Cultural studies document
Concepts
Lecture 1
Monolithic
Monotonous
That cultures are never monolithic -- there are always tensions, culture is dynamic and full of
contestation
High Culture
culture is the best of what a society produces
● Literature
● Fine Arts
● Ballet, classical music etc.
Ordinary Culture
culture is a society’s way of life
● Everyday lived experience of a group or community
● Traditions and habits of a people
Cultural studies takes this approach
Culture is ordinary, Culture belongs to a group of people, Culture is about (the creation of)
everyday meanings for groups of people: Values, Norms, Material/symbolic goods
Culturalism/ anthropological approach to culture
The focus on ordinary culture
● The ordinariness of culture
● The everyday, lived character of culture
● The active, creative capacity of common people to construct shared meaningful practices.
Cultural materialism
Cultural materialism explores how and why cultural meaning is produced and organized.
Cultural materialism is concerned with the connections between cultural practice and political
economy.
It involves the exploration of signification in the context of the means and conditions of its
production.
● Culture is part of an expressive totality of social relations: (You cannot isolate culture from material
conditions, economic possibilities, social position of who creates this culture ○ We can use culture to
understand social relations)
● Culture must be understood through the representations and practices of everyday life in the
context of the material conditions of their production
Cultural materialism urges you to study all of culture’s components:
Institutions - what institutions are involved in creating a culture? [eg. museum, university, television]
Formations - what schools, movements and factions do we discern? [eg. marxism = a school]
Modes of production - what material conditions can we identify in the production of culture?
[fibreglass cable = quick internet and allows for rapid digital reproduction of culture]
Identifications - how do people identify with a cultural practice? [are you a goth, a punk, nationalist,
etc.?]
,Reproduction - how is this culture re-produced, remembered, archived etc.? [national archive,
peoples stories]
Organization - how is that archive and remembrance organized? [formal by the state? Or informal?]
Lived culture
You’re not particularly thinking about ‘recording’ what you’re doing or making, it’s about having fun,
being creative, giving meaning to your life.
Recorded culture
The activity you’re engaging in is being recorded:
- someone takes a photograph, makes a video, etc.
- The activity you engage in produces an object or record that has some permanence: eg. you knitted
a sweater, crafted a sculpture, etc.
The culture of the selective tradition
the factor connecting lived culture and recorded culture (making selections about what to record and
archive and what not
Lecture 2
Historical materialism (Marxism)
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 the socially organized production of material conditions of
existence
The Marxist definition of culture is...
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
conditions. (base - superstructure)
The totality of the relations of production constitutes
- the economic structure of society
Which is:
- the real foundation, on which legal and political superstructures arise
- and to which definite forms of consciousness correspond.
Superstructure: includes culture, politics, art...
Relation of production: The social relations that you are in and that you have to rely on to
survive. The relations of production are organised in a hierarchical way, and you are not able
to fully detach yourself from them.
Forces of production: Technologies of production, workers
Base: economy
, 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
Marxism holds on to the idea that the profit motive and class relations directly and completely
determine the form and meaning of cultural production.
But is it always that simple?
No, says cultural studies:
Culture is a site of tension and conflict, it’s too simple to argue that it’s ruled by the dominant class
alone.
Social formation
Is not a totality of which culture is just an expression
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
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 groups
(eg. class, gender, race).
(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 much from their historical life-process as the inversion of
objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.
Hegemony
(Cultural Studies)
Culture is comprised of a multiplicity of streams of meaning and encompasses a range of ideologies
and cultural forms. However, there is one strand of meaning that can be called ascendant (or
dominant). The process of making, maintaining and reproducing these authoritative sets of meanings
and practices is what we call “hegemony”.
● Hegemony must be understood in relational terms (groups within society and how they interact
with each other).
● These relations between group, where one group dominates another, is inherently unstable:
It must be won and re-won every time
It takes an effort to maintain it
This is why hegemony is not static but dynamic.
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