given that, for example, parks can be quite large – the largest I could find in Britain, also the largest municipal park in Europe (as of 2005), is a mere square mile in size – there may be some practical difficulties still to be ironed out...

Flabella, Horrida Flabella

The counterpart of a communication system which may or may not have been the sworn secret of a Chinese sorority, where there's no doubt about the system's existence (contrast another story about marginalised Far Eastern writing systems I recently learnt about, concerning the possibility of a Vietnamese script lost to memory) but disagreement about its place in society, is presumably a case where we'd be sure about the social role of the communication system in question... if only we could be certain it ever existed. Oddly enough, we have a candidate: I happened upon a blistering denunciation of claims that we have any secure grounds for belief in a 'language of the fan' used in (depending on which Web page you look at) the 18th or 19th Century.

I find it striking that so recent an alleged system, supposed to have been in fairly general use, can be the subject of such disagreement about its very existence: it makes me wonder just how many clandestine, informal or marginalised systems of communication, especially those incapable of leaving any tangible remains, might have been lost to history already—and, conversely, how many which we think existed might be later fabrications.

The Kantian Room

To my growing list of 'teaching ideas best left untried' (such as setting ever weirder reading suggestions to see how long it took tutees to rebel—probably educational, but unlikely to meet with Q.A.A. approval) I can now add jerking people out of complacency with passages of faux-Kant revealed at length to be computer-generated.

I'd heard of the postmodern and computer science paper generators of course, but this philosophical writing generator had somehow passed me by until now. Take one notoriously problematic writing style (Kant and Husserl come supplied), add a dash of randomness and you have the makings of a 'spot the real thing' quiz.

Don’t Let This Stop You Dissuading Real People From Committing Suicide

I'm used to condemnations of video games which regard the teleology of their gameplay as a possible source of imitation in real life, thereby contending that acting out a moral wrongdoing within the game's structure may have a correspondingly deleterious effect on players' actions generally. Thus ran familiar critiques of Manhunt, Grand Theft Auto, and so on. What then is this?

Suicide charities have condemned an internet game in which players have to keep a depressed man from killing himself.
Metro.co.uk

The criticism isn't just about tastelessness, but is explicitly concerned with possible outcomes:

'Suicide is not a light-hearted subject,' said The Samaritans. 'Types of suicide portrayal can act as a catalyst.'

But if influences on subsequent behaviour tend to reflect gameplay teleology, surely an in-game goal of preventing suicide would encourage suicide-prevention... It's not that I regret any sign of recognition that the meanings players find in games can be complicated and personal; but it seems a shame that in this case it's coming in the form of hasty condemnation once again.

This Post Is Provided ‘As Is’...

The disclaimer is an artform, albeit of the sigh-inducing kind when it turns up at the bottom of an e-mail, quite possibly taking up more space than the message itself. On seeing this gem...

Postings are provided as is with no warranties, and confer no rights. Opinions expressed here are my own delusions; my employers at best shake their heads and sigh, at worst repudiate the content with extreme prejudice, whenever it manages to appear on their radar.

...I wondered whether any similar deviations from the standard legalese might be lurking around the Web. From the field of science fiction, we have this:

This website exists purely to speculate on the Bad Wolf phenomenon in the new series of Doctor Who, which is a fictional television programme made by BBC Wales in Cardiff for the British Broadcasting Corporation.

This website has been made by the BBC. It is placed on the Internet.The Internet is an information superhighway based on the sharing of information between computers using wires. The Internet is used by kind permission of GeoComtex.

For more information about Doctor Who, please visit the official website.

Please don't email us to ask what Bad Wolf means. We honestly don't know.

If you're concerned by the thought that the universe has been irrevocably altered by an enormous experiment in neuro-linguistic programming, then just tell yourself "The Bad Wolf is not real. The Bad Wolf is not real. The Bad Wolf is not real."

There are also some words of advice about rocks (too long to quote in full)...

...Nelson Rocks Preserve is covered in steep terrain with loose, slippery and unstable footing. The weather can make matters worse. Sheer drops are everywhere. You may fall, be injured or die. There are hidden holes. You could break your leg. There are wild animals, which may be vicious, poisonous or carriers of dread diseases. These include poisonous snakes and insects. Plants can be poisonous as well. We don't do anything to protect you from any of this. We do not inspect, supervise or maintain the grounds, rocks, cliffs or other features, natural or otherwise...

...which inspired the creation of a universal disclaimer, surely the highest manifestation of the genre—or second-highest, if the meta-disclaimer at the end of a They.com post has anything to say about it.

The one that stood out the most for me, though, doesn't actually set out to be comedic. I just find it surreal in a way that makes me feel very uneasy that information about sex offenders in California should come with its own piece of legal back-covering; I half expect also to to be told that if I am not completely satisfied with my sex offender information I can return it for a full refund within fourteen days, my statutory rights not being affected. In certain circumstances, nothing's quite so creepy as a piece of bland legal writing.

Partial To a Bit of Culture

'Exorcisms are part of our culture'; 'Foie gras is "part of our culture", declare the defiant French'. We sometimes say a practice is 'part' of someone's culture, or that an object is 'part' of somebody's tangible cultural heritage, this heritage in turn presumably being in some sense a component of the culture with which it's associated (or so I shall assume for the moment; although I shall have to revisit the question once I better understand what cultural parthood is, since the commonplace language of 'cultural property' perhaps implies a different kind of relation)—but presumably we say such things without meaning to imply that a culture is readily conceived of as a mereological sum. Even if we accept the view (pace e.g. Benhabib) that cultures are the kinds of thing which can have rigid boundaries, we don't speak of them as the kind of things which are capable of division: what on Earth would half a culture look like? (By contrast, of course we can scrape a few shavings off a table and still have a table left, but it's entirely possible to divide a table in two; whereas it doesn't strike me as even conceptually possible to divide a culture in two.) So it seems on these grounds that we have a warrant to speak only loosely of 'parts' of cultures: we can still say an item is 'part' of a given culture, much as we can identify an item as 'part' of a shop's inventory, but (recalling my interest in categorisation) it isn't apparent that this implies any particularly interesting relation between item and culture.

Of course, there is the common sense of 'part' we use when speaking of, say, a mixture of one part cordial to five parts water: take a glass of liquid, pour out part of it and you're left with less liquid, without ever having to worry about 'half a liquid'. However, this doesn't offer a complete solution: we sometimes do speak collectively of items of heritage as we might of a kind of 'stuff', as when we refer to the roughly 500,000 volumes in the Bucharest University Library which were lost to fire during the revolution of December 1989 (Lost Libraries, p.5), without having to know just what books were in the library catalogue, but often our concern is with discrete and particular objects and practices: the Elgin Marbles, the Last Night of the Proms, and so on (including both types and tokens, of course: e.g. the type 'First Folio of Shakespeare' as well as the token recently restored to Durham). When we do talk in generalities, we are apt to do so with implicit reference to particular contexts: 'building pyramids' was part of ancient Egyptian culture, but this means that pyramid-building in Egypt (and possibly also in neighbouring Kush, now part of Sudan, which was politically and otherwise involved with Egypt) was part of Egyptian culture; one wouldn't say that Mayan pyramids had anything to do with Egypt. An image of culture as liquid 'stuff' fails to capture this kind of often fine-grained particularity.

Consequently an argument like the following looks tempting: cultures are indivisible wholes (though possibly wholes with fuzzy boundaries); therefore there are no parts to a culture the removal of which might threaten its integrity as that culture; and consequently no culture can ever truly suffer loss (though cultures can cease to exist). The membership of a cultural 'inventory' can change over time, certainly—but this hardly captures the notion of cultural 'loss' in its fullest and most ethically salient sense. For of course we do speak of cultural loss, especially where cultural heritage is concerned: we, and our Western culture, have suffered the loss of most of the plays of Sophocles, for example, in the straightforward sense that none of us has them or has access to them, because no known copies exist anymore. Practices, similarly, can die out when people cease to participate in them.

If we take 'x is a part of culture φ' to mean something like 'x plays a role in culture φ', then I can see how such a conception of what it is to be part of a culture might mask the possibility of 'genuine' loss: a thing reputed to be lost may nevertheless play a cultural role by virtue of the interest taken in it. The legends surrounding the post-Biblical fate of Ark of the Covenant, for example, gained one fairly concrete instantiation in our cultural life with the production of Raiders of the Lost Ark; in the real world, meanwhile, Ark-hunters have followed possible leads indicating a resting place in Ethiopia and Zimbabwe. The religious importance of the Ark assures its cultural significance; the absence of the physical object affects the role it plays for us, making it a mysterious thing of ancient worshipful repute rather than another artefact available for museum display and examination, but in a very real sense the absent Ark does play a role in our culture. The Holy Grail, meanwhile, inspired a large portion of Arthurian literature, and entered cinematic culture through both Indiana Jones and Monty Python; the crown jewels King John is supposed to have lost in the Wash are the stuff of national legend; and so on.

All of these, of course, are nonetheless quite definitely 'lost' in the bluntest of senses. The possibility of other kinds of circumstance we might (or might not) regard as 'loss', notably cases of expatriation, suggests a need for a fuller treatment of cultural loss on my part; but first I want to finish clarifying the question of cultural 'parts'. If a thing that is missing from existence, perhaps not only passed into legend like the Ark but known to have been destroyed, can perform a cultural role in spite of its absence, then are the things that play the roles, such as the (not necessarily still existing) object called the Ark of the Covenant, themselves properly constituents of culture(s)?

Well, clearly enough items offer various potentialities for what cultural roles they play which are lost when they become lost themselves: I can expect never to read more than a few fragments of the ancient comedy Margites, and never to see except in photographs the statues of the Buddha which the Taliban dynamited. (As for practices, some have become impracticable – I can make a donation to a church, but not pay tithes to it – while in other cases there's a question of 'authenticity'.) A scholar hoping to understand the comedy of the ancient Greeks will be hampered by the lack of a work they esteemed highly, and this epistemic impediment will limit understanding of the ancients' lives. But why should these potentialities for cultural roles be of concern? We could equally well observe that a present and available item offers none of the potentialities of a lost one (e.g. we wouldn't have the story about King John if the jewels were still in the Crown's possession): that an item presently exists (and is available) isn't a necessary condition for it to play some cultural role.

By this point I feel quite inclined to suspect that my attempts to analyse a cry of 'It's part of our culture!' in these terms are mistaken: that the claim is not purely descriptive, but more like a warm reference to someone who has become a close friend as 'quite part of the family now', with all the tones of value-laden endorsement and human affection that involves. Just as a loss experienced by a family is in no way a matter simply of biological and socially recognised associations, the loss of a culturally important artefact or social practice is not simply a matter of lost potential for knowledge, etc. to which we react affectively; rather, the social role played by the artefact or practice is already loaded with affective associations. As for 'cultural property'—the law recognises the family dog as 'property', but that fact is of little relevance when the dog is lost, and in no way precludes the dog's also and more significantly being 'part of the family'.

If analysis of cultural parthood is indeed mistaken in something like the way in which it misses the point to point out that man and wife do not literally 'become one flesh', ought I just to sidle quietly away from the half-unwoven rainbow and wander off home, bearing a renewed suspicion about surface language? Certainly I may have to accept that a philosophical characterisation of culture cannot exhaust the supply of significant things to be said about it; but it was never my intention to demystify culture, or to generate a totalising theory of it. I did hope to get closer to understanding what culture (or a culture) is, and in this respect I may have been frustrated; but on the other hand, perhaps I have a better idea of what culture isn't like.

What then should I do in order to grasp, insofar as it will be possible for me, what it does mean to say something is part of one's culture? My difficulties may have partly arisen from attempting an ahistorical treatment of culture, as though, whatever being part of a culture meant, it had to depend purely on the formal properties of cultures, and not at all on how something might become 'part of a culture'. Another comparison I considered was between culture(s) and networks, where a cultural 'part' is like a node of a network: an explanation, for example, of why it seems natural and reasonable to call the Internet Relay Chat quotation database at bash.org, which collects excerpts of I.R.C. conversations ranging from the humorous to the plain obscene (more of the latter, admittedly), part of Internet culture might have proceeded by noting that this website is part of the Internet (on the grounds that it's accessed through a public-facing Web server, is identified by a domain name, etc.) and that it collects and archives snippets from Internet Relay Chat, so that its content comes from discourse elsewhere on the Internet (and one sees references to bash.org elsewhere on the 'Net too). When one website goes offline (and bash.org recently was inaccessible for some time) we still have 'the Internet' (albeit a slightly smaller and more impoverished network), and we still have 'Internet culture' as an undivided whole. The role of bash.org in Internet culture has not, however, been simply a matter of the formal relations it exhibits with other parts of the Internet. Rather, the existence of the quotation database gave I.R.C. discourse generally the character of 'that which might end up on bash.org': the site's role in 'Internet culture' is grounded in what it portends for people who might find their (often unintentionally) humorous comments preserved on bash.org and in consequence readily available for reference by other people elsewhere.

Does this sort of account lend itself to the construction of a general account of cultural parthood? If this is what we do mean by 'a part of (our) culture', it seems on the face of it that the definition must be a fairly restrictive one: for example, two Titian paintings which at the time of writing are the object of efforts to keep them in the U.K. seem unlikely to play any qualitatively similar role in our culture, and their presence here therefore presumably is not 'part' of it in the suggested sense. There's surely some potential for invoking cultural movements, milieux, etc. in order to bridge the gap: the paintings exemplify the work of a noteworthy Renaissance painter, and the developments in the arts which took place during the Renaissance assuredly had an effect on how we understand and appreciate 'art' generally. Certainly (given my earlier work on the role of categories, milieux and so on) I should be happy to acknowledge the relevance of these contextual facts in an evaluation of Titian's cultural importance.

To be able to endorse not only Renaissance art in general but also, say, these two Titian paintings specifically as part(s) of our culture, I should presumably have to adopt some sort of principle of transitivity: a Titian painting is part of Renaissance art; Renaissance art is part of our culture; therefore a Titian painting is part of our culture. But of course I immediately face the objection that here I am simply using the word 'part' in two different senses: if being part of Renaissance art were qualitatively similar to being part of a culture, the question of what it is to be part of a culture would not have occupied me for so long to begin with. Moreover, I am still unsure whether it is the paintings themselves or the fact of their possession and geographical presence (or both, or neither) which potentially might be called 'part of our culture'—since in order to determine whether an item of tangible heritage (or indeed 'cultural heritage' collectively) can be part of a culture I need to know what that means in the first place.

Perhaps at this point it would be best for me to turn to the supplementary questions which I had hoped to find myself addressing with a more fully developed understanding of cultural parthood in hand.

Hear No Evil

Since I do research in moral philosophy, I'm used to witnessing people employ quite considerable sophistication when constructing post hoc rationalisations for their sense of moral disgust; and so I find it disappointing to see publicity given to fifth-rate practitioners of the art.

..."It's completely inappropriate to recommend him as listening material. Boys and girls of 15 or 16 who select this song will go straight to the Internet to find Glitter's music. I dread to think what they may find searching online for him," he added.
BBC News

A little Googling suggests they might find some fairly off-colour jokes, but if my memory of G.C.S.E.-age pupils serves me adequately I doubt they'll be shocked. Other than that, I find myself scratching my head: how easy is it expected to be to find objectionable material in the course of musicological research, simply because of the performer's past convictions? 'No teacher should be in the position of having to discuss this man's work with the young people in their class', we're told—whether for the sake of the teachers' sensibilities or the pupils' I really don't know. I'm not aware of any generally applied principle under which a piece of cultural history can be placed beyond the scope of classroom discussion because of the wrongdoings of its creator.

Let me indulge in some psychological speculation: scrape away the usual dissembling about 'inappropate' decisions and Sending Messages, and what you're left with looks like the ancient moral opposition between purity and pollution. Both the sex offender and things associated with him are felt to be tainted; that there may nevertheless be good pedagogical reasons for not blanking out pieces of musical history is ignored. Things produced by so foul a being must be unwholesome, mustn't they...?

...Why am I toying with this kind of half-hearted critique of easy targets? In frustration felt on behalf of my former, G.C.S.E.-age self, who would have been disgusted at being patronised in such a fashion.

Perplexiphoid

A BBC News story about a Scotsman fined for posting a picture of himself with a sword on a website (without any suggestion in the story, barring future updates, that he did so threateningly or might ever have used the sword violently) is provoking questions among us non-lawyer types, like 'which law forbids this?' and 'is it one that applies in England and Wales?' [Update: judging by this Telegraph story, it seems he was posing in a public place. The BBC News article neglects to mention this detail, and the whole thing still looks pointless.]

Perhaps for the sake of informing the public the police might try a higher-profile test case next time.

Image from Wikimedia Commons and used under its Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 licence

Too Plausible for Comfort

Jacqui Smith says public demand means people will be able to pre-register for an ID card within the next few months. The cards will be available for all from 2012 but she said: "I regularly have people coming up to me and saying they don't want to wait that long."
BBC News

[Allegedly, Grigory] Potemkin ordered the construction of entire pasteboard villages on the banks of the Dnieper (much of the royal progress was conducted via riverboat); imported peasants, flocks, and herds from a thousand other villages to make a show of prosperity, thereby triggering famine in the depopulated hinterlands; [and], once the procession had passed, dismantled the entire meretricious apparatus and reconstructed it several versts downstream (one verst is about two-thirds of a mile) in order to deceive the imperial court anew.
The Straight Dope

Okay, the full linked article concludes the story about an elaborate scheme to deceive Catherine the Great is unsupported by available evidence; but the story is certainly in circulation for anyone with a motive to adopt the idea. Of course, the Home Secretary's experiences are more economically explained by sheer statistical plausibility (a few enthusiasts appealing to her notice against the backdrop of the uncooperative masses), but... it's scary to consider how readily a minister seeking to rationalise a course already decided on might be so manipulated.

The Frankest Abstract Ever?

More of us should write abstracts like the one displayed on the Eidos site this week, courtesy of Donnchadh O'Conaill:

Yes, it's yet another paper about the bloody explanatory gap. Yet more chuntering about consciousness, the hard problem, the mind and the body, yadda yadda. And, no, I have neither managed to solve the problem, nor make the damned thing go away.

Why then should you bother coming to this paper? Well, that’s a philosophical question in and of itself...

After explaining what actually is in the paper, he concludes, in proper Durham fashion:

Plus, when the paper's over we can go to the pub. That's at least prima facie compelling, no?

Mutatis Non Mutandis

Via Languagehat, what I really hope is the exaggerated kind of disturbing news: some local authorities' drive for generally comprehensible documentation is reported to have broken the bounds of intelligent thought and forbidden traces of Latin as thoroughly naturalised and commonplace as e.g., i.e., n.b. and etc.

What I've seen of the reaction has largely been concerned with the mauling of linguistic sensibility implied: that the replacement circumlocutions are unwieldy, and that English has traditionally been strengthened by its acquisitions from other languages. Perhaps we've become so accustomed to the idea that the fight against elitism in support of the common man has been reduced to patronising self-parody by now that a defence of the people imagined to be threatened by marauding vice versa-utterers is deemed redundant.

New Entries In the ‘How Come I Never Heard of This Before?’ File

The current entrants to my psyche distracting me from productive research.

Collectivist bad literature, Tékumel, and some cryptolects

Like anyone with a taste for the staggeringly awful, I've heard of Ros and McGonnagall; perhaps it's just the comparatively cynical touch of deliberately setting out to write bad prose, and in a clandestine fashion rather than for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, that's hitherto kept Naked Came The Stranger and Atlanta Nights insufficiently notorious to be on my radar. The collaborative nature of both projects reminds me of The Subtle Philosopher's 'collectivist expressionism', in which a class of Sixth Formers would individually construct parts of what would be presented as an artwork in an exciting new genre bringing the musical ensemble tradition into more traditionally solitary artforms—or something like that. I think he managed to fool one of the art teachers into thinking it was a genuine up-and-coming art movement.

On the principle that if you like Tolkien enough to care about the model languages for which Arda was the setting, you've reason to be at least somewhat interested in M.A.R. Barker's Tékumel, it's likewise striking that this is the first I've heard of it, especially since I'm not altogether ignorant of pen-&-paper RPG settings. And now I'm considering tracking the novels down (Barker's early style is a bit rough in places, but no doubt he improved), and adding Tsolyáni to the lengthy list of languages I wish I had time to learn.

Having stumbled across news about studies of Moroccan secret languages, and subsequently learnt of Iranian and Armenian cryptolects among others, I'm wondering how many there are in the world. Of course, some are just Pig Latin-style modifications, or glorified slang, but some even have full grammars. It strikes me that, with many regular languages dying out, and a race against time just to catalogue them, languages which are by nature secret must be even more prone to extinction...