Culture, like blood and other life forces, circulates around the globe as if through a body.
There are certain locations, like New York or London or Paris, that seem more likely to originate culture, whereas other places, like Chicago or Manchester or Montreal, we might recognize more as receivers or interpreters of culture.
Population plays a part in determining whether a location originates or interprets culture. Larger cities tend to be engines of culture, with sympathetic administrative institutions and cultural infrastructures to incubate it.
Demographics is another indicator of where original cultures are more prone to occur. University cities, for instance, with higher numbers of young and enterprising residents tend to cultivate more unique cultural forms.
A confident and vibrant foundational culture, based upon things like shared language, identity, and history, is another significant condition that a given location might be more apt to originate rather than receive culture.
We frequently assign greater value to original cultures and to the locations that nurture them. Cultural insemination suggests a primary vital élan, whereas a secondary, supporting role is reserved for cultural dissemination. But a different kind of power can be found in locations that receive and reinterpret culture — that of revision, or what Homi K. Bhabha calls, “new and hybrid agencies and articulations.”
The time lag inherent in cultural transmission opens up a temporal space for imperative interventions and interpretive interference. As cultural forms travel from New York — or London, or Paris — to wherever they end up, they evolve in significance and transform in transit. In the time it takes for culture to arrive, it both loses and accrues meaning.
Techno music that originated in Detroit or Berlin but now resounds, for example, out of a stereo in a middle-class bedroom in the Montreal suburbs, may become less about representing art’s postmodern mechanical reproduction than about corporeal phenomenology and the body’s rhythmic regulation. The heartbeat during the depths of a Canadian winter is more immediate than the assembly line or the factory floor.
Taken out of context like this, cultural forms may superficially be misinterpreted or misunderstood. But those apparent interpretational deficiencies are themselves acts of agency that insert new cultural knowledge and multiply possible readings and meanings. Reception, then, is also always a new productive act. Reading is rewriting. And rewriting takes place in the time lag of transmission.
Ralph Ellison writes in his novel Invisible Man about the 20th century Black American experience of temporality. “Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time,” Ellison says, “you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead.”
Primary culture seems to set the temporal cultural pace — think of the phrase “New York minute” — whereas feeling behind or outside time is a condition common to receptive cultures. Hence the racist pejorative, “CP time.” The reclamation of the temporal sense, I believe, is the origin of the saying most commonly attributed to the Hip-Hop lexicon, which has now migrated to the MAGA Right in America: to “know what time it is.”
Physical travel still takes time, although much less since the 19th century than it did in every century before. But ideas and information today travel with near instantaneity and require practically no time to be received, read, and rewritten. Therefore, there is no longer any location of original culture, since it is constantly and everywhere being produced, circulated, and reproduced. And yet, there are certain places that still persist as cultural centers.
Is the idea of cultural centrality itself an artifact of time lag, just waiting to be read, rewritten, and understood anew? Are ideas also products, subject to the same regulation as commodities, with a short initial shelf life and increasingly rapid successions of cyclical marketplace revaluation?
The reality is that time arrives in waves, and like waves, time is subject to tides. Time is not a straight line, nor is it a cycle. It is a current, a frequency, a living bandwidth that carries culture on it like a radio frequency carries signal. We are each tuned to slightly different times.
What precipitated this line of thought was Laura Snapes’ interview in The Guardian this week with Angine de Poitrine. First off, culture is not supposed to originate in Saguenay. But it is acceptable when it is a revision of culture that originated elsewhere, like a misreading of Frank Zappa or King Crimson. And for a New York minute, Saguenay becomes a center of culture.
It is ironic that this so of-the-moment band is also, aesthetically speaking, all about timing, frequency, and ambiguity. Now that Angine de Poitrine have arrived in London, they can reset their loop pedals and properly impose upon cultural temporality their own brand of CP (coloured polkadot) time. How long this micro-moment lasts remains to be seen. In a time of TikTok, when everyone wants to know what time it is, the clock is ticking…
I also had time this week to contemplate Bizet’s Carmen, a cultural text with comparatively longer staying power, but one which has undergone a series of re-readings and rewritings through the sands of time.
It is probable that, in its time, Carmen was conceived as a cautionary tale against liberated femininity. The Prosper Mérimée novella from which Bizet’s opera is adapted begins with a quotation from the Greek poet Palladas: “Every woman turns sour, twice she has her hour, one is in bed, the other is dead.”
Theodor Adorno in his essay “Fantasia sopra Carmen” writes that Carmen celebrates “eruptions from civilization into the unknown,” rejecting the bourgeois expectations of work and productivity, adherence to commodified temporality and inevitable domesticity. “The Fate which rules and which nothing can halt,” Adorno asserts, “is the primeval and pre-intellectual force of sexuality itself.”
It took 150 years for these thoughts to migrate from Paris to Frankfurt to Montreal.
You can always escape a place. But you cannot fly faster than time. And you can never overtake an idea.◼︎
Cover image: Rihab Chaieb as Carmen photographed by Vivien Gaumand for Opéra de Montréal.
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