5.1-Introduction To Cultural Studies -Summary PDF

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Introduction to Cultural Studies – SummaryBy the end of the term you should be able to answer the following questions. It is not enough to learn the definitions by heart and recite them, but you need to be able to explain them and give examples. This is the list of the terms & topics you nee...

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Introduction to Cultural Studies – Summary By the end of the term you should be able to answer the following questions. It is not enough to learn the definitions by heart and recite them, but you need to be able to explain them and give examples. This is the list of the terms & topics you need to be able to explain: 1. What is Cultural Studies? 2. What is culture?/How can it be defined? 1. Nature versus Culture 2. Subculture 3. Who introduced the idea of British Cultural Studies and when (what’s its history)? 4. What were the main ideas about culture, which were introduced by the early representatives of British Cultural Studies? What was new about these ideas? 5. What are key concerns/concepts of today’s cultural studies? 1. Cultural semiotics 2. Signifying practices 3. Encoding/ decoding model (Stuart Hall) 4. Cultural representation 6. What other social sciences/humanities influence(d) cultural studies with their theories? 7. What is: 1. identity 2. identity politics 3. collective identity 4. race 5. racism 6. ethnicity 7. multiculturalism 8. feminism 9. gender 10. gender (studies): masculinity, femininity, queer studies, feminism 11. the public sphere 12. social class 13. (Cultural) Hegemony 8. What is popular culture? How can it be analysed? 9. Interaction of different media with each other 10. What is visual culture and how can it be analysed? How to analyse visuals/ What parts do you analyse? 11. How can we analyse film? Film Language 12. Reception (audience/ context) 13. Taste communities 14. Why should culture be analysed at all? What can be gained from such an analysis?

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Setting the Stage: •

What is Cultural Studies? ◦ A science of analysing culture in an objective way ◦ the analysis of culture and its phenomena ◦ cultural studies analyses not only meaning but also values of societies ◦ Culture is not only high culture, but also “a whole way of life”(R. Williams) and popular or working class culture ◦ concerned with the process of naturalisation ◦ concerned with alterity ◦ holy trinity of cultural studies: class, ethnicity and gender

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What is culture?/How can it be defined? ◦ A human-made construction expressed with the help of cultural representations such as: symbols, rites, values and norms, certain ways of behaving and cultural artefacts ◦ one cannot analyse culture as such, but only its artefacts ◦ Culture needs a least 2 people ◦ three dimensions of culture by Posner: ▪ mental dimension (e.g. myths, political ideologies, values and norms, mindset) ▪ social dimension (e.g. social rites, communication and institutions) ▪ material dimension (e.g. cultural artefacts(clothes, art, texts…) products of pop culture) ◦ a definition of culture can also be made on the basis of semiotics: a culture is a communication system that relies on the same signs and codes ◦ Nature versus Culture: ▪ nature and cultural are traditional complementary opposites ▪ the dangerous wildness needs to be tamed by human culture ▪ cultivation of nature is seen as mankind's greatest achievement ▪ this division evoked the concept of duality in western cultures ▪ the nature-culture-division itself is a cultural product or construction ▪ it can also be found within the field of sciences (Natur- und Kulturwissenschaften) ◦ Subculture: ▪ a concept of cultural studies concerning youth culture ▪ the concept of subculture is a mobile one constitutive of its objects of study ▪ it is a classificatory term that attempts to map the social world on an act of representation ▪ it can also refer to a whole way of life ▪ the defining attribute of “subcultures” lies with the way the accent is put on the distinction between a particular cultural/social group and the larger culture/society ▪ the emphasis is on variance from a larger collectivity ▪ they are condemned to and/or enjoy a consciousness of “otherness” or difference

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Why should culture be analysed at all? What can be gained from such an analysis? ◦ The understanding of culture and its processes is important in international communication ◦ knowledge of one's own identity and culture can be important informations 2

Definitions of Culture and Cultural Semiotics: •

Who introduced the idea of British Cultural Studies and when (what’s its history)? ◦ Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson and later Stuart Hall ◦ Birmingham in 1964: founding of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS)

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What were the main ideas about culture, which were introduced by the early representatives of British Cultural Studies? What was new about these ideas? ◦ Culture is not only high culture, but also popular culture/working class culture ◦ youth culture, television shows and everyday culture ◦ the uses of power ◦ the role of gender ◦ the role of the mass media

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What are key concerns/concepts of today’s cultural studies? ◦ Cultural semiotics ▪ Ferdinad des Saussures: signifier (sign/symbol) and signified (meaning) ▪ concerned with the meaning of signs ▪ e.g.: clothes: signifier & subculture: signified; meaning: anti-establishment attitude and rebellion ▪ different sorts of signs: indexes (blushing), icons (toilet signs) and symbols (heart) ◦ Signifying practices ▪ the processes by which meaning is attached to signs, symbols, or conventions ▪ the ascribing of meaning to cultural products by producers and recipients ▪ analysis of these meaning-giving social processes or meaning-making behaviours ◦ Mass media and how to analyse them: Encoding/ decoding model (Stuart Hall; 1970) ▪ production of media text: encoding of meaning ▪ recipient of media texts: decoding of meaning ▪ production and recipient meaning are not identical ▪ this is because many messages and media texts are polysemic (they have more than one potential set of meanings) ▪ meaning resides within the recipient, which means that there is no inherent meaning to cultural products ◦ Cultural representation: ▪ how the world is socially constructed and represented to and by us in meaningful ways ▪ representations are given meaning by signifying processes ▪ we need to explore the textual generation of meaning ▪ includes investigation of the modes by which meaning is produced in a variety of contexts ▪ cultural representations and meanings have a certain materiality: they are embedded in sounds, inscriptions, objects, images, books, magazines and television programmes ▪ they are produced, enacted, used and understood in specific social contexts ◦ cultural materialism: ▪ processes and practices which create cultural products, conditions and means of production ▪ relationship between the producers and recipients of cultural products 3

▪ processes giving meaning to cultural objects (through marketing strategies or contexts of usage) ▪ producers and recipients of cultural products ascribe meaning to these products through signifying practices ◦ Du Gay et al.: the circuit of culture ▪ every aspect influences another aspect

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What sciences/humanities influence(d) cultural studies with their theories? ◦ Philosophy (Derrida, Foucault, Horkheimer/Adorno) ◦ semiotics (Saussure) ◦ linguistics and literary studies

other social

Media: Television: ◦ television influenced cultural studies as it began to become a very important part of everyday life in the 60s and onwards ◦ “during its relatively short history television's interactions with everyday life have been radically intensified” ◦ What are the four elements of television? 1. the broadcast content 2. the set on which the content is watched 3. the means of distribution of that content 4. the industry which produces the content ◦ the set: ▪ is also culturally dependent ▪ tells us something about family relations, lifestyle and self-presentation consequences ▪ in the West the set is primarily a domestic medium ◦ What is the sociality of television use? ▪ TV addresses families •

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▪ Depending on how many sets a household owns the set itself can be seen as a centre of social interaction ▪ people interact with the TV as they talk about it or watch TV ▪ TV draws people together or isolates them the industry: funding and regulation ▪ dominating questions: how to fund it? ▪ TV is an expensive medium because new content needs to be constantly produced ▪ TV has also an economic function ▪ taste cultures have developed ▪ TV is a policy issue because of its social power → regulation needed How is television regulated? ▪ Concerned with the balance of market and non-market funding of programming and the safeguards, to maintain diversity, to ensure the right of the media to 'free speech' and for civic decorum, through censorship ▪ censorship and self-censorship Audiences: ▪ TV exists within the social and ethical centre of the media ▪ TV socialises its viewers towards the social apparatus ▪ TV creates an intergenerational bonding – nostalgic TV moments of each generation ▪ TV plays a role in everyday life ▪ TV and the media as a bridge between different 'cultural domains' ▪ TV unites people through forming audiences into communities What is a segmented audience? ▪ A segmented audience is an audience with different taste-cultures and different age groups (based on e.g.: ethnicity, gender, level of education, political orientation, …) What approaches are there to the study of audiences? ▪ The “uses and gratifications approach”(Lazarsfeld): used statistical analysis of data to show that television viewing integrated viewers into capitalist society by reinforcing its norms and marginalising deliberative analysis ▪ the “critical theory' school”(Adorno): this approach argued that television reduced its audience's capacities to reflect on and critique society and culture; TV deindividuates people ▪ The “encoding/decoding model”(Hall): four-stage theory of communication: production, circulation, use and reproduction; model of analysing meaning and reception at a basic level ▪ other approaches found out that audiences could actually resist a programme's values and that TV does not have a single meaning but contains a number of meanings ▪ cultural studies aims at understanding the role of TV in everyday life Content: ▪ TV does not have the monopoly position in the media → other media influence culture just as much as it does ▪ TV and its content can be analysed in relation to other cultural and social institutions ▪ TV also shapes other social and cultural institutions How is TV content studied in cultural studies? ▪ Content and TV itself are seen as flow (Williams) ▪ not the shows themselves but how those shows are arranged is considered ▪ cultural studies has also paid attention to genres and analysed constitutive features ▪ analysis of programmes has also taken the form of showing how programmes 5

produce their meaning through the use of signs ◦ What are TV's relations to other cultural and social institutions? ▪ The media connect together different cultural domains for audiences as well as creating a sense of the audience itself as a community ▪ TV is in competition with a wide variety of other institutions that fulfil similar functions or offer similar pleasures, e.g. with the education system ▪ but TV also enables and shapes those institutions, e.g. formal politics ◦ “Television produces reality as well as representing is.” Explain! ▪ e.g. generating TV celebrities ▪ TV has created its own sphere which touches upon our everyday lives ▪ the media folds into everyday life; it traverses it; it fuses into it and deterritorialises it; it forms blocks of emotion in the real world or grounds social activities there which appear and disappear in their own opaque rhythms • Popular Music: ◦ What is the connection between subcultures and popular music? ▪ Popular music is divisive because it creates micro-communities and lifestyles ▪ music can form identities and even political and spiritual dimensions ▪ music forms subcultures through processes of division and attraction ◦ What does Hebdidge say about subcultures (using Punk and Reggae as examples)? ▪ He described punk as a transgressive signifying practice, because it combined elements of other cultures in itself ▪ he described reggae as alternative to white hegemony music ◦ “There is a tension between music as an authentic collective expression versus as a commodity or industry product.” Explain! ▪ Commercial vs. real music ◦ Is there a connection between popular music and politics? ▪ e.g. rock music: from “rock's rebellion to significant political clout ▪ political statements can be conveyed by music ◦ What can cultural studies do with music/why is it crucial to cultural studies? ▪ It is crucial because it provides strong examples of how art forms nurture particular cultural formations through processes of division and attraction, and because music fandom crosses the border between academic and non-academic so easily • The internet and technoculture: ◦ What is the “old internet”? ▪ Access through modem, made up of bulletin boards ◦ What is the major difficulty with studying technoculture? ▪ no one truly knows what technoculture is and where it is heading ◦ What does “hybridisation” of (old) media mean? ▪ Old media become adopted and transformed into modern shape ▪ e.g. e-mail is almost like an interactive post ◦ What are the five main academic findings on the internet? 1. use of technologies depends on the context of a person 2. fears and risks depend on social terms of a person 3. virtual activities supplement real activities 4. new technologies encourage traditional activities 5. the more global, the more local ◦ What is the global digital divide? ▪ Massive inequality of net access across regions 6

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◦ What is the privatisation of public activities (and vice versa)? ▪ It means that public activities like shopping can easily be done at home ▪ with the emergence of social media private affairs could easily be made public ◦ How does the internet change the structures of social and cultural relations (identities)? ▪ Access to more information leads to more opinions ▪ Formations of new collectives and identities Interaction of different media with each other: ◦

Identity: •

identity: ◦ influenced by: classic gender roles, social hierarchies, shared values, religious, ethnic, and national beliefs, age/peer groups ◦ Practices of self: techniques that people use to construct their character and life ◦ identities are given in terms of more or less arbitrary selected features that individuals posses ◦ no socially situated individual without identity and these features are determined socially ◦ they can be seen as constitutive of individuals and society ◦ not all identities carry equal weight in particular circumstances ◦ not a fixed and watertight distinction, but there are: ▪ given or inherited identities (many of which are based on corporeality, e.g. gender) ▪ and chosen identities (many of which are based on cultural, material or ideological choices or preferences) ◦ hybridity: ▪ in this concept identity is not conceived as a fixed marker but in terms of the processes or performances by which identities are formed and they are not just given or chosen, they have to be enacted; so groups and individuals do not have a single identity but several

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▪ hybridity theory thinks of identity not as a stable marker but as a practice, they way we behave, whose meaning and effect is constantly mutating as its context changes ▪ some people like their identities to be stable and not fluid as hybridisation suggests ◦ everyone has more than one identity and our own identity could be described as a set of identities adopted to the circumstances and the context (e.g. white, European, Musician) ◦ Self-identity: the way we think about ourselves and construct unifying narratives of the self with which we emotionally identity; that is a reflexive discursive construction of self ◦ to some extent we all have a choice of identity, but on the other hand some features of your identity cannot be freely chosen by ourselves What is the connection between identity, community, culture and society (politics)? ◦ the terms by which identities are ascribed do not usually describe traits and groups neutrally; they are culturally inflected, and in the last instance are determined by power relations within a community, especially how these shape social relations between those using the identity-descriptor and those whom the descriptor applies ◦ segmentation and identity formation is accelerated by the culture and media industries by quickly targeting particular identities as specific, de-limited consumer markets ◦ identity is where culture is joined to society and politics identity politics: ◦ politics engaged on behalf of those with particular identities ◦ they are said to begin with the civil rights movement in the USA but sometimes it is said that identity politics are fuelled by the desire for recognition of a particular group 7

◦ it can involve consciousness raising ◦ two explanations for the emergence of political formations: ▪ first, because of the agency of the community and individuals involved ▪ the second analyses the larger social conditions that made the new politics and its forms of association possible ◦ difficulties with identity politics: 1. Identity politics tends to erase internal differences 2. Identity politics often assumes that an identity is an essence 3. Identity politics tends to work by the principle of exclusion 4. Identity politics tends to overlook identities around which lives are actually lived 5. When a political or social movement is based on identity, the content of the “identity” tends to be emphasised and the importance of organisation and process in achieving political ends is neglected 6. Identity politics tends to invent legitimating histories or traditions which can be politically (them commercially) exploited • collective identity: ◦ the shared sense of belonging to a group ◦ reconstruction and great emphasis on heritage and recollection ◦ interpretation of the shared past ◦ alterity: us and them; relationship of the known and the foreign other • race: ◦ race is an idea or a concept ◦ race does not biologically exist ◦ although race as a concept is scientifically wrong speaking of people and not biologically verified people use it everyday to categorise themselves and others ◦ it is also widely believed to serve as a potent marker of cultural difference and has been used for ideological purposes ◦ racial hierarchy ◦ racial markers (e.g. skin colour) are arbitrary ◦ many influential conceptions of racial difference have their origin in the colonial encounters of European powers with the societies that they sought to dominate ◦ race is a justification for slavery and colonization ◦ it is difficult to get rid of because, it goes back to the conceptual machinery of xenophobia, to old notions about “savages” and to long-term population imaginary of racial characters ◦ race is a powerful but barely visible referent in concepts such as ethnicity and multiculturalism and thence even in the concept of culture itself ◦ it was and is still used as a means of how power is realized ◦ it is hard to get rid of racial markers in our discourses because culture and society are still too organised around them and experience is filtered though them ◦ What did you learn about the history of racism (esp. its function)? ▪ Started around the middle of the 19th century → Darwinism, the basis of scientific racism ▪ it was used to justify slavery or colonization • racism: ◦ racism is a behaviour, it represents an impossible form of identity politics ◦ racism does exit and includes real actions ◦ the discrimination against others on the basis of their membership of a perceived 'racial' group 8

◦ a real concept that is practised and lived reality ◦ institutional racism, e.g. in schools also exits and is far worse to be removed from people's believes; racism sometimes manifests in large-scale social processes => institutional racism e.g. India caste system, third Reich, racist profili...