Here is a short passage from de Certeau’s dense, frustrating, difficult, and brilliant book about how we can change our focus from thinking about the creation of culture to thinking about the consumption of culture:
“Ever since scientific work (scientificité) has given itself its own proper and appropriate places through rational projects capable of determining their procedures, with formal objects and specified conditions under which they are falsifiable, ever since it was founded as a plurality of limited and distinct fields, in short ever since it stopped being theological, it has constituted the whole as its remainder; this remainder has become what we call culture.” (6)
Michel de Certeau, The Practice Of Everyday Life (Berkeley: UC Press, 1988)
I first read this book in graduate school, getting my Ph.D. in English. It was slow going then and hasn’t gotten faster since.
The short version, near as I can tell, is that the Industrial Revolution and mass production turned a lot of things that hadn’t been numbers into numbers—rendering quantification from qualification. The leftover bits are what we call culture.
That was de Certeau’s argument (radically simplified) back in the 1980s, before the digital revolution that supplanted the industrial revolution.
Today, in our digital world, even more quantification has taken over many more aspects of everyday life. With the A.I. revolution, that quantification is accelerating even more.