¡Politicemos siempre! o, la cultura como la política-qua-cultura

The political interpretation of culture remains a problematic endeavor. The problem lies in the competing and differing understandings of culture that are current in critical discourse. This article examines the two major ways culture is used —referring to either the arts and intellectual life, or a specific way of life, following Raymond Williams— and shows how both cultures are, in their specific ways, political, that is, constitutive of hierarchical social organization. The argument then is not that culture can be understood politically, but that it has to be understood and interpreted politically, that culture is, in fact, politics-qua-culture.