Public Culture: Diversity, Democracy, and Community in the United States

What Is Public Culture? Agency and Contested Meaning in American Culture—An Introduction

What Is Public Culture? Agency and Contested Meaning in American Culture—An Introduction Mary Kupiec Cayton Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization. —Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics (1913) The public is one thing, Jack, and the people another. —Spoken by the poet Lemsford to Jack Chase in Herman Melville, White-Jacket (1850) All culture is in some sense public. Who of us would dispute it? As human beings, the meanings we attribute to our individual experiences emerge only through the use of shared codes, some verbal and some nonverbal . Culture is about the patterns of meanings we use to organize human behavior . As such, it always has a public—that is to say, a shared and suprapersonal—dimension. Meaning is never the product of individual experience considered in isolation from other human experience. What we know and experience can only be known and experienced through the prism of what we share with others, and the something that is shared is always based on shared codes and languages. All culture, then, is by definition public. In addition,“public”is perhaps the term most commonly used, at least in the Western Enlightenment tradition, to talk about what some general “we”— often defined in national terms—have in common in the realm of cultural interaction made visible through discursive articulation. The United States in particular, from its embodiment as a nation during the late Enlightenment, was born as a res publica, a thing of the people, a realm of human activity where the good of the whole could hypothetically be paramount. Derived from the Latin populus, the notion “republic” marked the discursive site where duly constituted deliberative bodies (“citizens”) deliberated rationally to produce a metadiscursive realm apart from everyday life—one where the variety of private concerns that comprise everyday life were defined, regulated, and protected, for the good of the whole (or alternatively, for the “commonweal”). Simultaneously both a place or space as well as an abstractly constituted group of people, “the public” represented both process and product—the place where a common good transcending the particular and private was discussed, ratified, and promoted, as well as the result of those deliberations. It is to the nature of this public deliberation and the culture it produces —or purportedly fails to produce these days in the United States (as some significant contributors to the conversation about the vitality of the res publica would have it)—that I turn in this essay. The propositions that this public is in crisis, that this crisis in public culture has significant ramifications for the welfare of citizens, and that significant interventions into this culture are necessary to preserve or restore its health are widespread. The most visible such case in recent years has been made by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, whose discussion of the decline of social capital and the civic enterprise has found a receptive audience not only among scholars, but also among national leaders such as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Tony Blair.1 Efforts such as Putnam’s emphasize the importance of civic engagement as a way of overcoming the fragmentation of values and identity associated with postmodern America—that is to say, with a perceived disintegration of public culture. Putnam’s civic engagement model and those like it address the importance of civic intervention in maintaining liberal democracy as it has flourished in the United States. They leave out, however, questions about how inequalities of cultural power get created, established, sustained, contested, and transformed—and the effect of those inequalities of power on a public realm designed to promulgate and promote the common good. Or put another way, such liberal political models of citizenship feature a totalizing rhetoric that makes citizenship a category that transcends other identity categories and which subsumes them. Such “official” conversations, which privilege citizenship as a transcendent category of value, obscure the degree to which national conversations utilize an open-ended set of meanings or processes, which, far from being agreed upon 2 Mary Kupiec Cayton and uncontested, are negotiated, disputed, accommodated, and modified...