What is Cultural Studies

1
What is Cultural Studies?

• What is Culture?

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Definitions of Culture

• Raymond Williams (a founder of cultural studies)
  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
• Clifford Geertz (Anthropologist) culture is
  simply the ensemble of stories we tell ourselves
  about ourselves
• Margaret Mead (Anthropologist) culture is the
  learned behavior of a society or a subgroup

3

• Multiple Methods (textual analysis, ethnography,
  psychoanalysis)
• Multiple Modes of Inquiry (Marxism,
  post-structuralism, post-colonialism, feminism)

4

• Power is central in cultural studies. Cultural
  Studies aims to examine subject matter in terms
  of cultural practices and representations and
  their relationships to power.

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By Definition, Cultural Studies Is

• Radical
• Committed to social reconstruction by political
  involvement
• Not apolitical, distanced form of scholarship
• To change structures of dominance.

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Name

• The name cultural studies comes from the Centre
  for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS)
• In existence from 1963 to 2002 at the University
  of Birmingham in the UK

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Founding of Cultural Studies

• Became known as the Birmingham School or just
  British Cultural Studies. Emphasized reciprocity
  in cultural texts - blurring lines between
  producer and consumer.
• Academics from largely working-class backgrounds.
  Concerned with question of culture in
  class-based England. Celebrated authentic
  popular culture of new industrial working class.
  Focus on how culture is practiced and how culture
  is made. How cultural practice leads to struggle
  for cultural domination.

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Influenced by Frankfurt School

• Dissident Marxists in Germany who wanted to
  clarify social conditions Marx never saw
  believed in Marxs historical materialism and
  include Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert
  Marcuse, Walter Benjamin and later Jurgen
  Habermas.
• Frankfurt school famous for fleeing Germany for
  Southern California and having snooty attitude
  towards popular culture as opiate of people

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Influenced by New Left

• Precursor to CS.
• British response to Russian invasion of Hungary
  in 1956 many who denounced Stalinist variety of
  Marxism formed New Left. Students and
  intellectuals from former UK colonies moved on
  fringes and never allowed to be part of dominant
  institutions of UK left they were New Left.
  Without colonial intellectuals there would be no
  British New Left and no cultural studies. So
  from beginning UK cultural studies had
  international foundation

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Founders

• Richard Hoggarth (The Uses of Literacy, 1957, is
  considered by some to be the first text in
  cultural studies. Based work on F. R. Leaviss
  ideas on lit crit, argued that critical reading
  of art could reveal the felt quality of life of
  a society. Art creates life in full complexity)
• Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (1958) and
  The Long Revolution (1961) draw on two
  traditions within Marxism practice of seeing
  culture as specific expressions of coherence of
  organic communities and resisting determinism in
  its various forms. Culture all-inclusive
  identity, a whole way of life, material,
  intellectual, and spiritual. Williams goes
  beyond literary and philosophical analysis to
  examine language in all the forms in which it has
  been used to give meaning to lived experience.
  No thing as masses. Good as well as bad mass
  culture.

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Founder

• E.P. Thompson - radical historian changed
  perception of British history The Making of the
  English Working Class (1978). Differs from
  theoretical Marxists and sociologists class is
  historical phenomenon that cant be understood as
  structure or category. Class not thing
  something that happens in human relationships.
• CS developments from Thompson popular mass
  culture not new creation of consumer society
  has history. Meaningful change over a
  considerable historical period.
• History is a form within which we fight, and
  many have fought before us. For the past is not
  just dead, inert, confining it carries signs and
  evidences also of creative resources which can
  sustain the present and prefigure possibility.
  Thompson argued against Althusseurs introduction
  of structuralism into Marxism.

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Founder

• Stuart Hall sociologist most canonized of
  founding fathers of cultural studies. In 50s
  leader in New Left, in 60s and 70s, at CCCS, in
  80s at Open University and led New Times debate
  at Marxism Today
• Activism and theory. Cultural studies political
  and theoretical questions. Throughout career has
  described himself remaining within shouting
  distance of Marx BUT in late 50s and early 60s
  rejected Marx to engage with contemporary. This
  changed in 70s - Centre focus on structural
  Marxism. In early 80s writing about Marxism
  without Guarantees. In late 80s and early 90s
  Marxist element abandoned. Never accepted that
  class struggle explains and determines
  everything.
• Hall about cultural studies having a practical
  impact on reality

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On CS agenda

• 70s UK cultural studies all about style and
  behavior of young working class men (punks,
  rockers, mods as symbolically resisting dominant
  system hair, clothes read as signs of
  resistance)
• 80s Broadened CS to include women and Blacks
  but again on reading signs of resistance and
  opposition to dominant culture
• UK CS 90s diversity and originality of subjects
  studied and a political dimension

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Influence Athusser

• French philosopher Louis Althusser (1918-1990)
  imported structuralism into Marxism to make it
  more of a science.
• 3 key ideas of Althusser in CS
• 1., main ideological instruments of society (law,
  religion, education, family) are just as
  important as economic conditions.
• 2., Culture is neither totally dependent or
  totally independent of economic conditions and
  relationships,
• 3., Ideology does not construct false
  consciousness ideology provides conceptual
  framework through which we interpret and make
  sense of our lived, material conditions and Hall
  says that ideology therefore produces our culture
  as well as our consciousness of who and what we
  are

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Influence Gramsci

• Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) political activist,
  Marxist philosopher and founder of Italian
  Communist Party. Believed that Lenins Bolshevik
  rev in Russia (1917) could be transplanted to
  Italy. But then in 1922 Benito Mussolini,
  fascist, became dictator of Italy. Even though
  Gramsci was an elected member of parliament who
  should have had immunity as such, he was arrested
  by Fascists in 1926 and spent rest of his life in
  prison. Has an enforced leisure to reflect on
  socialist defeat and role of culture in society.
• Key term hegemony binds society together
  without use of force negotiation and consent.
  Ideas, values, believes not imposed from above,
  and dont develop in free and accidental way but
  are negotiated through series of encounters
  between classes.
• Culture is a key site where struggle for hegemony
  takes place. In popular culture issues of moral
  and intellectual leadership resolved.
• All men are intellectuals even though all men in
  society do not have the function of
  intellectuals. Organic intellectuals openly
  identified with oppressed class, shared interests
  and worked on behalf.
• In CS hegemony theory doesnt work as Gramsci
  originally formulated it expanded beyond
  boundaries of class to include race, gender,
  culture, consumerism, meaning, pleasure.

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Critiques of British CS

• For parochialism, Anglocentrism, overemphasis on
  class above race and gender, and with romantic
  treatment of urban style and subculture.
• For being Marxism in disguise (esp Marxist
  materialist notion of history).

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Some ways Marxism influenced CS

• Assumption that industrial capitalist society
  unequally divided along class, gender, and ethnic
  lines. But CS goes even further in culture
  division established and fought for, subordinate
  and marginalized groups resist imposition of
  meanings which reflect interests of dominant
  groups.
• CS analyze social structures in terms of how
  cultural forces have given historic form.
  Culture important because shapes history social
  structures. SO CS doesnt treat history and
  culture as separate entities.
• But CS has tended to oppose reductionist Marxism
  (hard determinism of history and economics)

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Migration of UK CS

• During Thatcher years (1979-90) UK CS began to
  fragment and migrate to US, Canada, Australia,
  France, and India. With each country acquired
  own special characteristics some less political
  and more on aesthetic and textual analysis. Some
  more with marginalized.
• In US CS began in mid-80s. At this time in US
  humanities in turmoil. Many disciplines moving
  towards a more active engagement with politics of
  social identity and examination of representation
  of cultural forms. In media studies, emphasis
  shifting towards ethnography of audiences.