Transcript MMC220 last week

MMC220
THEORIES OF COMMUNICATION
CULTURAL STUDIES
Introducing Cultural Studies
• Cultural studies is an academic discipline which
combines political economy, communication,
sociology, social theory, literary theory, media
theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology,
philosophy, museum studies and art
history/criticism
• The aim of cultural studies is to study cultural
phenomena in various societies
• Cultural studies researchers often concentrate on
how a particular phenomenon relates to matters of
ideology, nationality, ethnicity, social class and
gender
Introducing Cultural Studies Continued
• The term was coined by Richard Hoggart in 1964
when he founded the Birmingham Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies or CCCS.
• It has since become strongly associated with
Stuart Hall, who succeeded Hoggart as Director
• From the 1970s onward, Stuart Hall's pioneering
work, along with his colleagues
–
–
–
–
Paul Willis,
Dick Hebdige,
Tony Jefferson, and
Angela McRobbie,
• Created an international intellectual movement.
Introducing Cultural Studies Continued
• Following the social upheavals of the 1960s,
popular culture has come to be taken more
seriously as a terrain of academic enquiry and has
also helped to change the outlooks of more
established disciplines
• Conceptual barriers between so-called high and
low culture have broken down, accompanying an
explosion in scholarly interest in popular culture,
which encompasses such diverse mediums as
conic books, television and the Internet.
• Reevaluation of mass culture in the 1970s and
1980s has revealed significant problems with the
traditional view of mass culture as degraded and
elite culture as uplifting.
Concerns of Cultural Studies
• Cultural studies concerns itself with the meaning
and practices of everyday life.
• Cultural practices comprise the ways people do
particular things (such as watching television, or
eating out) in a given culture.
• In any given practice, people use various objects
• Hence, this field studies the meanings and uses
people attribute to various objects and practices
• Cultural studies concentrates more on the
symbolic dimension, and on what culture does
rather than on what culture is.
• Since cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field,
its practitioners draw a diverse array of theories
and practices.
Concerns of Cultural Studies continued…
• In his book Introducing Cultural Studies, Ziauddin Sardar
lists the following five main characteristics of cultural
studies:
– - Cultural studies aims to examine its subject matter in terms of cultural
practices and their relation to power. For example, a study of a subculture
(such as white working class youth in London) would consider the social
practices of the youth as they relate to the dominant classes.
– - It has the objective of understanding culture in all its complex forms and of
analyzing the social and political context in which culture manifests itself.
– - It is both the object of study and the location of political criticism and action.
For example, not only would a cultural studies scholar study an object, but
she/he would connect this study to a larger, progressive political project.
– - It attempts to expose and reconcile the division of knowledge, to overcome
the split between tacit cultural knowledge and objective (universal) forms of
knowledge.
-It has a commitment to an ethical evaluation of modern society
and
to a radical line of political action.
British Cultural Studies
• Initially, scholars in the United Kingdom and the
United States developed somewhat different
versions of cultural studies after the field's
inception in the late 1970s.
• The British version of cultural studies was
developed in the 1950s and 1960s
• This was mainly under the influence first of
Richard Hoggart, E. P. Thompson, and Raymond
Williams, and later Stuart Hall and others at the
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the
University of Birmingham.
• This included overtly political, left-wing views,
and criticisms of popular culture as 'capitalist'
mass culture.
British Cultural Studies continued…
• It absorbed some of the ideas of the Frankfurt
School critique of the "culture industry" (i.e. mass
culture).
• This emerges in the writings of early British
cultural-studies scholars and their influences
• In the works, for example, of Raymond Williams,
Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, and Paul Gilroy.
American Cultural Studies
• In contrast, the American version of cultural
studies initially concerned itself more with
understanding the subjective and appropriative
side of audience reactions to, and uses of, mass
culture;
• American cultural-studies advocates wrote about
the liberatory aspects of fandob.
• For example, see the writings of critics such as
John Guillory or Constance Penley.
• This distinction between American and British
strands, however, has faded.
Marxism and Cultural Studies
• Many cultural studies scholars employed Marxist
methods of analysis, exploring the relationships
between cultural forms (the superstructure) and
that of the political economy (the base).
• By the 1970s, however, the politically formidable
British working classes were in decline.
• Britain's manufacturing industries were fading and
union rolls were shrinking.
• Yet, millions of working class Britons backed the
rise of Margaret Thatcher.
• For Stuart Hall and other Marxist theorists, this
shift in loyalty from the Labour Party to the
Conservative Party was antithetical to the interests
of the working class and had to be explained in
terms of cultural politics.
Birninghan School of Cultural Studies
• In order to understand the changing political circumstances
of class, politics, and culture in the United Kingdom,
scholars at the CCCS turned to the work Antonio Gramsci.
• Gramsci had been concerned with similar issues: why
would Italian laborers and peasants vote for fascists? Why,
in other words, would working people vote to give more
control to corporations, and see their own rights and
freedoms abrogated?
• Gramsci updated classical Marxism in seeing culture as a
key instrument of political and social control.
• In this view, capitalists use not only brute force (police,
prisons, repression, military) to maintain control, but also
penetrate the everyday culture of working people.
• Thus, the key rubric for Gramsci and for cultural studies is
that of cultural hegemony.
Ideology
• The concept of ideology, forces readers to
perceive that all cultural texts have distinct biases,
interests, and embedded values reproducing the
point of view of their producers and often the
values of the dominant social groups
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels coined the term
ideology in the 1840s to describe the dominant
ideas and representations in a given social order
Ideology continued…
• During the feudal period ideas of piety, honor,
valor, and military chivalry were the ruling
ideas of the hegemonic aristocratic classes
• During the era of modernization (capitalist
era), individualism, profit, competition and the
market became dominant, articulating the
ideology of the emergent bourgeois class
• Today, ideas that promote globalization, digital
technologies and unrestrained market society
are becoming the prevailing ideas – furthering
the interests of the governing elites in the
global economy
Ideology continued…
• Members of a wide range of subordinate groups
detected that ideologies reproduced relations of
domination in the arenas of gender, race, ethnicity,
sexuality and other domains of everyday life
(feminists, multiculturalists, anti-racists etc.)
• In a broad sense, ideologies reproduce social
domination, legitimate rule by prevailing groups
over subordinate ones, and help replicate the
existing inequalities of power and control
Ideologies as natural
• Perhaps an important reason why ideologies go uncriticized is because they appear natural, they seem
common sense and are often invisible
• Ruling ideas reproduce dominant societal interests
serving to naturalize, idealize, and legitimize the
existing society and it’s values
–
–
–
–
Is nationalism natural? (banal nationalism)
Is competition and self interest natural? (capitalism)
Are human beings cooperative in nature? (communism)
Is patriarchy natural?
Ideologies as natural continued…
• For classical Marxism, the ruling classes not only
produce ideas that glorify the dominant institutions
and ways of life but also propagate these ideas in
cultural forms like films, literature, music, press etc…
• The concept of ideology makes us question the
naturalness of cultural texts and to see that prevailing
ideas are not obvious, common sense but are
constructed, biased and contestable
• The more one studies cultural forms, the more one
sees the presence of ideologies
Antonio Gramsci and “hegemony”
• The Italian Marxian thinker Gramsci is well known
for his elaborations on and developments of the
notion of ideology in it’s classical Marxist sense
• Gramsci argued that diverse social groups attained
“hegemony” at different times through inducing the
consent of the majority of subordinate groups
• In this sense, Gramsci’s hegemony relates to how the
ruling class turn their ideologies into common sense
and natural and how they preserved that status quo
Antonio Gramsci and “hegemony”
continued…
• According to Gramsci, the establishment of
hegemony requires active and willing consent
– Common sense, suggests Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, is 'the
way a subordinate class lives its subordination' (cited in
Alvarado & Boyd-Barrett 1992: 51)
• Gramsci also emphasized struggle in his
conceptualization of hegemony
– 'common sense is not something rigid and immobile, but is
continually transforming itself' (Gramsci, cited in Hall
1982: 73)
• Consent must be constantly won and re-won, peoples’
material and social experiences remind them of their
subordination, this causes a threat to the dominant
ideology
Antonio Gramsci and “hegemony”
continued…
• Gramsci pointed out that while the unity of the
prevailing groups is usually created through the
state and violent institutions (American revolution,
the establishment of the Turkish Republic, police,
military etc.), civil society institutions play an
important role in establishing and maintaining
hegemony as well (schools, religion, media etc.)
• Later, the French Marxian thinker Louis Althusser
defined these civil society institutions as
ideological state apparatuses
Althusser and ideology
• Ideology, for Althusser 'represents the imaginary
relationship of individuals to their real conditions of
existence' (cited in Stevenson 1995: 37).
• Ideology transforms human beings into subjects,
leading them to see themselves as self-determining
agents when they are in fact shaped by ideological
processes
• Althusser saw ideology as itself a determining force
shaping consciousness, embodied in the material
signifying practices of 'ideological state apparatuses',
and enjoying 'relative autonomy'.
Applying the hegemony theory
• Hegemony theory of Gramsci involves both
analysis of current forces of domination, the ways
in which these forces achieved hegemonic
authority and the delineation of counter
hegemonic forces that could contest the existing
hegemony
Applying the hegemony theory
• An analysis, for example, of the internal dynamics of
how the Kemalist regime and its ideologies came to
power would mean:
– First studying how this group gained dominance through
control of the state, the use of media and cultural
institutions
– How the ideas and ideologies of this group became
dominant in the media, schools and cultural institutions at
large
– It would discuss how on a global level nations and
industrialization started to gain much more importance as
opposed to empires and agriculture
– It would also include an analysis of the contestations to this
hegemonic order via counter hegemonic forces such as the
Ottoman sultanates, religious groups, theological schools
etc.
• This line of thinking opened up fruitful work exploring
agency; a theoretical outlook which reinserted the active,
critical capacities of all people.
• Notions of agency have supplanted much scholarly
emphasis on groups of people (e.g. the working class,
primitives, colonized peoples, women) whose political
consciousness and scope of action was generally limited to
their position within certain economic and political
structures.
• In other words, many economists, sociologists, political
scientists, and historians have traditionally deprived
everyday people of a role in shaping their world or outlook.
• As Edgar and Sedgwick argued,
– The theory of hegemony was of central importance to the
development of British cultural studies [particularly the CCCS]. It
facilitated analysis of the ways in which subordinate groups
actively resist and respond to political and economic domination.
• Cultural studies, opposed this perspective and
emphasized the social/political agency of individuals
and groups.
• However, at times, cultural studies' romance with
agency nearly excluded the possibility of oppression.
• It overlooked the fact that the subaltern have their own
politics
• It romanticized agency,
• And over-blew its potentiality and pervasiveness.
• In work of this kind, popular in the 1990s, many
cultural studies scholars discovered in consumers ways
of creatively using and subverting commodities and
dominant ideologies.
• This orientation has come under fire for a variety of
reasons.
• In other words, the focus of British cultural studies at
any given moment was determined by the struggles in
the present political conjuncture and their major work
was thus conceived as political interventions.
• Their studies of ideology, domination and resistance,
and the politics of culture directed cultural studies
toward analyzing cultural artifacts, practices, and
institutions within existing networks of power and of
showing how culture both provided tools and forces of
domination and resources for resistance and struggle.
• This political focus intensified emphasis on the effects
of culture and audience use of cultural artifacts, which
provided an extremely productive focus on audiences
and reception, topics that had been neglected in most
previous text-based approaches to culture.
• Cultural studies situated culture within a theory of
social production and reproduction, specifying the
ways that cultural forms served either to further
social domination or to enable people to resist and
struggle against domination.
• 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.
• Employing Gramsci's model of hegemony and
counterhegemony, it sought to analyze
"hegemonic," or ruling, social and cultural forces
of domination and to seek "counterhegemonic"
forces of resistance and struggle.
• Cultural studies subverts the high and low culture
distinction
• This way it gives attention to cultural forms like film,
television, and popular music dismissed by previous
approaches to culture which tended to utilize literary theory
to analyze cultural forms, or to focus primarily, or even
solely, on the artifacts of high culture.
• Raymond Williams and the members of the Birmingham
school are responsible for the rejection of the term "mass
culture," which they argue,tends to be elitist, erecting a
binary opposition between high and low, that is
contemptuous of "the masses" and its culture.
• The concept of mass culture is also monolithic and
homogeneous, and thus covers over cultural contradictions
and oppositional and critical practices and groups within
contemporary societies.
• Cultural studies presents an approach that allows
us to avoid cutting up the field of culture into high
and low, popular vs. elite, and to see all forms of
culture as worthy of scrutiny and criticism.
• It allows approaches to culture that force us to
appraise the politics of culture and to make
political discriminations between different types of
culture that have different political effects.
• It brings the study of race, gender, and class into
the center of the study of culture and
communications and adopts a critical approach
that, like the Frankfurt school,
• interprets culture within society and
• situates the study of culture within the field of
contemporary social theory and oppositional
politics.
• Some researchers, especially in early British
cultural studies, apply a Marxist model to the
field.
• This strain of thinking has some influence from
the Frankfurt School, but especially from the
structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and
others.
• The main focus of an orthodox Marxist approach
concentrates on the production of meaning.
• This model assumes a mass production of culture
and identifies power as residing with those
producing cultural artifacts.
• In a Marxist view, those who control the means of
production (the economic base) essentially control
a culture.
• Other approaches to cultural studies, such as
feminist cultural studies and later American
developments of the field, distance themselves
from this view.
• They criticize the Marxist assumption of a single,
dominant meaning, shared by all, for any cultural
product.
• The non-Marxist approaches suggest that different
ways of consuming cultural artifacts affect the
meaning of the product.
• This view is best exemplified by the book Doing
Cultural Studies: The Case of the Sony Walkman
(by Paul du Gay et al), which seeks to challenge
the notion that those who produce commodities
control the meanings that people attribute to them.
• Ultimately, this perspective criticizes the
traditional view assuming a passive consumer,
particularly by underlining the different ways
people read, receive, and interpret cultural texts.
• On this view, a consumer can appropriate, actively
reject, or challenge the meaning of a product.
These different approaches have shifted the focus
away from the production of items.
• Instead, they argue that consumption plays an
equally important role, since the way consumers
consume a product gives meaning to an item.
• Some closely link the act of consuming with
cultural identity. Stuart Hall and John Fiske have
become influential in these developments.
• In the context of cultural studies, the idea of a text not
only includes written language, but also films,
photographs, fashion or hairstyles: the texts of cultural
studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture.
• Similarly, the discipline widens the concept of "culture".
• "Culture" for a cultural studies researcher not only
includes traditional high culture (the culture of ruling
social groups) and popular culture, but also everyday
meanings and practices.
• The last two, in fact, have become the main focus of
cultural studies.
• A further and recent approach is comparative cultural
studies, based on the discipline of comparative literature
and cultural studies.