In Humanities scholarship today there are two definitions of the word ‘culture’ in use, two sets of semantic associations. There is culture as a clutch of creative practices, what the historian Arthur Danto called an ‘art world’. This includes, but is not confined to, what most of us think of as high art – creative writing, film, opera, theatre, dance. Convergence and hybridisation, however, have blurred the lines between forms, as well as making the divisions between ‘élite’ and ‘popular’ art increasingly specious. Then there is culture as ‘a whole way of life’, as Raymond Williams, the father of British Cultural Studies, influentially identified in the 1950s. Here, culture is the symbolic investment of identity, a heightened consciousness and sense of belonging, expressed in everything from topiary to tae kwon do. There is no reason why the two understandings of culture – the one concentrated and aesthetic, the other diffuse and social – should not work together in binocular focus. But in the past they have not, and the intellectual antipathy existing between them has plagued the Humanities for fifty years, breeding defensive schools of thought one step behind what is actually happening in the world outside. With the Charlie Hebdo killings, the two definitions were seen in double helix, as radical Islamists asserting a fanatical way of life brutally collided with cartoonists pursuing satirical art.

In the no man’s land between culture-as-art and culture-as-life lies the operation of culture now. Culture cuts across, but does not transcend ethnic, regional, and national differences. It allies itself to modernity in all its guises, but is also the visible mark of traditional societies. Culture is both individual creative vocation and collective recreational pursuit. It is industry, identity, means of communication, and a set of artistic outcomes. It does not stand apart from religious and political beliefs in a neat box marked ‘culture’, but pervades them as a background even as it provides specific means of expression. Cultural processes are to the twenty-first century what national processes were to the nineteenth century and religious processes to the sixteenth century: a near-literal metaphor for human existence, both resource and result. No wonder that ‘culture’ was the most looked-up term in the Merriam-Webster dictionary during 2014. Joshua Rothman recently wrote in the New Yorker: ‘Confusion about culture is just part of the culture … [Our] sense of the word … has grown darker, sharper, more skeptical … If words are tools for thinking, then this year “culture” has been used to think about the parts of our society that function poorly.’

Photograph by Benoit-caen, Wikimedia Commons

Controversy over the proprieties of culture is a regular occurrence, both in respect to cultural ownership and cultural response – over who controls forms and critiques. In Australia, one only has to recall the events surrounding Transfield Services and the 2014 Sydney Biennale, or Bill Henson and his photographs of nude teenagers, or Andres Serrano and Piss Christ, or Caryl Churchill and Seven Jewish Children to see how public feeling sharply polarises around culture-as-art when it abrades with the expectations of culture-as-life. It is when trying to understand the drivers of these sometimes fateful occurrences that Pinker’s view is so hobbling. For all you can do with cheesecake is eat it. It is a metaphor that leaves no room for analytical discrimination. It reduces culture to personal preference, obliterating the need for ‘chatter’ about it – which is what the Humanities essentially provide. The metaphor is not one that would be accepted by most scientists, politicians, or business people, who would recognise it as a travesty. But in its implied scientific triumphalism it epitomises what Matthew Arnold called ‘the philistine debate’ about culture’s value. Meanwhile, the arguments around Charlie Hebdo descend into screams of ‘terrorism’ on one side and ‘blasphemy’ on the other. It is culture-as-impasse, and we need to get beyond it.

‘In Australia, one only has to recall the events surrounding Transfield Services and the 2014 Sydney Biennale, or Bill Henson and his photographs of nude teenagers, or Andres Serrano and Piss Christ, or Caryl Churchill and Seven Jewish Children to see how public feeling sharply polarises around culture-as-art when it abrades with the expectations of culture-as-life’

How could a more useful discussion of Charlie Hebdo proceed? It might start by gathering information about how political cartooning operates differently in Western and Islamic countries. Islamic cultures do not lack a satirical tradition. Persian satire is especially potent; modern Iranian writers like Ebrahim Nabavi and cartoonists like Hadi Heidari live complicated lives in relation to the ayatollahs. However, most countries with Islamic majorities or even, like India, with large Islamic minorities, have a higher level of sensitivity to religious satire than has been the case for some time in secular Europe. To some extent this is a difference to be respected. Past a blurry point it is politically oppressive. How Islamic cartoonists circumnavigate Sharia law has changed over the last two decades. Print and broadcast media are relatively controllable by authoritarian régimes, be they in Tehran or Beijing. But digital media provides a means of rapidly disseminating satirical words and images that are difficult to contain.

In the West, cartooning has had long-standing licence to ridicule powerful figures born of the Enlightenment rejection of authority, especially religious authority. Cartooning is not mere entertainment but a contrarian art world seen as a precondition for political systems wanting to discern the will of the people rather than to direct it. It is an indicator of social openness and cultural dissent. With its restrictive libel laws and record of dealing deferentially with public figures in the ‘serious’ media, France’s cartooning art world is unrepentantly confrontational. Charlie Hebdo issues typically run to 60,000 copies of taboo-flouting text and images in concentrated form. Its artwork is not drip-fed into the mainstream like Alan Moir’s cartoons in the Sydney Morning Herald or Bill Leak’s in the Australian. It remains apart, a conscious continuation of Voltairian guerilla critique, and seeks to expose the self-serving plot that is Establishment belief. Can it be hysterical and offensive? Certainly. But it is the anchor for a vocation of provocation grimly summed up by Stéphane Charbonnier (Charb) after the first attack on the Charlie Hebdo office in 2011: ‘I am not afraid of reprisals, I have no children, no wife, no car, no debt. It might sound a bit pompous, but I’d prefer to die on my feet than to live on my knees.’

This put Charb on a collision course with radical Islam, but also in conflict with pious sympathisers of all creeds who think art should not give offence. A number of problems compound in the same cultural space, all of them difficult. There is the tension between free speech and religious sensitivity. There is a question of when free speech is free speech and when it is a religious or racial slur. And there is the issue of the provocative expression of free speech prompting a violent response via the extreme language of armed religious fundamentalism. This six-part process can be broken down as follows:

1. The general belief in the moral right to express offensive opinions through free speech
2. The particular expression of certain offensive opinions through speech
3. The general belief by religious believers in the moral wrongness of offensive opinions
4. The particular offence taken by religious believers at the expression of certain offensive opinions
5. The generally extreme language of some religious believers in denouncing the moral wrongness of offensive opinions
6. The particular extreme actions by some religious believers against some free speech for the expression of certain offensive opinions

(1) and (3) are problems in respect of culture-as-life, of root political and religious beliefs. (2) and (4) are problems in respect of culture-as-art, the expression of particular views in a creative practice context, and the impact of these in a related reception context. (5) and (6) are problems in respect of rhetoric and action, of political and criminal behaviour. But these rely on the first four for their shape and meaning, and themselves have a cultural dimension, especially (5), which, though general in its effect, takes specific cultural forms. Only (5) and (6) can be addressed by increased policing and surveillance. (1), (2), (3), and (4) require a different approach to managing a lack of community consensus and to keeping conflict within the bounds of acceptable civic behaviour. A scientific emphasis on providing ‘the facts’ so people can make ‘rational’ decisions is misplaced. It ignores the reality that questions of principled belief are emotionally loaded and culturally mediated. At the present time, when fact, falsehood, plausible claim, and unprovable thesis swirl around in the same social media bucket, the need is not for information, but for education. People need the ability to navigate the welter of claims made in the unregulated space that is public debate in the age of the Internet. Now more than ever cultural processes are irreducible. They are not proxies for economic or political ones. They must be understood as cultural.

How could a better – and more useful – understanding of culture be obtained? One way is to clarify what we want the word to do. The context around it is not constant but reflects changing social and historical conditions. The meaning is the use, in Wittgenstein’s aperçu. In the 1950s, Raymond Williams needed to expand its definition. What had been a handy normative characterisation – Arnold’s ‘best that has been thought and said in the world’ – had decayed into fusty aestheticism. A culture-as-life approach reflected what many people in Britain were experiencing after World War II. Regional mobility was on the rise, class stratification on the decline. Cultural tastes were flattening out, blending into forms of everyday behaviour. When the Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler coined the term ‘lifestyle’ in 1929, he named a confluence that accelerated after 1945, when an expanded economy and expanded educational system led axiomatically to an expanded idea of culture.

‘How could a better – and more useful – understanding of culture be obtained?’

As with all denotative extensions, there comes a point where a word loses purchase if it includes too many things, or includes them in too undifferentiated a way. Simply broadening our definition of culture is no longer a useful semantic strategy. The world has changed again, and what we face in the age of Je suis Charlie Hebdo is not a hierarchy of forms against a backdrop of relative social homogeneity, but divergent communities and conflicting belief systems co-located in the same geographical and virtual space. Where once we needed to credit the ‘Other’ and diverse cultural practices, now we have to juggle a number of ‘Others’ and discover what they might hold in common. In a world full of different cultures, it is up to the Humanities to ensure the word ‘culture’ doesn’t just reflect our differences. Rothman again:

‘Culture’ may be pulling itself apart from the inside, but it represents, in its way, a wish. The wish is that a group of people might discover, together, a good way of life; that their good way of life might express itself in their habits, institutions, and activities; and that those, in turn, might help individuals flourish in their own ways. The best culture would be one in which the [different] meanings of ‘culture’ weren’t at odds with one another. That’s not the culture we have at the moment; our culture is fractured, and so our sense of the word ‘culture’ is, too.

This means restoring a normative edge to the definition of culture, equipping it as a tool for distinction and discrimination, not just description. It need not mean a retreat into an Arnoldian version of culture-as-art, limiting the scholarly aperture to a few forms and practices. It does mean putting the act of critical judgement front and centre, acknowledging that, however partial a critic’s perspective, a purely relative understanding of culture does not help when antagonistic belief systems violently clash. The bestowal of critical judgements on cultural activity will be an act that is sometimes both difficult and controversial (think of the decision to reprint, or not, the Charlie Hebdo cartoons). But it is intellectually necessary and politically overdue.

Journalists such as Jonathan Freedland and Gary Younge in the Guardian have argued that Western and Islamic communities must now take steps to make allowances for each other’s world view. Such cultural adjustment is unlikely to appeal to the fanatics of the Islamic State or to the no-less troubling adherents of PEGIDA, the German anti-Islam movement. It does not have to engage the extremists, however, but the looser (and larger) ranks of sympathisers, thus promotingmitigation rather than eradication, ideas rather than ideology. In his book The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Regions, 1650–1815 (1991), American historian Richard White describes relations between European settlers and Native Americans in the eighteenth century, focusing on the face-to-face interactions of frontier villages. He provides a powerful modelling of what he calls the ‘search for accommodation and common meaning’ between opposed communities:

The accommodation I speak of is not acculturation under a new name … [It] certainly involves cultural change, but it takes place on what I call the middle ground. The middle ground is the place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the non-state world of villages ... On the middle ground diverse peoples adjust their differences through what amounts to a process of creative, and often expedient, misunder­standings. People try to persuade others who are different from themselves by appealing to what they perceive to be the values and practices of those others.

Are the Humanities in Australia in a position to advance this creative and nuanced understanding of culture-as-middle-ground, or to inform public policy at the deepest level? From 2002 onwards every academic seeking support from the Australian Research Council has had to explain how their project will contribute to the National Research Priorities. For Humanities scholars the only option has been to argue we are ‘Safeguarding Australia’, by ‘enhancing Australia’s capacity to interpret and engage with its regional and global environment through a greater understanding of languages, societies, politics and cultures’.

Charlie Hebdo has shown us that the only way of protecting Australia is through better cultural understanding and through the accommodation that follows from it. To achieve this we must recalibrate our idea of culture, and renew our commitment to the Humanities research that can action it to the benefit of all.

The authors of this article are based at Flinders University, where Julian Meyrick is Strategic Professor of Creative Arts; Richard Maltby is Professor of Screen Studies and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Education, Humanities and Law; and Robert Phiddian is Head of the Department of English and Cultural Studies.