1. Cultural Studies

2. Culture
‟one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (Raymond Williams, Keywords)
Modernity: we no longer regard our ways of life as unproblematically natural, but we are conscious of our culture as a culture, we our a culture for whom culture is a problem. (György Márkus, ‟The Making and the Make-up of a Concept”)
Latin: ’Cultura’ >>> colere – inhabit (colonus – colony) , cultivate, protect, worship (cultus – cult)
Cultura – tending, cultivation (mainly crops or animals), but cultuvation of the individual soul (enters English via French by 15th C)
Cicero: uneducated soul is like uncultivated land - philosophy as cultura animi
St. Augustine: God’s words open the soul like ploughman's plough, planting seeds of instruction to bring fruits of piety (a cult for cultivation)
Renaissance humanists (e.g. Bacon) preserve the individual pedagogy: secular moral education, a tending to the innate potentials of the mind
German Enlightenment: Bildung (Bild in German is a picture [of God], in mystical traditions culture is transforming the soul into the image of God, originally there planted) educational process of self-realisation

3. Culture as process and product
Process, metaphorically of human development, e.g. More: ‟to the culture and profit of their minds”, Bacon: ‟the culture and manurance of minds” (1605).
By the 18th century process transposed to its result: cultured v. uncultured replacing noble v. commoner.
A way to contrast societies: for many Enlightenment thinkers, human nature is the same, but there are different cultural levels.
In German, especially Enlightenment philosophy it is both used in the sense of a generalised process of becoming civilised and in the sense of universalist histories of human development.

4. Cultures and Value
Herder: Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind ( ) – attack the Euro-centric uniliniarity of universal history, advocates a plural use of cultures of specific nations and periods as well as specific groups within those nations. Leading to emphasis on national and folk cultures.
3 broad categories of usage: 1) intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development; 2) a particular way of life (of a period, group, humanity in general); 3) works and practices of intellectual and esp. artistic creativity.
3) is the most recent: seems to be transferred from 1) – and often embodied in institutions (Ministries of Culture) --- supra-individual and objectified, associated with value: Sometimes slightly or distinctly pejorative, implying superiority, as in ’culture vulture’, or (high) culture v. (popular) entertainment.
Departmentalised: in archaeology and cultural anthropology more about material production, in history and cultural studies more about signifying or symbolic systems.

5. Civilisation
An achieved state of organised social life. Referred, like culture, originally to a process.
Originally, in English (early 117th C) it referred to making a criminal matter into a civil matter, thus bringing it within social organisation.
Latin root is ’civilis’ - belonging to citizens, by 16th C, also implied educated and orderly.
’Civility’ was used (17-18th C) instead of civilisation for an ordered society.
From the early 19th century, often contrasted with culture: 1, an issue of manners, law-abidance, rule following v. 2) an interior and more fundamental development.
These days, it is also often used neutrally and in the plural.

6. Cultural Studies: History and Basic Problems
1960s attempts by British educators and others to find ways of dealing with the texts and experiences of a newly vibrant popular culture: popular music, television, film, and the styles of subcultures.
“Culture” ≠ high culture
Everyday processes through which we make sense of our world. Culture is ordinary.
A process rather than a canon of texts, and it was a process that could be understood.
The production of a particular way of life which expresses certain meanings and values. Examines the political effects – distributions of power – which flow from these meanings and values.
The role played by the mass media in constructing meaning and producing culture.

7. Concern
During the period between the wars, an aesthetic and moral critique of mass media was mounted by key figures such as the Cambridge literary critic F. R. Leavis and the Oxford poet critic T. S. Eliot (culture and civilization tradition).
Shared the concerns, but not the politics of German Marxist philosophers and sociologists known as the Frankfurt School (Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin).
Americanisation: American media increased worldwide during the 1950s. Hollywood monopolized the supply of television material over a period when many nations were setting up their first broadcasting systems; the Hollywood film studios were relatively untouched by war that had ruined the European film industries, the arrival of rock ‘n’ roll had America reaching a historic peak in terms of the scale of its reach.

8. Frank Raymond Leavis (1895–1978)
Towering influence in the formation of English studies as a university discipline in England. He had a profound impact on generations of students (“Leavisites”), who continued with his missionary zeal to establish the cultural centrality of English as an academic discipline and to transform the teaching of it in schools throughout Britain and in English-speaking countries throughout the world. His primary aim was the pedagogic one of creating a “collaborative community” of “common readers” who shared his foundational vision of (re)creating English literature as the carrier, through its language, of a collective historically grounded national culture.
Traces of the influence of his rural craftsmen forebears can be seen in Leavis’s celebration of an “organic community” sharing “traditional” cultural values, a crucial aspect of his critical and moral perspectives.
the rise in mass literacy had combined with its commercial exploitation through mass-market popular literature to produce a “dumbing down” of the public sensibility and capacity to recognize the “implicit standards that order the finer living of an age”. It is the role of a minority clerisy (or intellectual class) to “keep alive the subtlest and most perishable parts of a tradition” and to restore “an informed and cultivated public”.
Background: Matthew Arnold: Culture and Anarchy (1869), where culture is offered as the antidote to modern individualism (anarchy or democracy?), excessive concern with practicalities (Philistinism), the threat of the rising proletariat, but also aristocratic Barbarism.

9. Methodology and Agenda
New Critical traditions of literary analysis provided insufficient tools, but new inspiration was offered by Fresh translations of continental theoretical texts of Continental structuralism (e.g. Barthes) and neo-Marxism (e.g. Althusser), often by the founders of Cult. Studies, itself.
Semiotics to deal with the combination of media, it explained the generation of meaning or significance rather than providing an assessment of aesthetic value.
Communications studies examined media texts for balance, bias, or misrepresentation.
The most influential figure in the beginning was Stuart Hall, director of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). The media as the primary territory to be explored. The objective was ideological critique – demonstrating how the culture’s dominant “maps of meaning” were naturalized, legitimized, and reproduced through representation in the media, and then linking these with the political interests they served.

10. Stuart Hall ( )
Born in Jamaica in 1932, studying literature at Oxford University, director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham and chair of the Sociology Department at the Open University.
Analyst of the black British experience, and an influential political theorist and public intellectual. He played a critical role in founding the British New Left in the late 1950s and was in the forefront of analyzing the New Right in Britain in the 1970s and ’80s. Hall is responsible for coining the term “Thatcherism,” and he played a prominent role in rethinking left-wing politics in an age of globalization and conservative hegemony.
The first editor of New Left Review and played a primary role in mediating between the rising student generation and ex-communists mostly of an older generation, notably the historian E. P. Thompson.
Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams insights drawn from literary analysis to critically examine transformations in post-war politics and society.

11. Hall 2
The Popular Arts (1964), written with Paddy Whannel: popular and high culture have different aims comprehensible only on their own terms. Within the popular arts, he distinguishes between “mass” and “popular” culture. Popular culture is a genuine expression of the urban and industrial experience; mass art, on the other hand, involves the embellishment of a stock formula known to manipulate the emotions.
CCCS: contemporary media, youth subcultures, working-class life, the modern state, historical theory, the theory of ideology, and the relationship between race, class, and gender.
“Encoding/ decoding” (1980): semiology and Marxism to understand the communication process. He sees communication as a chain of discrete moments, each with its own modality and form. Though “structured in dominance,” subject to asymmetrical power relations, the production of media messages or “encoding” and audience reception or “decoding” are two moments subject to their own structural logic. Producers strive to gain assent to preferred meanings. Audiences, on the other hand, are capable of interpreting these messages in their own terms, because they do not understand the preferred meaning, are indifferent to it, or because they choose to use a different and sometimes oppositional code.

12. Hall 3
Theorist of the black experience: blacks in Britain are mostly treated as immigrants, that is, outside of British history and culture, they, in fact, are a diasporic people shaped by the historical experience of the British Empire and global capitalism, thus placing them at the centre – rather than the periphery – of British history.
A discursive notion of the subject drawn from postmodern and poststructuralist thought. He supplants the centred, rational, stable, and unified self underpinning Marx’s class theory with a conception that is “more fragmented and incomplete, composed of multiple ‘selves’ or identities in relation to the different social worlds we inhabit, something with a history, ‘produced,’ in process”.
A theoretician of multiculturalism, he was a member of a committee that produced The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain and which stroked controversy by pointing out the historical association btw Britishness and being white.

13. Richard Hoggart ( )
Hoggart’s initial training was in literary criticism, adapted the literary-critical method of “close reading” to social observation. Culture is to be found not only in the arts, but also in social manners, forms of speech, dress, food, the organization of the home, and popular entertainment, as Raymond Williams put it, the “whole way of life.”
The early motivation for Hoggart’s social observation was an interest in class. Like
Williams, he was a “scholarship boy” – one of the first generation from working-class backgrounds to enter British higher education – and negotiated class difference on a daily basis in his own life. But unlike Marxist theorists, Hoggart regarded classes as cultures rather than positions in social relations of power.
The Uses of Literacy (1957): 1) close description, “from the inside,” of the meaning invested by working-class people in home life, family, neighbourhood, and religion up to the mid-twentieth century. It suggested that the relationship between media texts and audiences must always be one of active negotiation. Even those with little education are formed by the cultural context to which they belong, bringing their own dispositions or sense-making practices to anything they receive. 2) newer forms of mass media that were emerging in Britain in the 1950s. Concern about commercial entertainment and Americanisation (often criticised).

14. Text
Cult. Stud. was established to analyse the media text, but over time, the definition of what constituted a text expanded from “fixed” texts such as films or television programs to include such “lived” examples as subcultural dress codes and the practices of self-presentation we describe as style or fashion.
This pushed cultural studies further away from its origins in literary studies, and toward the more empirical ends of the social sciences and humanities.
The broader the definition of the text became, the more contingent its reception was found to be: critiquing what came to be called the “process model” of communication – at its simplest, a sender-receiver model that analysed neither the contents of the message nor the process of reception.
Hall’s model of reception, differentiated between “preferred” or “dominant”, “negotiated”, and “oppositional” reading.

15. Audience
Historicising and empirically specifying the audience ~ cultural history of the media.
There are ethnographic studies of fan cultures and the audiences of particular genres of television, as well as studies of the new audience (or users) behaviours related to DIY online content, social network participation, and multiplayer gaming.
How audiences are constructed by and inscribed into their everyday cultural practice. The influence from anthropological models of consumption since the mid- 1990s has been crucial: individuals produce their own culture through the consumption of commodities and the production of meanings and pleasures around them. The range of choices, from which this production of culture is made, is not one over which the individual subject has control.

16. Structuralism/Poststructuralism 1
Meaning is made, and meaning making is an essential function of culture.
The intersection of power and meaning in popular culture.
Stuart Hall: associated with the New Left, Hall sought to bring Western Marxism to bear on the study of popular culture. He was, however, critical of Marxism’s reductionist tendencies, and sought to eradicate them through the addition of the synchronic semiotic approach of structuralism.
For classical Marxism culture is shaped by the production and organization of material existence. This idea is expressed through the metaphor of the base and the superstructure. Here the base or mode of economic production exerts a powerful determining influence on the character of the cultural superstructure. As Karl Marx himself pointed out, “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”.

17. Structuralism/Poststructuralism 2
Dick Hebdige’s “Subculture: The Meaning of Style” (1979) illustrates the structuralist influence within the Birmingham School. Hebdige explores subcultures through the autonomous play of signifiers and so asserts the specificity of the semiotic and cultural. For Hebdige, style is a signifying practice of spectacular subcultures that display fabricated codes of meaning. Style signifies difference and constitutes a group identity.
For Hall, the formation of cultural identity involves identification with continually shifting positions in language. These include, identifications of class, gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, nationality, and religion. Each of these discursive positions is unstable.
Hall’s anti-essentialist position does not mean that we cannot speak of identity. Rather, it points us to the political nature of identity as a “production” and to the possibility of multiple, shifting, and fragmented identities, which can be articulated in a variety of ways.

18. Visual Culture Studies
The production, circulation, and consumption of images; the changing nature of subjectivity; the ways in which we visualize or reflect upon or represent the world to ourselves (even the future world).
“Visual culture”: the objects, subjects, media, and environments of the world around us and from the past. This includes all manner of visual culture – from high culture to popular, mass, and subculture, from the elite to the everyday, from the marginal to the mainstream, from the ordinary to the extraordinary.
Sometimes the term “visual culture” is employed to characterize a historical period or geographical location such as the visual culture of the Renaissance or Aboriginal visual culture. Sometimes “visual culture” is used to designate a set of thematic individual or community-based concerns around the ways in which politically motivated images are produced, circulated, and consumed both to construct and reinforce, and to resist and overthrow, articulations of sexual or racial ontologies, identities, and subjectivities – such as black visual culture or feminist visual culture or lesbian and gay visual culture.

19. Feminism/Gender Studies and Cultural Studies
Social constructivism.
Gender and Popular Culture.
Male Gaze: feminist film theory, an area of criticism and research introduced by British cultural theorist Laura Mulvey in her essay “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema” ([1975). Mulvey explains the significance of what she refers to as the “male gaze” in film. Male characters tend to be subjects, often looking with intensity at their objects, which tend to be feminine or emasculated. The male gaze then becomes a kind of penetration that serves to subordinate other characters. Mulvey extends this gaze to the realm of science and science fiction, noting that the telescope and microscope are extensions of the male eye, constructing the source of its inquiry as “object” or “other” and thus feminine.

20. Subculture
A social group that is in some way non-normative or nonconformist. Subcultures are “minor” social formations, usually distinguished from dominant modes of sociality – family, religion, vocation, school, politics, nation, “society” itself – and from what are often rather loosely referred to as “mainstream” cultural practices and tastes.
In what ways can a subculture’s non-normativity or nonconformity be defined? And second, how can the sociality of a subculture be accounted for?
It asks us to look beyond the originally 19th C distinction btw community and society (Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft). Community was understood as residual, tied to pre-modern social forms and practices: family, kinship, patriarchy (or matriarchy), neighbourhood, tradition, collectivity, and cooperation. Society, by contrast, is modern: shifting the emphasis from collectivity to individuality, fragmenting and impersonalizing relationships, destroying traditions, and replacing patriarchy with remotely imposed (e.g., by state bureaucracies or corporations) rules and conventions.

21. Lessons for Literary Studies
Anthony Easthope: Literary into Cultural Studies (1991)
Undoing the hierarchical opposition between elite culture and mass civilisation, challenging disrespect for popular culture.
Challenging English Studies as such, including the following: 1) English is a field for study discriminating the canon from popular culture; 2) English has an object of study, the canonical text; 3) the assumption that the canonical text is unified. 4) the view of the literary text as autonomous and transcendent (can be studied in isolation as a stable structure).
We move from a view of a text as an object towards a view of it as a process in relation to a reader with specific and describable ideologies, agendas, interests. The resulting readings can be acknowledged to be widely different, without a need to reconcile contradictions.

22. Lessons 2
Literary value is not universal, it is evaluated in specific situations by specific people. The greatness of literature is shown by the multiplicity of ways in which it has become significant to us.
Need to re-define works as signifying practices: specificity in terms of history, audience, medium – wary of overarching theories.
Interest in collective texts (films) as opposed to the myth of self-sufficient genius.