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Samenvatting Cultural Studies (5181V4CS)
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Samenvatting Cultural Studies (5181V4CS) ALL Readings for the Entire Cultural Studies Course
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Cultural Studies CompilationDocument
Contents
Cultural studies......................................................................................................................................2
Chapter 1 an introduction to cultural studies p. 14-17......................................................................2
Chapter 2 Questions of Culture and Ideology p. 44-53......................................................................3
Chapter 2 Questions of Culture and Ideology p. 63-84......................................................................5
Chapter 3 Culture, Meaning, Knowledge: The Linguistic turn in cultural studies p 85-106..............11
Chapter 3 Culture, Meaning, Knowledge: The Linguistic turn in cultural studies p 122-124............18
Chapter 5 A New World Disorder? P. 163-169, 186-190, 211-212...................................................19
The analysis of culture.........................................................................................................................24
Cultural theory and popular culture................................................................................................24
Simone de Beauvoir, childhood, the second sex..................................................................................26
Assignment......................................................................................................................................26
Summary..........................................................................................................................................26
Video lecture.......................................................................................................................................29
Roland Barthes: Mythologies (fifties)...............................................................................................29
The blue guide/travelling guide text............................................................................................29
Toys text......................................................................................................................................29
The great family of man text........................................................................................................29
Second part of lecture:....................................................................................................................30
The blue guide.....................................................................................................................................31
Toys.....................................................................................................................................................32
1
,Theory and practice
Cultural studies
Chapter 1 an introduction to cultural studies p. 14-17
The intellectual strands of cultural studies
Key concepts: active audiences, anti-essentialism, articulation, cultural materialism, culture,
discourse, discursive formation, hegemony, identity, ideology, language-game, political economy,
politics, polysemy, popular culture, positionality, power, representation. Signifying practices, (the)
Social, social formation, subjectivity, texts
Influential theories within cultural studies: Marxism, culturalism, structuralism, poststructuralism,
psychoanalysis and the politics of difference (under which heading, for the sake of convenience, we
include feminism, theories of race, ethnicity and postcolonialism).
Marxism and the centrality of class
Marxism is a form of historical materialism. Labour and the forms of social organization that material
production takes, called ‘modes of production’, are central categories of Marxism. The organization
of a mode of production is not simply a matter of co-ordinating objects; rather, it is inherently tied
up with relations between people. Different forms of material organization and different social
relations characterize each mode of production throughout history. Further, each mode of
production is superseded by another as internal contradictions, particularly those of class conflict,
lead to its transformation and replacement.
Capitalism
The fundamental class division of capitalism is between those who own the means of production,
the bourgeoisie, and those who, being a property-less proletariat, must sell their labour to survive.
Capitalism aims to make a profit and does so by extracting surplus value from workers. The
realization of surplus value in monetary form is achieved by the selling of goods (which have both
‘use value’ and ‘exchange value’) as commodities. Capitalism is a dynamic system whose profit-
driven mechanisms lead to the continual revolutionizing of the means of production and the forging
of new markets. However, the mechanisms of capitalism also give rise to perennial crises and will
ultimately lead, or so Marx argued, to its being superseded by socialism. Problems for capitalism
include:
- a falling rate of profit
- cycles of boom and bust
- an increasing monopoly
- the creation of a proletariat which is set to become the system’s grave-digger.
Marxism and cultural studies
There is no doubt that we live in social formations organized along capitalist lines that manifest deep
class divisions in work, wages, housing, education and health.
Culturalism and structuralism
Culturalism is a post hoc term that owes its sense precisely to a contrast with structuralism.
2
,Culture is ordinary
Culturalism stresses the ‘ordinariness’ of culture and the active, creative capacity of people to
construct shared meaningful practices. One criticism of contemporary cultural studies is that it has
come to focus too much on pastimes and not enough on the lived realities of life. There is an explicit
partisanship in exploring the class basis of culture that aims to give ‘voice’ to the subordinated and
to examine the place of culture in class power. However, this form of ‘left culturalism’ is also
somewhat nationalistic, or at least nation-centred, in its approach.
Chapter 2 Questions of Culture and Ideology p. 44-53
Key concepts: Articulation, Mass culture, Culturalism, Popular culture, Hegemony, Poststructuralism,
Ideology, Social formation, Marxism, Structuralism
‘culture’ is a word, not a thing or an entity, and the meaning of words lie in their use.
Key thinkers: Raymond Williams (1921-1988): His anthropologically-inspired grasp of culture as
ordinary and lived legitimized the study of popular culture. His work engages with Marxism but is
critical of its economic reductionism.
Culture with a capital C: the great and the good in the literary tradition
culture can be seen as ‘lived experience’. ‘high’ culture refers to the separation of civilization and
raw and uncultivated masses.
Leavisism
Leavisism shares with Arnold the notion that culture is the high point of civilization and the concern
of an educated minority.
For Leavisism, the important tasks are:
- to define and defend the best of culture represented by the canon of good works
- to criticize the worst of mass culture represented by advertising, films and popular fiction.
Culture is ordinary
We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life – the common meanings;
to mean the arts and learning – the special processes of discovery and creative effort. Culture is both
the ‘arts’ and the values, norms and symbolic goods of everyday life.
The anthropological approach to culture
Williams’s concept of culture is ‘anthropological’ since it centres on everyday meanings: values
(abstract ideals), norms (definite principles or rules) and material/symbolic goods. Comprehending
culture as a ‘whole way of life’ had the pragmatic consequence of splitting off the concept from the
‘arts’.
Culturalism: Hoggart, Thomspon, Williams
Culturalism = an anthropological and historically informed understanding of culture
Hoggart, Thompson and Williams stress the ordinariness of culture. They share an interest in class
culture, democracy and socialism.
3
, ‘men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under
circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and
transmitted from the past’ -Marx
Richard Hoggart: the uses of literacy
Hoggart’s view of working-class culture seems tinged with nostalgia. He appears to mourn a lost
authenticity of a culture created from below. Despite its romanticism, The Uses of Literacy is an
important book.
John Hartley: The Uses of Digital Literacy
Hartley argues that the progression from ‘read-only’ literacy to ‘read-write’ uses of multimedia is a
sign that writing is finally catching up with reading.
Edward Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class
Thompson, along with Williams, conceives of culture as lived and ordinary. For Thompson, class is a
historical phenomenon forged and created by people. It is not a ‘thing’ but a set of social relations
and experiences.
Raymond Williams and cultural materialism
For Williams, culture as everyday meanings and values is part of an expressive totality of social
relations. Thus, ‘the theory of culture’ is defined as ‘the study of relationships between elements in a
whole way of life’.
We need to distinguish three levels of culture, even in its most general definition. There is the lived
culture of a particular time and place, only fully accessible to those living in that time and place.
There is the recorded culture, of every kind, from art to the most everyday facts: the culture of the
period. There is also, as the factor connecting lived culture and period cultures, the culture of the
selective tradition.
He suggests that we explore culture in terms of:
- institutions of artistic and cultural production, e.g. artisanal or market forms
- formations or schools, movements and factions of cultural production
- modes of production, including the relations between the material means of cultural
production and the cultural forms which are made manifest
- identifications and forms of culture, including the specificity of cultural products, their
aesthetic purpose and the particular forms that generate and express meaning
- the reproduction, in time and space, of a selective tradition of meanings and practices
involving both social order and social change
- the organization of the ‘selective tradition’ in terms of a ‘realized signifying system’.
Culture as lived experience
Culture for Williams is constituted by:
- the meanings generated by ordinary men and women
- the lived experiences of its participants
- the texts and practices engaged in by all people as they conduct their lives.
4
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