Culture - We used to find unity in a shared heritage. Yet we are set on defining our difference

In the 1980s, "culture" suddenly began to spawn in all directions. Like a fashionable address or a crate of Glenfiddich, everybody seemed to want it. Whereas culture had once meant Bach and Balzac, it expanded to include beach culture, police culture, deaf culture, Microsoft culture, gay culture, sky-diving culture and so on. Culture was no longer a handful of artworks, but a particular way of life. This had always been true for the anthropologists. It was just that they were thinking of, say, Mexican or Polynesian culture, rather than the culture of Yorkshire dale walkers or Portuguese physiotherapists.

Now, however, culture has descended from the macro to the micro - from whole societies to a range of interest groups within them. It is more about Hell's Angels than Hellenic Greece. This naturally raises the question of how micro you can get. Do the two teachers in the village school constitute a culture? What about Posh and Becks?

Strangely, the culture of Yorkshire dale walkers is not mainly about walking. Culture is not so much about what a group does (since a lot of other people do the same thing), as the distinctive way they do it. Killing people is not exactly part of US army culture, but having short hair and a fairly restricted vocabulary while you do it is. Culture is a question of style and form. So it comes as no surprise that it should take centre stage in a civilisation for which form and style are increasingly precious commodities.

Ironically, however, culture is also a form of resistance to that civilisation. In its concern with symbolic meanings and local solidarities, it offers an alternative to the abstract and universal. Cultures are all about knack, habit and know-how, rather than rational methods or conceptual procedures. They are the taken-for-granted background of everyday behaviour, the invisible colour of daily existence, the collective unconscious of political society. Culture is what everyone knows without knowing it. Unlike algebra, you get the hang of a culture not by swotting it up but by taking part in it. It is more like a child learning a language than an adult learning how to assemble a coffee table.

Thus, inside a culture, things work by gesture, tacit knowledge, unspoken implication. This is one reason why culture is so nervous of the universal, given that gesture and implication wear too thin when they are stretched across global space. So the return to culture is partly a reaction to a globalised, uniform world. It is a revolt against the death of difference. Culture is what you don't have in common with the general run of people. But as this is true of everybody, there is a sense in which it cancels out. What everyone shares in a postmodern world is the fierce way they cherish their differences.

If cultures work by nuance and implication, then culture in the broad sense of the word (a specific way of life) has the intuitive force and fineness of texture of culture in the narrower sense (the arts). This is one reason why it makes sense to use the same word about both of them. Neither a work of art nor a way of life can be said to be "right" or "wrong", as one might say of a political strategy or a code of ethics. It would be like saying that the Romanian language was a mistake. Neither of them has much utilitarian value. Culture is whatever is in excess of the useful and necessary. We need letter boxes, but we do not need to paint them red.

Culture values the customary and affective, the "lived" and sensory, as the World Bank does not. It lends the adjective "corporate" a different, less bloodless meaning. In this sense, the shift we have been witnessing in the meaning of culture - roughly, from "civilised living" to "a distinctive way of life" - involves a gender shift as well. Culture is more a feminine notion than a masculine one. It is a "warm" concept, rather than a cool one such as "institution", or a chilling one such as "human resources management".

"Warm" concepts, however, can become uncomfortably hot. Culture can be a claustrophobic idea as well as a creative one. "What everybody knows without knowing it" is not a bad definition of ideology. What is cosily communal for some is intolerably tribal for others. Culture tends to appeal to custom, not reason, which is to say that it has a habit of drawing its justi- fication from itself.

An appeal to cultural tradition simply means that doing something for a very long time is the next best thing to being right. The reason why you go in for honour killings or racial lynchings is because this is the kind of thing you go in for. The word "culture", like the words "taste" or "evil", means among other things: don't argue. What we do is what we do. We cannot justify it rationally, but neither can you justify your objections to it.

So we might as well declare a truce. As long as you let us get on with female infanticide, which is completely unremarkable in our society, we shall let you get on with the domestic violence that figures so richly in your own cultural tradition. Cultural relativism of this sort is highly convenient for the ruling powers. If it means that they cannot criticise other cultures, it also means that as a culture they are immune from criticism themselves. Anyway, not criticising, say, Muslims does not stop you from knocking them around. Cultural sensitivity and political benightedness can be on amicable terms. Every neofascist spokesperson has learned to say "his or her".

Local cultures can indeed be oases in a desert of dreary sameness. Yet if difference is so jealously cultivated these days, it is partly because it sells. You can find the same inimitable hotel restaurants just about everywhere. Nothing is more global than the utterly unique. The local is peddled all over the planet. If capitalism rolls over some local cultures, it takes a hand in creating others. Hostility to the universal is scarcely bad news for those whose interests would be threatened by talk of human rights and connected global struggles.

Why else has culture bulked so large in recent times? One answer is obvious: we live in an epoch in which culture has become for the first time a key part of mass commodity production. Culture is now capital, while capital is now saturated in culture - in signs, styles, narratives and images. This is a momentous development because, as late as the modernism of the past century, culture used to see itself as the polar opposite of commodity production. Its job then was to judge it, not join it.

But there are other forces at work, too. Over the past three or four decades, the most resourceful movements on the left have been ones in which culture plays a vital role. Feminism, ethnic militancy, revolutionary nationalism: for all three of these political currents, culture in the broad sense of language, identity, symbol, tradition and community are a huge part of what is politically at stake. Far from being agreeable extras, they provide the very terms of political argument. And this has an interesting implication. It means that culture has shifted before our eyes from being part of the solution to being part of the problem.

In Victorian and early 20th-century Britain, culture was a matter of the fundamental values on which we could all agree, buried deep between our petty differences. I might have been a mill owner and you might have been a crossing sweeper, but Shakespeare spoke to what was universal in both of us. If the arts were important, it was because they gave voice to this common humanity. So they, and the values they stood for, could be called upon to play a role in the resolution of real-life conflict.

This involved the rather curious assumption that being exposed to great art would make us nicer people. If our own era has witnessed a crisis of culture, it is partly because this assumption failed to survive two bloody world wars. In any case, the idea of laying aside your conflicts in the name of unity and harmony seemed far too convenient for our rulers. It is usually the victims who are called upon to be disinterested.

So culture has become instead a concept steeped in conflict to its very roots. Which means, among other things, that it has come down to earth. However, it has done so at the cost of abandoning its critical, utopian role. Most of the champions of culture today are distinctly coy of phrases such as "common humanity". When they hear them, they reach for their differences with Pavlovian precision. Yet they do so in a world in which humanity has never been so forcibly united in the face of the same military, political and ecological threats. There is nothing in the least abstract about this kind of universality. It is a curious abstraction that could blow us all to kingdom come.

Few of the global problems that confront us today are in any precise sense cultural ones. Radical Islam might appear to be an exception, but even this is more about material conditions than spiritual ideals. The enemies we face are for the most part pretty ancient: poverty, warfare, disease and natural disaster. There is not much fashionably postmodern about any of them.

Yet the cultural left continues, astonishingly, to inflate the idea of culture beyond all tolerable proportions. By insisting that culture goes all the way down in human affairs, it ends up repressing its opposite - Nature - with all the ruthlessness of the Enlightenment it detests.

It is true that there is one particular form of culture which is of extraordinary political significance. This is sport, and football in particular. Just think of how the social and political landscape of Britain would be transformed if there was no longer football to provide people with the tradition, ritual, dramatic spectacle, sense of corporate existence, hierarchy, loyalty, savage aggression, gladiatorial combat, spirit of rivalry, pantheon of heroes and appreciation of aesthetic skills so singularly lacking in everyday late-capitalist life.

As such, culture, like sex, can be overestimated as well as underrated. It is true that everyone has to be somewhere, as the man said when asked by the enraged husband why he was hiding in his wife's wardrobe. There is no "raw" humanity, unmarked by local culture. Yet if our being cultural animals is a source of division, it is also what we have universally in common. Besides, to say that we are all cultural animals is to say that we are all needy and vulnerable. Creatures like us, who need culture in order to survive, do so because of a gap or deficiency in our nature.

Human beings are all prematurely born and if culture (in the shape of language, kinship, practices of caring and so on) does not move speedily into this gap, they will prematurely die. So if culture is the mark of our edge over the other animals, it is also a sign of our weakness. It is on this shared vulnerability, not on cultural differences, that any decent politics must surely be built.

Terry Eagleton is professor of cultural theory and John Rylands Fellow at Manchester University

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