cultural studies
shift of the focus
culture
- a general process of intelelctual and aesthetic development
- a particular way of life (of people/group, period)
- works and practices of intellectual and artistic activity (texts, practices
that signify, produce meaning)
… and ideology (the political dimension)
- systematic body of ideas of a group of people (professional ideology)
- distorting reality (capitalist ideology); texts presenting a particular
image of reality (ideological forms)
-‘myth’; connotations; universalize and legitimize what is partial and
particular (operations of ideology)
- as a material practice; encountered in the practices (not only in certain
ideas) of everyday life (rituals/customs binding us to the social order)
popular culture
different definitions:
well-liked by many people; or inferior culture; or mass (commercial)
culture; or folk culture (originated from the people); as a site/terrain of
struggle; blurring of the distinction between authentic and commercial
… popular culture more than a simple discussion of entertainment and
leisure
… a culture that only emerged following industrialization and
urbanization (change in the relations of employees/employers;
residential separation of classes; repressive measures to defeat
radicalism)
• ‘culture and civilization’ tradition
-Matthew Arnold (1867-9) Culture and Anarchy
anarchy (popular culture), the disruptive nature of working-class lived
culture (political dangers) – against anarchy, cultural politics
- Frank R. Leavis (1930) Mass Civilization and Minority Culture
culture can only be appreciated and judged by a small minority; what
has changed is the status of minority (collapse of authority); threat of
mass civilization and mass culture (mass democracy)
• culturalism
1950s-60s
analyzing the culture of a society - the textual forms and the documented
practices of a culture
possible to reconstitute the patterned behavior and constellations of ideas
shared by the men and women who produce and consume the texts and
practices of that society
… it is a perspective that stresses human agency, the active production of
culture, rather than its passive consumption
‘the ordinary people’
Richard Hoggart (1957) The Uses of Literacy
structure of book: the working class of Hoggart’s youth (1930s) / this
culture under threat from the new forms of mass entertainment of the
1950s
working-class culture marked by a sense of strong community; popular
culture is made by the people (lived culture)
Vs
the ‘shiny barbarism’ of new mass culture; the pleasures of mass culture
over-excite taste, eventually dull it, and finally kill it (mindless hedonism)
… not all popular culture is bad; this is true only of contemporary popular
culture
the analysis of culture
Raymond Williams: three new ways of thinking about contemporary
culture:
- a description of a particular way of life
- expresses certain meanings and values
- the work of cultural analysis should be the clarification of meanings
and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of life, a particular
culture
…
in addressing the complex organization of culture as a particular way
of life, the purpose of cultural analysis is:
- to understand what a culture expressing
- the actual experience through which a culture was lived
- the important common element
- a particular community of experience
… to reconstitute the shared values of a particular group, class or
society (‘structure of feeling’)
(cultures in conflict)
Edward P. Thomson (1963/68) The Making of the EnglishWorking Class – the
political and cultural formation of the English working class
the history from below: seeks to reintroduce working class experience into
the historical process; working class are the conscious agents of their own
making
- ‘ordinary’ men and women, their experiences, their values, their ideas,
their actions, their desires; popular culture as a site of resistance to those in
whose interests the Industrial Revolution was made
- cultures always exist in conflict and struggle to establish particular ways of
life rather than evolve to form a particular way of life
• cultural studies
critical approaches to society and culture were proliferating
throughout the world by the 1960s
they systematically rejected high/low culture distinctions and took
seriously the artifacts of media culture, thus surpassing the elitism of
dominant literary approaches to culture
the classical period of British cultural studies from the early 1960s
to the early 1980s adopted a Marxian approach to the study of
culture; one especially influenced by Gramsci and Althusser
the context
Hoggart established the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the
University of Birmingham (1964); Stuart Hall directed the Centre
from 1968 to 1979
… developed a variety of critical perspectives for the analysis,
interpretation, and criticism of cultural artifacts
‘we have to try and see beyond the habits to what the habits stand for,
to see through the statements to what the statements really mean
(which may be the opposite of the statements themselves), to detect
the differing pressures of emotion behind idiomatic phrases and
ritualistic observances’
… the focus
responding to social conflicts and movements of the 1960s and the
1970s, the Birmingham group came to concentrate on the interplay of
representations and ideologies of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and
nationality in cultural texts
they studied the effects of newspapers, radio, television, film, and other
popular cultural forms on audiences
… how assorted audiences interpreted and deployed media culture in
varied ways and contexts, analyzing the factors that made audiences
respond in contrasting manners to media texts
… the analysis
British cultural studies situated culture within a theory of social
production and reproduction, specifying the ways that cultural
forms served either to further social control or to enable people to
resist
it analyzed society as a hierarchical and antagonistic set of social
relations characterized by the oppression of subordinate class,
gender, race, ethnic and national strata
… the differentiation
unlike the classical Frankfurt school, British cultural studies looked
to youth cultures as providing potentially potent forms of
opposition and social change
… they demonstrated how culture came to constitute distinct
forms of identity and group membership and appraised the
oppositional potential of diverse youth subcultures
… they overcame the limitations of the Frankfurt school notion of
a passive audience in their conceptions of an active audience that
creates meanings and the popular
… the interest
cultural studies focused on how subcultural groups resist dominant
forms of culture and identity, creating their own style and identities
on the one hand, people conform to hegemonic dress and fashion
codes, behavior and political ideologies, producing their identities
with mainstream groups (white, middle class, conservative …)
on the other hand, people who identify with subcultures (punk, hip
hop, etc) act differently, creating oppositional identities, defining
themselves against standard models
… questioning
cultural studies developed ways to examine and critique how the
established society and culture promoted sexism, racism,
homophobia and additional forms of oppression, or helped to
generate resistance and struggle against domination and injustice
this approach implicitly contained political critique of all cultural
forms that promoted oppression, while positively affirming texts
and representations that produced a potentially more just and
egalitarian social order
overall
studying the politics of culture, cultural studies attempt to show how
culture both provided tools and forces of domination and resources
for resistance and opposition
so, individuals use media culture to generate also potentially
oppositional readings, identities and subcultures
… cultural studies interpreted culture within society
- Stuart Hall
argued that a distinction must be made between the encoding of
media texts by producers and the decoding by consumers
this distinction highlighted the ability of audiences to produce their
own readings and meanings, to decode texts in aberrant or
oppositional ways, as well as the ‘preferred’ ways in tune with the
dominant ideology
a case study: broadcasting
the institutional structures of broadcasting, with their practices and
networks of production, their organized relations and technical
infrastructures, are required to produce a programme
production here constructs the message; in one sense, then, the circuit
begins here
the institution-societal relations of production must pass under the
discursive rules of language for its product to be realized
…
before this can have an “effect” (however defined), satisfy a need or be
put to a use, it must first be appropriated as meaningful discourse and
be meaningfully decoded
it is this set of decoded meanings that have an effect, influence, entertain,
instruct or persuade
in a determinate moment the structure employs a code and yields a
message; at another determinate moment the message, via its
decodings, issues into the structure of social practices
the circuit …
frameworks of knowledge / relations of production / technical
infrastructure
- encoding (meaning structures 1)
- programme as meaningful discourse
- decoding (meaning structures 2)
decoding positions
a.
the dominant-hegemonic position: when the viewer takes the connoted
meaning of a programme and decodes the message in terms of the
reference code in which it has been encoded – the viewer is operating
inside the dominant code
b.
negotiated code or position: it acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic
definitions to make the grand significations (abstract), while, at a more
restricted, situational (situated) level, it makes its own ground rules –
reserving the right to make a more negotiated application to ‘local
conditions’
c.
oppositional code: decoding message in a globally contrary way – here the
‘politics of signification’, the struggle in discourse is joined
implications
a program becomes a text at the moment of reading, that is, when the
interaction with one of its many audiences activates some of the
meanings that is capable of provoking
- re-empowering of the reader in terms of the social practices and the
discourses they produce for the social subject
- evaluating the social and cultural influences that mediate the process
of reading (decoding moment)
*politics of representation
British cultural studies, progressively adopted a feminist dimension,
paid greater attention to race, gender, sexuality, pleasure; ethnicity,
nationality, identity
as various relevant discourses circulated in response to social
struggles and movements
/race
race is a cultural and historical category, a way of making difference to
signify between people of a variety of skin tones
what is important is not difference as such, but how it is made to signify;
how it is made meaningful in terms of a social and political hierarchy
this is not to deny that human beings come in different colors and with
different physical features, but it is to insist that these differences do
not issue meanings; they have to be made to mean (signification)
…
‘the work that cultural studies has to do is to mobilise everything that it
can find in terms of intellectual resources in order to understand
what keeps making the lives we live, and the societies we live in,
profoundly and deeply antihuman in their capacity to live with
difference’ (Hall, 1996)
the task for cultural studies is to help to defeat racism, and by so doing,
help to bring into being a world in which the term race is little more
than a long discussed historical category, signifying in the
contemporary nothing more than the human race
/gender
though contemporary feminists have taken a diversity of approaches to
popular culture, they have shared two major assumptions:
- women have a particular relationship to popular culture that is
different from men’s
- understanding how popular culture functions both for women and for
a patriarchal culture is important if women are to gain control over
their own identities and change social mythologies and social relations
-
… Ian Ang (‘watching Dallas’)
an analysis of the American prime-time soap Dallas, concerned with
female pleasure
trying to understand this pleasure, without having to pass judgment on
whether Dallas is good or bad
she is not concerned with pleasure understood as the satisfaction of an
already pre-existent need, but the mechanisms by which pleasure is
aroused
instead of the question ‘what are the effects of pleasure?’, she poses the
question ‘what is the mechanism of pleasure; how is it produced, and
how does it work?’
… Janice Radaway (‘reading the romance’)
the focus is the ordinary woman as romance reader - why the women
read, how they read, why they read romance fiction, and how they
discriminate between ideal and failed romances
her conclusions on the cultural significance of romance reading are
contradictory: on the one hand, if the focus is the text, romance
reading seems like a surrender to patriarchy; on the other hand, if the
focus is the act, romance reading appears to be an oppositional
activity
it is this tension, between the ‘meaning of the act’ and the ‘meaning of
the text’ that must be analyzed if we are to understand the full
meaning of romance reading
… Judith Buttler (queer theory)
on the performativity of gender
… the gender is not an expression of biological sex, it is
performatively constructed in culture
gender identities consist of the accumulation of what is outside (i.e.
in culture) in the belief that they are an expression of what is inside
(i.e. in nature)
femininity and masculinity are not expressions of ‘nature’, they are
cultural performances in which their ‘naturalness is constituted
through discursively constrained performative acts that create the
effect of the natural, the original and the inevitable
/taste
for Pierre Bourdieu, taste is a profoundly ideological category
it functions as a market of ‘class’ (using the term in the double sense
to mean both socio-economic category and a particular level of
quality)
… consumption is predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not,
to fulfill a social function of legitimizing social difference – cultural
distinctions are often used to support class distinctions
… distinction
distinctions of culture (whether understood as text, practice or way of
living) are a significant aspect of the struggle between dominant and
subordinate groups in society
Bourdieu’s purpose is not to prove the self evident – that different
classes have different lifestyles, different tastes – but to interrogate the
processes by which the making of cultural distinctions secures and
legitimates forms of power and control rooted in economic inequalities
… how differences are used by the dominant classes as a means of
social reproduction
creation of a ‘cultural field’?
John Fiske: commodities from which popular culture is made circulate
in two simultaneous economies, the financial and the cultural
whereas the financial economy is primarily concerned with exchange
value, the cultural is primarily focused on use – meanings, pleasures,
and social identities
… resistance to the power of the powerful by those without power (in
western societies) takes two forms, semiotic and social; popular
culture is a semiotic battlefield
critique
McGuigan (1992): the separation of contemporary cultural studies
from the political economy of culture has been one of the most
disabling features of the filed of study
… what can political economy offer to cultural studies?
… collapsing everything back into the economic?
the challenge
keeping in active relationship production, text and consumption …
what is needed is an understanding of the relationship between
structure and agency
… there is always a dialogue between processes of production and the
activities of consumption
*
notes from the books:
- Bourdieu, P. (1986) Distinction a Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste
- Durham, M. G. and Kellner, D. (eds.) (2006) Media and Cultural Studies: Key
Works (revised edition)
- Hall, S., et. al. (eds.) (1980) Culture, Media, Language
- Storey J. (2009) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: a Reader (4th edition)
- Storey J. (2009) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: an Introduction (5th
edition)
questions for discussion
 where do you find yourselves in Hall’s encoding-decoding model?
 can you bring examples of media representations of race and gender
and critically evaluate the discourse they produce?
 what do you think about the conception of identity as cultural
performance?
 do you agree with Bourdieu’s analysis on taste and the cultural
distinctions?
thank you
for your attention
workshop
 work in groups and make a list of your tastes
come to discuss them in the class in relation to:
- gender differences; their meanings (‘text’ Vs ‘act’);
their performative role; and their cultural
distinction
workshop
- one group working on the role of mass media in
promoting new lifestyles in Turkey
- the other group working on traditional customs and
ways of life that are threatened by the role of mass
media in Turkey
… present your arguments