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 un-criticized 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. The subordinate groups need not be seen merely as the passive dupes of the dominant class and its ideology (Edgar & Sedgewick, 165).

• 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.