Cultural Studies 3:

1
Cultural Studies 3

• Key Concepts and Subject Positions
• Consumer as an Example

• Main issues Literary Studies vs. Cultural
  Studies
• Major Theories and Methodologies
• Key Concepts and Subject Positions

2
Outline

• Chap 12 outline
• Starting Questions
• Consumption Marxist Views
• Consumption Cultural Studies
• Populist Views Michel de Certeau
• Stuart Hall Encoding, decoding
• Articulation
• Other Views of Consumption Desire Combining
  Marxism and Psychoanalysis
• Production of Desire -- Slavoj Zizek
• Desiring Machine Deleuze and Gattari
• Another example
• Next Time

3
Chap 12 outline
Chap 10. from a lit. perspective, chap 11.
history and methods, chap 12. key concepts

• Cultural Studies defined p. 7
  interdisciplinary, objects culture as a whole
  way of life and its forms of power, institutions
  in higher ed which form connections with those
  outside.
• Culture as signifying practices
• Representationproduced, enacted, used and
  understood in specific social ocntexts
• Materialism and Non-reductionism (to class or
  economic factors) ? Articulation (later)
• Pervasive Power, (control by consent) ideology,
  hegemony in Popular Culture
• Text and reader (later)
• Subjectivity product of discourses
• Marxism mode of production, capitalism,
  commodification, alienation, fetishism, economic
  determinism vs agency

4
Please comment

• The plot of romantic love in ??s novels
  constructs weak women with dreamy eyes and no
  contact with economic reality, which become an
  object of fantasy or identification for female
  reader of that historical period.
• Morning and Notes on a Scandal partly explain
  and reflect the high rate of divorce in our
  society.
• Violent films lead to violent behavior in
  teenagers.
• The sensationalism on TV news program appeals to
  and results in the audiences interest in and
  gossip over ??news.
• In Madness of Love, Williams concept of
  romantic love comes from the operas he loves.
• Contemporary inventions of telecommunication
  (e.g. Walkman, E-games, cell phone, the Internet)
  leads to human isolation.
• ??????????????????????(???).

5
Consumption Marxist Views (1)

• regulation of consumption e.g.
• Penopticon/surveillance (Foucault e.g. market
  survey our identity defined in terms of
  numbers.)
• production of consumption/consumers e.g.
• Culture industry and massification of consumers
  (Frankfurt school)
• Parts interchangeable ? pseudo identity -- (no
  real human contact in Internet chatrooms cell
  phone and identitye.g. next page.)
• creation of a false need (Walkmana recorder
  without recording functions endless versions of
  Windows)

6
Cell Phone --

• Parts interchangeable with different surfaces
• Youtube7610 ???? pink version

• Nokia 7610 Affair

7
Consumption Marxist Views (2)

• production of consumption/consumers e.g.
• interpellation (Althusser e.g. natural response
  to identification with the rings of cell phones,
  the exchange values of commodities sold in ads)
• subject positions in discourse (Foucault e.g.
  identifying with the protagonists in ??s novels)

8
Cultural Studies (1) M. de Certeau
The Practice of Everyday Life

• Dominant culture and the producers cumbersome,
  powerful strategies of control
• Consumption
• ?????? ("active re-creation" Poster 102)
• Provisional, fragmentary and invisible re-writing
  and theft of the power imposed on him/her
  ?????????????????, ?????????????????????????????
• tactics of evasion, resistance, disruption,
  opposition.

9
Cultural Studies (2) Stuart Hall

• (image source)
• Verbal Communication as a Speech Event (Jacobson)

• Encoding and Decoding
• Communication as a highly structured,
  asymmetrical and non-equivalent process.
• -- "meaning structure 1" and "meaning structure
  2" may not be the same.

10
Encoding Decoding

• Implications behaviorism and textual determinism
  rejected a more interactive view of audience
  reception.
• Code-- e.g. Televisiual code audio-visual sign
• Encoder The production structures production
  team, production companies, TV stations,
  sponsors, TV rating-- within the wider
  socio-cultural and political structure (where
  ideologies are from)
• Encoding process (using Roland Barthes)
  denotation ? (signified emptied out)?
  connotation ? myth
• There are encoders and decoders in each of the
  five levels of production, circulation/regulation,
  consumption, representation and identification

11
Cultural Studies (2)

• Three positions in decoding of communication
  (Stuart Hall)
• the dominant-hegemonic -- preferred meaning
• the negotiated code,
• the oppositional code -- at the oppositional code
  level viewers/listeners/readers detotalize the
  message in the preferred code  in order to
  retotalize the message within some alternative
  framework of reference (1980 138).
  (http//www.sociology.org/content/vol006.002/vanni
  ni_myers.html )

12
From Marxism to Cultural Studies (2)

• ??????? (32)
• ????(dominant-hegemonic position)????????????(pre
  ferred meaning),?????????
• ????(negotiated position)Hall ?????????????????,?
  ??????????????????????
• ????(oppositional position)??????????????????????
  ????????????(preferred code),?????????????????????
  ??????(? )

13
The Practice of Everyday Life e.g.

• Walkman (by extension cell phone) -- criticized
  for its
• anti-social, atomizing effects, blocking off
  the world and the valuable. e.g. As long as
  they have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what
  the great tradition Shakespeare, the Bible and
  so on has to say.
• two functions of Walkman escape
  (individualism dominant reading) and
  enhancement (negotiated position)
• possible choices pop music, audio books,
  background music
• when Im listening to the Walkman Im not just
  tuning out. Im also tuning in a soundtrack for
  the scenery around me.

(du Gay 89-93)
14
Cultural Studies (3) Articulation

• articulation (expressing/representing and
  putting together textbook p. 9)
• ? articulation of contradictory
  interpellations/subject positions.

15
Other Views of Consumption

• Combining Marxism and Psychoanalysis
• Slavoj Zizek -- use Lacan to analyze popular
  culture
• Deleuze and Guattari against Oedipus complex.

16
Production of Desire Slavoj Zizek

• Fundamental homology between Marxs and Freuds
  analysis of commodity fetishism and of dreams
  (the logic of abstraction and symbolization)
• Dream manifest content ? latent thought ? the
  unconscious desire
• Commodity chancy determination of commoditys
  value ? determination by labor-time (a secret) ?
  the unconscious desire

17
Commodity Fetishism

• 1. a definite social relation between men, that
  assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a
  relation between things (Marx 1974, 77)
• 2. A misrecognition of what is really a
  structural effect of the network of relations
  between elements (exchange value or price) as
  an immediate property of one of the elements
  (commodity) (Sizek 23-24) ? to avoid the Real of
  our desire.

18
Production of Desire Slavoj Zizek

• Latent content of dream//that of ideology.
• Desire The sublime object of desire the Other
  that which we most desire but cannot have ? we
  are the barred subject. S
• Ideology What we overlook, what we
  misrecognize, is not the reality but the illusion
  which is structuring our reality, our real
  social activity.
• Popular culture as Fantasy false attempts to
  integrate the impossible in the Symbolic, which
  actually avoids the Real of our desire.
• e.g. Hitchcocks films revelation and purging of
  the viewers Oedipus complex.

19
D/G vs. Marxism

• Marxism
• production ? distribution ? consumption
• Exchange value use value

• Against desire as lack.
• Against oedipalization, which is supported by
  Capitalism. The prohibited the desired.
• Desire a flow prior to representation and
  reproduction
• Desiring Machines and Nomadic Subject

20
Deleuze and Guattari Oedipalization
Capitalism

• Capitalism reduces all social relations to
  commodity relations
• ? 1) deterritorializes desire by
  subverting(de-coding) all territorial groupings
  such as the church, the family, local community,
  etc.2) It also reterritorializes desire by
  channeling(re-coding) all production into the
  narrow confines of the equivalence-form (logic of
  exchange value) within the state, family,
  law,commodity logic, banking systems,
  consumerism, psychoanalysis and other normalizing
  institutions. (Cf. Bogue 88 Kellner 89)

21
Our Body as Desiring Machine

• It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly
  at times, at other times in fits and starts. It
  breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks.
  What a mistake to have ever said the id.
  Everywhere it is machines. . .
• produces a flow of desire
• Connected with or interrupted by the other
  machines
• e.g. organ-machine an energy-machine the
  breast the mouth a machine coupled to it. (The
  mouth of the anorexic.) Hence we are all
  handymen each with his little machines.

22
Desiring Machine

• the production of production continually
  producing production, of grafting producing onto
  the product,
• e.g. A painting by Richard Lindner, 'Boy with
  Machine,' shows a huge, pudgy, bloated boy
  working one of his little desiring-machines,
  after having hooked it up to a vast technical
  social machine--which, as we shall see, is what
  even the very young child does.
• Composed of heterogeneous and independent parts.

23
Richard Lindner, 'Boy with Machine(1954, oil on
canvas) (source)
24
The body without organs

• Not an organless body, but body without
  organization, or the deterritorialized body an
  interconnected system of flows and forces.
• a body that breaks free from its socially
  articulated, disciplined, semioticized, and
  subjectified state (as an organism), to become
  disarticulated, dismantled, and
  deterritorialized, and hence able to be
  reconstituted in a new way (Kellner 90-91)

25
Nomadic subjects

• multiple personalities
• 1.consumption
• 2.when social codes e.g. Oedipus break
  down in their channelling of desire, then the
  nomadic subject is possible, traversing the lines
  of the desiring machines inscribed on the body
  w/o organs
• Model of the giant egg traversed by lines
  with a wandering point of pure intensity

26
Another example

• ??????????????
• ???????? ? ????? ????(disavowal) ?????,??????
  ???????????
• 1998 ???????????????.?????????.
• 1999 ?????????.??????????.
• ???????????.?

27
References

• Deleuze and Guattari. Ronald Bogue. London New
  York Routledge , 1989
• Psychoanalytic Criticism A Reappraisal.
  Elizabeth Wright. Polity,1998.
• Postmodern theory critical interrogations.
  Steven Best and Douglas Kellner. Houndmills,
  Basingstoke, Hampshire Macmillan , 1991
• du Gay, Paul, et al. Doing Cultural Studies The
  Story of Sony Walkman. Culture, Media and
  Identities series. London Sage, 1997.
• ???. ????????. ????, 2002.
• ????????????????? by ??? Thesis

28
Next Time

• The Groups Texts (at EngSite) (with a focus
  on??? ??????????? 53 ??? ??????????????????????
  54 )
• 20.30.40
• The Loveliness of the Long-Distance Runner
  1.5 in total. ?