The Cultural Studies Reader

1. The Cultural Studies Reader Introduction & Notes From Cultural Studies Theory and Practice 2nd Ed by Chris Barker (2003)

2. CULTURAL STUDIES is not an academic discipline like other disciplines • No well-defined methodology • No clearly demarcated field for investigation • Is the study of contemporary culture

3. Can be analyzed in many ways • Describing its institutions and functions • Describing relations • Celebrating large forms (literature) • Studying specific texts (Big Bang Theory Episode)

4. Early Cultural Studies Appeared in Great Britain in 1950s studied culture in relation to individual experiences and lives broke away from social scientific positivism or ‘objectivism’ Richard Hoggart: The Uses of Literacy (1957) – how changes in working-class life in post-war Britain affected an individual’s ‘whole way of life’. Brought to light how interrelation of work, sexual orientation, family, life, etc all affected living.

5. Early Cultural Studies Engaged form of analysis ‘the new left’ a Marxian but not communist movement, working towards form of socialism outside of trade unions or formal political parties and aimed at emancipating lifestyles and not just at participating in the public world worked in the interests of those who have least resources mostly for ‘working class’ and poorer members of ‘middle class’ as well as a large portion of the African-American community.

6. Older Cultural Studies focused on literary criticism which considered political questions as being of peripheral relevance to the appreciation of culture

7. Why has the study of culture recently become so popular across the whole range of the humanities, even the social sciences? The increasing importance of cultural industries to post-industrial national economies such as the USA and the UK. The rise in the use of cultural heritages and cultural consumption to maintain or stabilize identities by nations, ethnic groups and individuals. The downsizing of the academic humanities and the social sciences relative to other faculties inside a still expanding post-compulsory education sector.

8. Cultural Studies as Politics “For Hall, what is at stake is the connection that cultural studies seeks to make to matters of power and cultural politics. That is, to an exploration of representations of and ‘for’ marginalized social groups and the need for cultural change. Hence, cultural studies is a body of theory generated by thinkers who regard the production of theoretical knowledge as a political practice. Here, knowledge is never a neutral or objective phenomenon but a matter of positionality, that is, of the place from which one speaks, to whom, and for what purposes.” CS: T&P (p. 5)

9. Key Concepts in Cultural Studies • Culture and signifying practices • Representation • Materialism and non-reductionisms • Popular Culture • Texts and Readers • Subjectivity and Identity

10. Key Concepts in Cultural Studies • Culture and signifying practices • meanings are not simply floating ‘out there’; rather they are generated through signs, most notably those of language” • language gives meaning to material objects and social practices • meaning is produced symbolically in language as a ‘signifying system’ CS: T&P (p. 7-8)

11. Key Concepts in Cultural Studies • Representation • A good deal of cs is centered on questions of representation – how is the world socially constructed and represented to and by us in meaningful ways? • CS is the study of culture as the signifying practices of representation • Cultural representations and meanings have a certain materiality. That is, they are embedded in sounds, inscriptions, objects, images, books, etc. They are enacted, used and understood in specific social contexts. CS: T&P (p. 8)

12. Key Concepts in Cultural Studies • Materialism and non-reductionisms • CS is concerned with modern industrialized economies and media cultures organized along capitalist lines. Here representations are produced by corporations who are driven by the profit motive. In this context, CS has developed a form of cultural materialism that is concerned to explore how and why meanings are inscribed at the moment of production. That is, as well as being centered on signifying practice, CS tries to connect them with political economy. Concerned with: • Who owns and controls cultural production? • The distribution mechanisms for cultural products • The consequences of patterns of ownership and control for contours of the cultural CS: T&P (p. 8)

13. Key Concepts in Cultural Studies • Articulation • CS has deployed the concept of articulation in order to theorize the relationships between components of social formation. This idea refers to the formation of a temporary unity between elements that do not have to go together. Articulation suggest both expressing/representing and a ‘putting-together’. Thus representations of gender may be ‘put –together’ with representations of race, as in the case of gendered nationality. CS: T&P (p. 9)

14. Key Concepts in Cultural Studies • Power • Power is regarded as pervading every level of social relationships. Power is not simply the glue that holds the social together, or the coercive force which subordinates one set of people to another, though it certainly is. It is understood in terms of the processes that generate and enable any form of social action, relationship or order. In this sense, power, while constraining, is also enabling. CS has shown a specific concern with subordinated groups, at first with class, and later with races, genders, nations, age groups, etc. • CS: T&P (p. 9)

15. Key Concepts in Cultural Studies • Popular Culture • CS has commonly understood popular culture to be the ground on which consent is won or lost. As a way of grasping the interplay of power and consent, two related concepts are repeatedly deployed in CS. • Ideology commonly refers to maps of meaning purporting universal truths. Representations of gender in advertising, which depict women as housewives or sexy bodies alone, reduce them to those categories. As such they deny women their place as full human beings and citizens. The process of making, maintaining and reproducing ascendant meanings and practices has been called hegemony. Hegemony implies a situation where a “historical bloc’ of powerful groups exercises social authority and leadership over subordinate groups though the winning of consent. CS: T&P (p. 9)

16. Key Concepts in Cultural Studies • Texts and readers • The production of consent implies popular identification with the cultural meanings generated by the signifying practices of hegemonic texts. The concept of text suggests not simply the written work, though this is one of its senses, but all practices which signify. This includes the generation of meaning through images, sounds, objects (such as clothes) and activities (like dance and sport). Cultural texts are images, sounds, objects and practices. • However, the meanings that critics read into cultural texts are not necessarily the same as those produced by active audiences or readers. Readers will not necessarily share all the same meanings with each other. Meaning is produced in the interplay between text and reader. Consequently, the moment of consumption is also a moment of meaningful production. CS: T&P (p. 10)

17. Key Concepts in Cultural Studies • Subjectivity and identity • The moment of consumption marks one of the processes by which we are formed as persons. What it is to be a person, subjectivity, and how we describe ourselves to each other (identity) become central areas of concern in cultural studies. CS explores • How we come to be the kinds of people we are? • How we are produced as subjects? • How we identify with (or emotionally invest in) descriptions of ourselves as male or female, black or white, young or old? • The argument, known as anti-essentialism, is that identities are not things that exist; they have no essential or universal qualities. Rather, they are discursive constructions, the product of discourses or regulated ways of speaking about he world. In other words, identities are constituted, made rater than found, by representations, notably language. CS: T&P (p. 11)

18. Cultural Studies Summary • Is a plural field of contesting perspectives which through the production of theory has sought to intervene in cultural politics • Explores culture as the signifying practices of representation with the context of social power • Draws on a variety of theories including Marxism, structuralism, poststructuralism and feminism • Is eclectic in its methods • Asserts the positionality of all knowledge, including its own • Coheres conceptually around the key ideas of culture, signifying practices, representation, discourse, power, articulation, texts, readers and consumption • Is an interdisciplinary or post-disciplinary field of inquiry which explores the production and inculcation of maps of meaning • Can be described as a language-game or discursive formation concerned with issues of power in the signifying practices of human life • Is an exciting and fluid project that tells us stories about our changing world in the hope that we can improve it.