585 Reading Interests of Adults

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Image credit Victor GAD
585 Reading Interests of Adults Cultural
Theory and Popular Culture
Marija Dalbello Rutgers School of Communication,
Information, and Library Studies dalbello_at_scils.ru
tgers.edu http//www.scils.rutgers.edu/dalbello
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• What is Cultural Studies?
• ______________________
• Study of culture (rather than society)
• Progressive, radical, and omnipresent in arts,
  humanities, social sciences, science technology

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• What is Culture?
• ______________________
• Social behavior material culture cultural
  texts and practices shared fantasies
• Tylor (1871) Culture is that complex whole which
  includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law,
  customs, and other capabilities and habits
  acquired by man as a member of society.
• Kroeber lists 300 definitions of culture.

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What is Culture? ______________________ Mead
(1960s) Culture is a learned behavior of a
society or a subgroup. Williams (1970s) Culture
includes the organization of production, the
structure of the family, the structure of
institutions which express or govern social
relationships, the characteristic forms through
which members of the society communicate. Geertz
(1980s) Culture is simply the ensemble of
stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
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• What is the Subject of Cultural Studies?
• ______________________
• Subject area not clearly defined all-inclusive
  notion of culture and study of a range of
  practices
• Principles, theories and methods are eclectic
• Distinct history of cultural studies

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• What is the Subject of Cultural Studies?
• ______________________
• Principles, theories and methods from social
  sciences disciplines, the humanities and the arts
  adapted to the purposes of cultural analysis
• Methodologies diverse textual analysis,
  ethnography, psychoanalysis, survey research,
  etc.

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• Discipline or
• Anti-discipline?
• ______________________
• Cultural studies impossible to define
  collective term for diverse and contentious
  intellectual endeavors many theoretical and
  political positions
• Includes established and radical disciplines,
  political activism and modes of inquiry (critical
  theory)
• Anti-discipline not institutionalized

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• Historical background
• ______________________
• Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS)
  est. 1964
• Working Papers in Cultural Studies (1972)
• Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, E.P.
  Thompson, Stuart Hall
• Working-class background role of popular
  culture in class-based society in England

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• R. Hoggart R. Williams______________________
• Working class intellectuals
• The culture of common people (working class
  culture) seen as more authentic than middle- and
  upper-class culture derives from experience
• Against canonical élitism (high culture)
• Interest in active appropriation of cultural
  forms class struggle in the cultural arena
• Mass culture seen as colonizing working class
  culture packaged for passive absorption by the
  cultural industry producers

But what to do?
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• R. Hoggart
• ______________________
• Founder of CCCS
• The Uses of Literacy (1957) programmatic work
  parts of it written as a manifesto
• Problem working classes excluded from
  participation and dissemination of their cultural
  forms and practices
• Cultural struggle over legitimacy and cultural
  status of forms and practices
• Critical reading of art needs to reveal the
  felt quality of life of a society art captures
  the experience of the everyday as the unique

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• R. Williams
• ______________________
• Marxist tradition
• Culture is an expression of the coherence of
  organic communities resisting determinism in its
  various forms
• Culture material, intellectual and spiritual
  (base and superstructure)
• Centrality of the culture of everyday life
  (texts that capture the structure of feeling of
  everyday life, the sense of an époque) - not only
  validates such culture and its study but
  validates its production and gives it a status of
  insight into the dynamics of societys struggle

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Goals of Cultural Studies ______________________
1. Examine cultural practices in their
relationship to power how power shapes these
practices. 2. Culture is studied in the social
and political context in which its forms manifest
themselves. 3. Culture is both object of study
and vehicle for changing political consciousness
through this understanding (scholarly
pragmatic). 4. Reconcile division between tacit
/ universal knowledge validation of experience
(local knowledge) in addition to generally shared
forms of knowledge. 5. Moral evaluation of
modern society and means for radical action.
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• What is Cultural Studies?
• Study of relations between social relations and
  meanings (how social divisions are made
  meaningful)
• Culture is terrain on which ideological
  representations of class, gender, race are
  enforced, and contested by social groups
  validating their experience
• Hegemony
• operates in the realm of representations and
  consciousness
• implies power inequality in different segments
  of society
• naturalizes a class ideology and renders it in
  the form of common sense
• exercised through authority, not physical
  force
• operates through institutions (educational
  system, media and the family)
• Cultural studies focus on analysis of cultural
  forms and their meaning in the context of power
  relations in society

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• Culture as Site of Class Struggle
  ______________________
• Gramsci (1891-1937)
• Hegemony how society is bound together without
  the use of force under the moral and intellectual
  leadership of the ruling classes

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• Hegemony ______________________
• Hegemony relies on negotiation consent
• Intellectuals forge consent in the interest of
  the ruling class
• Competing classes achieve a compromise
  equilibrium
• Culture as key site of struggle of competing
  interests
• Popular culture is an arena of resistance but
  also of enforcing hegemony
• Paradoxically, the sphere of culture perceived
  as non-political although it is a conduit for
  hegemonic representations

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• Theories and Theorists in Cultural Studies
• ______________________
• Culture and civilisation (Matthew Arnold
  Leavisism) canon
• Culturalism (Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson,
  Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall) authenticity
• Structuralism (Ferdinand de Saussure,Claude
  Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes) signs unconscious
  foundations signification
• Post-Structuralism Jacques Derrida, Jacques
  Lacan, Michel Foucault, Edward Said) meaning is
  process
• Marxism (Classical the Frankfurt School,
  Althusserian neo-Gramscian Bakhtin) cultural
  texts reflect how society is organized
• Feminism (Janice Radway) constructing identity
  through consumption
• Post-modernism (Jameson, Baudrillard) revolt
  against modernism