23-TXT18
Culture Check
“Whenever I hear the word culture, I bring out my checkbook.” –Le Mepris, Godard
“I don’t know how to measure culture. I don’t know how to test its effects. I’m not sure anyone else does.”
–Harry Holzer
“I don’t know how to measure culture. I don’t know how to test its effects. I’m not sure anyone else does.” –Harry Holzer

Cultural value appears to unchain itself at the moment of its interpretation, or from a description from outside. That is, the value of culture appears insular to its instance, performed from within the rituals and artifacts that it creates. Interpretation and description tend to exist for broad social comprehension, as portable mind documents, as broadcast tools for cultural literacy. Maybe these movements of disintegration are necessary mind relics from Gutenberg, the technological emergence of literally duplicating documents for comprehension. And maybe they are integral to just being human.

The presence of interpretation performs a quick dissociating act, a disintegration: the presence of interpretation works to disintegrate you. Integration, however, is the final criteria to successfully be “of” a culture. This is a state or a mode, a vibing, a permission to vibrate with both ineffectual and budding atoms from a shared sun.

"It’s a fight against the gods." –Fritz Lang, in Le Mepris

Disintegration allows cultural value to become an object, an object to be seized and distributed broadly, an object of apprehension and exchange. Whether it can interpret itself, to place its own value, and whether this interpretation is accurate as a form of comprehension, or if this interpretation should take the form of something else, something aesthetic, non-logical, or inferred through sense, is conditioned by those who attempt to answer it. The means and language of interpretation require shared rules for the transference and agreement of knowledge, for the production of knowledge.

Distributing cultural value broadly is a disintegrating act, one that historically siphons the insular value of a culture at the cost of its existence, synthesizing it for the progression of human epochs: our raw, communal, and communally spiritual material. The mob exorcizes this dynamic energy to progress our joined worth in existence, and continually remixes to find and capitalize on unaccounted value. The measure of culture is a path to the checkbook of any given time, and its value fluctuates.

And we are emerging once more harnessing a new medium of distribution, a new medium of storage. At least it seems this way, that blockchain can provide the commitment of value to any culture without disintegrating it, without interpreting it, and potentially without requiring you to integrate into it. It may be a technology that can allow a culture to emit value from its insular instance without risking full disintegration into the spiritual pulp of progressive human identity. It remains to be seen if the flow of virality, the persuasion of influence, would be able to contain its measurement. But the direct influx of royalty into originality that allows a multiplicity of ownership with degrees of interpretation and virality might be possible now. It will probably be less seductive to participate culturally without the engines of marketing or hype, which in effect might relinquish culture back into itself as a human tradition for human development, maybe shedding in totality its value outside of itself.