A Prelude to 'Building on Culture'
Why today's main piece, for paid subscribers, is coming tomorrow
The best laid plans sometimes go hilariously awry.
On the weekend, I’d planned to record another BookTube, as per my new routine, but when I sat down on Sunday morning—usually the quietest day in the week, because the first half of the day is dedicated to ciclovía (cyclists and other exercise) on the highway right outside my apartment—some taxi drivers started laying on their horns.
Odd, I thought. Funeral?
Sometimes funeral processions on the highway here are quite a sight: people making figure-eights with their cars, motorcyclists pulling stunts, people popping out their windows, music blasting, people belting out the lyrics, and of course, plenty of horn.
But no. It turned out that I had missed the notice of a full-on strike being staged in major cities around the country. The highway quickly lit up with the intense droning and honking of taxi and truck drivers alike, and I couldn’t hear myself think, let alone record. The day was shot—but so it goes, sometimes.
So when I returned from English tutoring last night, and found that my internet was out, I wasn’t too distressed by the new hitch. (New hitches are kind of par for the course here!) No matter, I thought. I have two podcasts to listen to for this piece anyway. I’ll queue them up tonight, and draft tomorrow morning.
But in the vein of a modern (bourgeoise) scary story, when I woke up the internet was still out. Building-wide! The horror.
Still, I thought I was being resourceful by deciding to strike out for a new mall across my local township, to use its coworking space. There are no libraries in my neck of the woods (a fascinating reminder of what a rare, precious gift we have in many parts of the world), and the mall across the street from me often has internet outages, too.
On the way, I passed the usual assortment of scenes that always deepen my sense of gratitude, reawaken me to the complexity of human suffering, and remind me to take a whole lot less seriously all this grand work of pontificating online at all.
Which… as it turned out, was a very good take-away from my long walk, because I’d only settled down for about 30 minutes at the new mall before its internet cut out, too.
Sigh.
I then came back home to find that the internet was still out in my building, and left for the mall across the street. Fortunately, the internet is working here, but a lot of other people had the same idea I did, so finding a spot to work took some doing.
Workflow muddled, I did get some other key administrative tasks finished, but I just haven’t been able to focus effectively on the core of this piece. (Folks who know me know that I can get pretty obsessive during the “editing” phase especially, because that’s when I really stress-test my premises and sometimes rewrite whole sections because I’ve decided that what I was first saying was nonsense. You’re welcome.)
In the process, though, I’ve been living out a key part of that essay’s conclusion—so that’s the “spoiler” I’m going to leave you with today, before the coworking space closes at 8pm.
Tomorrow (internet willing), I’ll be able to share the rest of the journey.
The strange folly of online ‘discourse’
Sometimes we’re so consumed by writing and reading words on a screen, or by the mere act of checking in on major forums as if they belong to a great big “to-do” list, that we mistake what we’re doing here for worldly practice.
Oh, yes, we really made a difference by “getting” that person in a comments thread! Thank goodness I’m now fully caught up on all the hot takes of the day! And now that I’ve posted my brilliant treatise on X, I’m sure everyone will agree with me and we’ll be one step closer to world peace.
This ties into Tuesday’s post, on the danger of thinking that we just need to find the right “love language” to change the world. We’re so enamoured by life online sometimes that it’s easy to forget we’re not all engaging with one another for the same reasons here. Many of us have very clear missions in life—religious, nationalist, financial, familial—that have absolutely nothing to do with availing oneself to the wonder and growth potential of dialogue.
The world of words is not the world.
So what exactly are we doing with it, in the first place?
This is part of why I wanted to write on culture in the first place—building on Monday’s meditation about seemingly innocuous cultural items, like pasta (which in fact has a complex political history); and of course, on Wednesday’s reflection about how war flattens human diversity by driving us into cultural silos.
Simply put:
There is a larger semiotic function to all the sound and fury we engage in here.
It isn’t entirely useless to be spending our current slice of the polycrisis pouring out words of argument and solidarity together here.
And yet, it would probably help—amid ever so many reminders of how deeply we’re failing one another politically, environmentally, and humanly—to think about the work we are and aren’t doing with all these related exercises.
Unfortunately, though, today has not gone according to plan, and I’m not finished revising the full essay itself.
So—just as, last night, when I decided I’d focus on two research “listens” and wait out the internet problem, I invite folks here to do the same.
Paid subscribers will receive another post tomorrow (fingers crossed!), but I sincerely hope that these two audio pieces, experienced together, will give everyone at least a sense of where the work was headed.
The first piece is a lecture by Terry Eagleton, titled “Where does culture come from?” He actually answers the question in the first minute or so—it comes from labour—but amid some tongue-in-cheek asides and a little singing, he then teases out a bigger body of reflections from the premise, too.
The second piece is a conversation for Past Present Future, in its series-opener for “The History of Bad Ideas”. The first topic, explored with science broadcaster Adam Rutherford, is eugenics.
The through-line might be obvious, but also possibly not: “culture” has an area of interest, and as such is always deeply concerned with what it doesn’t contain, or doesn’t want to contain, as well.
I hope everyone who listens finds some food for thought in these episodes, which they can take with them into reflections on the world and today’s “culture” no matter what.
Either way, for paid subscribers—I’ll be back.
We’ll chat some more when a few precious lights on a little black box in my apartment come back on.
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML