Culture fosters social cohesion by aligning people within a similar ethic of critique and engaging them in discursive networks that inevitably coalesce into communities. Cultured subjects do not celebrate themselves or their beliefs because they are never fully self-confident, but always in the process of realizing their identity between the ephemeral fullness of felt truth and the alienated, discursively mediated re-cognition of their framing assumptions. The ethic of constant self-interrogation implicit in this model is incommensurate with the glorification of any particular identity, national, ethnic, or individual, since it contains as one of the crucial moments the stepping back from habitual practice, the contestation of everything that goes without saying.
If there is an underlying universal ideology of Culture -a tacit scenario of “natural” behavior that draws on the deep logic of culture- it would simply be this: that we contest all of our unexamined assumptions, and especially those that we rely upon when we engage in Cultural critique and arrogate its claim to truth. The moment that one steps back from one’s own practices and assumes a position of greater wisdom is the moment of greatest susceptibility to error, if only because, convinced of one’s averted perspective, one is less likely to question one’s conclusions. Culture demands that we resist such convictions, and to that extent, that we resist its authority.
” William Ray, The Logic of Culture (2001: 189)
