This is a final summary for the course cultural studies for the first year of international studies at Leiden University. It includes all the lectures and some examples from the book!
Power is also from the other way arround → Power is given (operates in every kind
of interaction)
Disciplinary → You speak back to your parents → Punishment → Conditions you to
not do it again → Still aware of punishment → Changes whether or not you are
going to do it
Discourse
Speak or write about a topic → Discussion
Hegemony
The process of making, maintaining and reproducing these authorative sets of
meanings and practices.
Lecture 2
Cultural materialism
Explores how and why cultural meaning is produced and organized. It involves the
exploration of signification in the context of the means and conditions of its
production. Cultural materialism is concerned with the connections between
cultural practice and political economy
Williams distinguishes three levels of culture
1. Lived culture of a particular time and place
Finals 1
, 2. Recorded culture of every kind, from art to the most everyday facts
3. Culture of the selective tradition, the factor connecting lived culture and
recorded culture (making selections about what to record and archive and
what not)
Marxist concepts to which cultural studies responds were
Ideology
Historical Materialism
Hegemony
What is Marxism?
Historical materialism (Marxism) is a theory that attempts to relate the production
and reproduction of culture to the organization of the material conditions of life
Culture is a corporeal force tied into socially organized production of material
conditions of existence
Culture is a corporeal force tied into the socially organized production of the
material conditions of existence
The concept of Culture refers to the forms assumed by social existence under
determinate historical condition (base - superstructure)
The totality of the relations of production constitutes → The economic structure
of society
The real foundation, on which legal and political superstructures arise
To which definite forms of consciousness correspond
Base and Superstructure according to Marxism
Finals 2
, For Marxism, Culture is Political because
It is expressive of social relations of class power
“The ideas of the ruling class are, in every age, the ruling ideas, i.e., the
class which is the dominant material force in society is at the same time its
dominant intellectual force.”
As a result culture
Naturalizes the social order as an inevitable fact (it makes you believe
capitalism is the natural order of things)
Obscures the underlying relations of exploitation
Criticism from Cultural Studies: Against Marxism’s Economic determinism
Marxism hold on to the idea that the profit motive and class relations directly and
completely determine the form and meaning of cultural production
Cultural studies does not think it is always that simple, culture is a site of tension
and conflict, it is too simple to argue that it is ruled by the dominant class alone
Finals 3
, Louis Althusser on the relative autonomy of culture and how cultural studies
picked up on this
Economy is only determining in the ‘last instance’ — Althusser
We must think a society or social formation as ever and always constituted by
a set of complex practices: each with its own specificity, its own modes of
articulation — Stuart Hall
What is a social formation? (Louis Althusser → Stuart Hall)
A social formation is not a totality of which culture is just an expression
A social formation is a complex structure of different instances (levels or
practices) that are ‘structured in dominance’
Different instances of politics, economics and ideology are articulated
together to form a unity
The social formation is not the result of single, one-way, base-superstructure
determination
The economic level is determinant only in the last instance (relative autonomy)
Ideology — Cultural Studies
The binding and justifying ideas of any social group. It is commonly used to
designate the attempt to fix meanings and worldview in support of the powerful
Here Ideology is said to be constituted by maps of meaning that, while they
purport to be universal truths, are historically specific understandings which
obscure and maintain the power of social group (eg. class, gender, race)
Ideology — Karl Marx
The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is directly interwoven
with the material activity of men. If in all ideology men and their circumstances
appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as
Finals 4
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