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A culture is a unit only in sofar a number is a unit. The fact that we express 1 as a finite number expresses our tidyness and our sense of economy, not necessarily something exterior called a number. A number is a thing upon which violence has been committed to make it what it is. It has been cut from the background. All units are a product of violence. Because 1 is defined by decision, we could also define one as not 0.999999etc. or 1.000001etc. Numbers obey borders and so do words. So that "A culture" is a precise border imposed by the definition given by whoever decides to define that particular culture. The borders of words like "that culture" are subject to heated terrotorial disputes. "Do you deny there is something called Englishness" he said threateningly. Oh yes there is Englishness and there is Germannes and Frenchness. They are cultures of exacerbated difference, of nationalism, of self-conscious differentiation, so they must exist, they are forced to. But they also tend to accrete in great concentrations around their source of definition. Englishness is something that belongs specifically to the self-conscious, those who paradoxically often feel most under threat of denial and sameness. And the real joke is that much of what consitutues Englishness is also a determining part of other selfconscious cultures. As such it might be safer to see a culture as a cell. A cell exists as a result of a continuous, partially selective and largely purposive exchange with the outside. Such a definition would take the wind out of the sails of any semantic baron insisting on his right to monarchic meaning.