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Summary Cultural Studies Finals Study Guide
Summary of key thinkers and concepts listed in the syllabus
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LECTURE 1KEY THINKERS
The founding father of cultural studies
- Develops a concept of culture opposed to the elitist vision of scholars (i.e. Matthew Arnold) → Cultural Materialism
- Origin of the world culture: "cultivation" of crops > Expanded to cultivating the mind (18th CE)
- Culture as "lived experience" connected to a specific group (19th CE)
He believed…
- Culture is both constitutive and expressive of a social totality of human relations and practices
- Culture = how we interact and interpret (our own) culture
- The things we produce, the decisions we make > contributes to culture and respond to the culture
- Culture is an “expressive totality" → all the practices (political, economic, ideological) interact, mediate and affect
each other.
- Economy sets limits to what can be done or expressed in culture but doesn’t determine the meaning of
cultural practices in a direct 1-1 relationship
Raymond
Williams He took one idea of Marxism: what kind of conditions/elements allowed the culture to emerge
- involves the exploration of signification (cultural practices) in the context of the means and conditions of its
production (poltical economy)
- Signification: The processes of generating meaning through the organization of a system of signs
2 Aspects of culture:
1) known meanings and directions in which its members are trained to the new observations
2) meanings which are offered and tested
Three levels of culture
- Lived culture: time and place → Patterns of thinking
- Recorded culture: art to the most everyday facts which normally are not recorded (photographs, writing, videos)
- Culture of selective tradition: connecting lived culture & recorded culture (selecting about what to record and archive
and what not) → institutions have the power to decide
1
, - Culture: system of representation and serves as a space of interpretative struggle.
- argues that culture is defined by shared meaning, and that culture is the way through which people make
Stuart Hall sense and give meaning to the world.
- the media not only reflects reality but also “produces” it while “reproducing” the dominant cultural order, in particular
the order inherited from the Empire.
KEY CONCEPTS
- A versatile tool that is useful to us and the meaning lies in a person’s use
- Created, performed, enacted, transferred → Never monolithic
Importance:
- Shapes how we think and how we react
- Creates a political and economic playfield + cultural interaction → To understand globalization, nationalism, political
frictions, customs and rituals of people, communities, and groups
> Arnold’s definition: “the best that has been thought and said in the world” → justification for high culture (reading,
observing…)
Culture > Hall’s definition: 2 people belong to the same culture if they interpret the world in roughly the same way + can express
themselves, their feelings, their thoughts concerning the world in way which is understood by each other
High Culture Approach: Englitenment approach)
- the best of what a society produced → Culture with a capital C = the most visible
- Con: you become literate > become respected and powerful
- Matthew Arnold + FR Leavis = culture should be exclusive and protected from the raw uncultivated masses which
has been lost since the emergence of cities > standardization + levelling down
Low (Ordinary) Culture Approach: more romanticism approach
- Culture is a society's way of life → Every day lived experience of a group or a community → Traditions and habits of
people
- Con: "White culture"
- cultural studies struggled emphasizing time and the importance and the impact of "ordinary culture"
2
, Related to Raymond Williams
- Explores how and why cultural meaning is produced and organized
- How does (new cultural meaning) relate to other existing cultural meanings in society?
- Culture must be understood through the exploration of signification in the context of the means and conditions of its
production + practices of everyday life → Key to society
- Concerned with the connections between cultural practice and political
- The people who own those means of culture = powerful + embodying their interests
Cultural
Materialism Why call this cultural materialism?
- Culture is part of an expressive totality of social relations:
- You cannot isolate culture from material conditions, economic possibilities, the social position of who creates
this culture
It urges you to study all of Culture's components: Institutions, Formations (what schools, movements, and factions
do we discern), Modes of production, Identifications, Reproduction, Organization
The Cultural studies use a broad anthropological definition of culture + studies elite & mass cultures + tensions between the two
anthropologic - To understand how other cultures are impacted by globalization you need to study ordinary, everyday culture
approach to - To understand the impact of globalization means to learn how culture is intertwined with politics & economics
cultural - To understand a particular area or community you can look at ordinary culture.
materialism
Related to Hoggart, Thompson and Williams (although all different… stressed the ordinariness)
- The everyday, lived character of culture
- About the creation of everyday life of people and the customs to construct shared meaningful practices
Culturalism - Everyone takes the active role of creating and giving meaning to their life through culture → Democratic edge
Oxford: An approach to the study of culture with a particular emphasis on popular culture and on the way of life of a
particular community as reflected in its cultural practices and the cultural texts that it produces and consumes. This
perspective tends to stress active human agency rather than passive consumption of Stuart Hall.
3
, LECTURE 2
KEY THINKERS
CULTURE IS… a corporeal force tied into the socially organized production of the material conditions of existence.
- about your body → If we want to analyze culture, we need to take in the material conditions (body)
- refers to the forms assumed by social existence under determinate historical conditions. (base-superstructure)
- The base (ie material conditions) helps determine the superstructure (ie Culture)
- Marxism holds on to the idea that the profit motive and class relations directly and completely determine the form and
meaning of cultural production (Economic Determinism Ideology)
- Analyzes in the economist perspective; profit becomes the main concept, while class relations are determined
by profit
- stresses the role of the material conditions of existence and the historical specificity of human affairs.
- focused on the development and dynamics of capitalism and class conflict, makes claims to be an
emancipatory philosophy of equality
Is it always that simple?
- No, cultural studies are a site of tension and conflict, not only ruled by the dominant class.
Karl Marx - It doesn’t accept the base-superstructure
Cultural studies has been influenced by it but also criticized it:
A social formation is not a totality of which culture is just an expression → INSTEAD is a complex structure of
different instances (levels or practices) that are “structured in dominance”
- Economy is only determining in the 'last instance'
Ideology (based on cultural studies): a system of constructed meanings that is given as fixed and universal to obscure
and maintain desired power relations
- Communists are all the same → To maintain a sense of order (what is good/bad)
Historical materialism: a theory that attempts to relate the production and reproduction of culture to the organization of the
material conditions of life.
- Ex: economic structure of society > creation of legal and political structures through existing relations of production
- Culture = Political → Culture is resolved by the organization and the material conditions of life
- Expressive of social relations of class power → Naturalizes the social order as an inevitable fact
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