Culture is an ongoing production, not a fixed inheritance to be recovered

Evidence

What these examples suggest is that culture is not just a voyage of rediscovery, a return journey. It is not an “archaeology.” Culture is a production. It has its raw materials, its resources, its “work-of-production.” It depends on a knowledge of tradition as “the changing same” and an effective set of genealogies. But what this “detour through its pasts” does is to enable us, through culture, to produce ourselves anew, as new kinds of subjects. It is therefore not a question of what our traditions make of us so much as what we make of our traditions. Paradoxically, our cultural identities, in any finished form, lie ahead of us. We are always in the process of cultural formation. Culture is not a matter of ontology, of being, but of becoming. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 862

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core definition of culture as production/becoming — central toolkit concept worth carrying forward.
• XREF: Calls back to ‘the changing same’ from Gilroy and Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic; also undergirds postcolonial readings of identity; strongly connects to how Islamophobia literature treats ‘Muslim identity’ as constructed rather than essential. — connects to: Mere preservation of tradition destroys culture, not sustains it — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 564; A farmer’s labor is no longer innocent because it is always already cultural — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 759
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion ‘not what our traditions make of us but what we make of our traditions’ and ‘identities lie ahead of us’ is a paradigm-shifting reframe of cultural identity.