"Hip hop? It's not only music, it's life, it's a culture, it defines me ..." This response given by an inner-city youth about his choice of music well illustrates the mechanics and dynamics of culture. Culture today is easily labeled as any type of demographic pool of people who share similar interests, habits, and customs. Culture is an experience which can be defined as truly human. The innate desire to be part of a solidarity movement rather then be excluded. "Culture is no longer a definition, no longer an object, it is something you dwell in" (lecture, 13 Jan). However in order to better understand how one experiences culture, Greenblatt indicates the common characteristic elements found in all cultures. The two concepts are constraint and mobility. He states:
"The ensemble of beliefs and practices that form a given culture function as a pervasive
technology of control, a set of limits within which social behavior must be contained, a
repertoire of models to which individuals must conform" (Greenblatt 3).
To address the first concept of a system of constraints, it is noted that "every culture has a set of rules" (lecture, 13 Jan). Of course these rules are not universal, they differentiate in accordance to the culture which dictates its convention. An example of this is the Biblical command toward the Israelites of old. "Thou shall not kill, yet it was ok to kill during battle with neighboring kingdoms because in that sense they were killing pagan criminals" (lecture, 13 Jan). A modern day example is the instituted law of death row. Although the government could define this as directed and initiated man slaughter, it also considers it a just procedure to bring a criminal (thus no longer a citizen) to rest.
"Culture is also about bringing people for rule towards a convention" (lecture, 13 Jan). Every culture has ideas of what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. To address the issue as mentioned in the outset regarding hip hop culture; hip hop is an art form consisting of four primary elements: Deejaying turntablism, freestyle emcees, graffiti artists, and b-boys (break-dancing). It's an amalgam of talents which defines the culture and further inseminates a life style which adherers to it must abide by.
There are unwritten codes in hip hop that everyone understands and practices. However, when one steps out of these boundaries, conflict occurs. For example, titles that mass media label such as "rap mogul Sean Puffy Combs" who is infamously known for sampling songs and producing mainstream commercialized hip hop through his production campaigns distorts the genre of hip hop from its roots, thus creating a crises. This is known as the mechanics of "spatial logic . . . you must rid the surplus, if you don't there is a crises. You must put into place which is sanctioned by culture" (lecture, 13 Jan).
Greenblatt uses Shakespearean and Elizabethan England to show how culture sanctions certain actions of power to enforce rules. He mentions the Shakespearean play As You Like It, "where Orlando's bitter complaint is not that he has been excluded from his patrimony...but rather that he being prevented from learning the manners of his class" (Greenblatt 4). Shakespeare suggests that being of certain class of nobility requires the need to not only know the ethics and morals of their order but to practice them.
When such rules of cultural conduct are enforced and practiced, "each practitioner becomes an agent of the enforcement" (lecture, 13 Jan). However when one does not abide to the rules, one becomes marginalized. They still retain their position but they are placed outside of culture. "To be excluded is to be included" (lecture, 18 Jan). And recapping this statement brings us to African-American music, one sector of it - hip hop which was initially excluded from society, but by being marginalized, it is now assimilated into our culture.
To address the social concept of mobility can be best thought of as this - to break the rules one must know them. For example, in the game of basketball, one must pass the ball and must be in constant motion of dribbling; to score one must simply deposit the ball into the basket. However it is when through improvisation, by "stretching the rules to see how far one can go" (lecture, 18 Jan), the result is of a spectacular display of a defiance of both gravity and the dynamics of physics, one can propel himself to slam dunk the ball with a swift three step motion.
Another display of breaking conventions can be seen in art. In poetry "good poems compels you to move ordinary uses of language to extraordinary use of language" (lecture, 18 Jan). Greenblatt mentions,
"Great writers are precisely masters of these codes, specialists in cultural
exchange. The works they create are structures for the accumulation,
transformation, representation, and communication of social energies and
practices" (Greenblatt 6).
And as words are modes of exchange, this article too acts as an agent of culture. By following the system of constraints I am restricted and confined to write this piece for fear of being marginalized which in this case would mean having less content in this issue as a whole. But by abiding to instructions and going further in tweaking it, my improvisation of how I interpreted the texts and lectures indicates that I myself am an agent of this submission, hence both answering and living within the answer to the question of how lived culture is experienced.
Greenblatt,
Stephen. "Culture." Critical Terms for Literary Study.
Ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas
McLaughlin. Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, date. 225-232.
Rafael, V.L. Lecture. Univ. of
California, San Diego, La Jolla. 13, 18 Feb. 2000.
