Culture...

This is the first thing we can say culture is, a wardrobe of signs people put out to each other, indicating where we are coming from and what we're about, so other people can size us up and decide what to do next. It is a way of marking out what makes us different.

Cultural historian Raymond Williams spent a lot of time trying to come up with a definition of culture. He referred to it as a whole way of life, or a structure of feeling. I have always rather liked that expression. It gives you the sense of culture as something you learn, perhaps without really being aware of it, yet it shapes your awareness of everything around you and how you react to things.

Learning a particular structure of feeling gives one no special insight whatsoever into other people's structures of feeling. Indeed, for our present purposes it has to remain an open question whether there is any way at all to get an overview of how structures of feeling, in general, operate. It is perfectly clear that literary and fine art cultures have no special knowledge of culture in general.