lecture 3: introduction to cultural studies

what are cultural studies?

• images, symbols and messages through which we try to make sense and give shape to our lives

• examining how people engage cultural texts

• cult. studies grew out of pol. economy

• focus on text (broad view, anything written, audio, video)

• active audiences/individuals

the precursors: Frankfurther Shule

culture and control

• media controlled by groups who employed them to furthezr their own interests and domination

• importance culture industries in reproduction of contemporary societies, mass culture and communications in centre of leisure activity are important agents of socialization and mediators of pol. reality

cultural industries

• culture industry: process of industrialization of mass-produced culture and commercial imperatives which drove the system

• commodification (turning things into things to sell), standardization (makes it easy to mass-produce stuff) and massification (produce a lot of shit)

ideology, hegemony, culture (and the media)

• concept of ideology forces readers to perceive that all cultural texts have distinct biases, interests and embedded values, reproducing pov their producers (and often values dominant social groups)

• hegemony

  • Gramsci: societies maintained stability through combination domination/force and hegemony (consent to intellectual and moral leadership)

  • hegemony: ruling ideas reproduce dominant societal interests serving to naturalize, idealize and legitimize existing society and its institutions/values

  • institutions (religion, education, media) induce consent to dominant order through establishing hegemony (ideological dominance of a distinctive type of social order like fascism, communism, market capitalism)

  • hegemony is a governance regime based on naturalized ideology

  • hegemony is never absolute, always subject to counter-hegemonies

  • democracy as hegemony, benefits from counter-hegemonies for its ideological and pol. legitimation

the French school

• immense accumulation fo spectacle that charactarized new consumer societies

• structuralism and semiology (assumed that society and culture were texts that oculd be analyzed for their structures, significance, effects) to make sense of expansion of media culture and its important social functions

post-structuralism, post-modernism

• simulation, hyperreality and nascent modes of media and computer culture are autonomous organizing forces of the contemporary world

• technological determinism, subjectivism, value relativism

• emergent forms postmodern culture within context of contemporary capitalism, connecting economy and culture

• in sum:

  • postmodern theories erase econmic, pol., social dimensions of cultural production and reception, indulge in theoreticist blather at extreme

  • in more dialectic version, postmodern theory used to rethink cultural criticism and politics contemporary era. It can be effective in calling attention to innovative configurations and functions of culture, without losing sight of questions of pol. power, domination and resistance

the linguistic turn

• structure becomes system of signs detached from reality

• language is awareness = reality

the British school

• rejected high/low culture distinctions

• situated culture within theory of social production and reproduction, specifying ways that cultural forms served either to further social control, or to enable people to resist

• analyzed society as hierarchical and antagonistic set of social relations

• employing hegemony and counterhegemony

• aimed at pol. goal of social transformation

• unlike (post)structuralism: not relativistic

• like Frankfurther schule: critically engaged

• unlike Frankfurther Schule: not pessimistic, no passive audience

how are cultural studies critical?

• understandings and interpretations media and culture, showing how they are often constructed to serve specific social interests and functions (pol. economy perspective)

• can be interpreted in multiplicitly of ways (cultural studies perspective)

• culture includes artifacts but also practices

• varying cultural forms and practices that generate meaning, identities and pol. effects