I. General Definitions
Cultural studies is “a transdisciplinary conception that draws on social theory, economics, politics, history, communication studies, literary and cultural theory, philosophy, and other theoretical discourses” (Kellner, 1995).
There are at least five different definitions of cultural studies (Science Encyclopedia, The History of Ideas, Vol. II):-
1. Any progressive cultural criticism and theory 2. The study of popular culture 3. “Postmodern” theories that advocate cultural and discursive constructionism 4. Research on politics of textuality applied broadly to include social life, especially based in poststructuralist theories of ideology, discourse and subjectivity 5. A particular intellectual formation that is directly or indirectly related to the project of British cultural studies as represented by the works of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
Elizabeth Long (1997)defines culture as a “whole way of life” of a given group or community.
According to Storey (1996), “culture” in cultural studies is defined politically rather than aesthetically. The object of study is culture understood as the texts and practices of everyday life. Cultural studies is not a monolithic body of theories and methods. As Kellner and Durham (2006) explains:
“Culture in today’s societies thus constitutes a set of discourses, stories, images and spectacles, and varying cultural forms and practices that generate meaning, identities and political effects. Culture includes artifacts such as newspapers, television programs, movies, and popular music, but also practices like shopping, watching sport events, going to a club or hanging out in the local coffee shop. Culture is ordinary, a familiar part of everyday life, yet special cultural artifacts are extraordinary, helping people to see and understand thing they’ve never perceived, like certain novels or films that change your view of the world.”
According to Elizabeth Long (1997), cultural studies has been in large part a theoretically informed, empirically engaged critical commentary on contemporary social and cultural life. She adds to Calhoun view of cultural studies as seeking an “engagement with the social world that starts from the presumption that existing arrangements do not exhaust the range of possibilities. It seeks to explore the ways in which our categories of thought reduce our freedom by occluding recognition of what could be.”
Stuart Hall (1980) describes cultural studies as study of the word culture and its effect in the changes in industry, democracy and class. Hall further describes culture as all social practices and the sum of their inter-relationships. In his opinion, ‘culture’ is “those patterns of organizations, those characteristic forms of human energy which can be discovered as revealing themselves – in unexpected identities and correspondences as in ‘discontinuties of an unexpected kinds”. Cultural studies is, then, “the analysis of culture” that is an “attempt to discover the nature of organization which is the complex of these relationships”.
Richard Johnson (1986) explains that cultural studies can be described in various ways as well. He defines it as either an “intellectual and political tradition”, or “in terms of its theoretical paradigms”, or “by its characteristic objects of study”.
II. History
In 1950s, experts like Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart explored the political and theoretical relevance of the concept of culture into the broader context of social life. They argued that cultural texts provided insight into social reality that is not evident in traditional social sciences. They helped in understanding the meaning of social life in a time and place and grasp “the structure of feeling”. Both Williams and Hoggart described this idea of culture’s concrete effect on people’s lives in their respective works. Hoggart in his book, The Uses of Literacy (1957) discussed the concept of Americanization using close textual analysis to explore the idea of whether the new forms of popular culture “was disturbing the balance between the working class culture and the patterns of everyday life of the working class”. Raymond Williams in his two works – Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1965) – tried to find “the theoretical and methodological tools” that would help reveal the “relationships between cultural practices, social relations and organization of power” (Hall, 1980; Johnson, 1986; Kellner, 1995).
In 1964, Hoggart formed the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, during his tenure as a professor in English Literature at the University of Birmingham. The Centre
“undertook, both individually and collectively, a wide range of evolving and discontinuous researches, both theoretical and empirical, into culture and society. Externally, it came to represent a more limited body of work as it engaged over the years in a number of highly visible public debates with other groups interested in the politics of culture. The Centre is most widely known for having offered a number of models of cultural studies from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, including models of: ideological analysis; studies of working-class cultures and subcultures, and of media audiences (all of which, taken together, constituted a particular understanding of culture as a site of resistance); feminist cultural research; hegemonic struggles in state politics; and the place of race in social and cultural processes. The Centre was primarily associated, quite commonly, with the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci.”(Science Encyclopedia, The History of Ideas, Vol. II)
IV. Different Influences
Stuart Hall and the two paradigms of culture:
Hall (1980) used the arguments presented by Williams and Hoggart in their books as the basis to flesh out the concept of cultural Studies. Stuart explained that the two books “helped to stake out the new terrain”. He argued that “Hoggart’s book took its reference from the cultural debate, long sustained in the arguments around “mass society” and in the tradition of work identified with Leavis, while he described William’s arguments as “a record of a number of important and continuing reactions to changes in our social, economic and political life” and offering “a special kind of map by means of which the nature of changes can be explored”.
Hall (1980) further explained that there have been two different types of conceptualization of ‘culture’ in the past in the area of cultural studies. On one hand, culture has been defined as “the sum of the available descriptions through which societies make sense of and reflect their common experiences”. This concept of ‘culture’ is democratized and socialized and culture is considered “ordinary”. On the other hand, the second approach defined culture more anthropologically and emphasized that aspect of culture that referred to social practices. The second approach popularized the idea of culture as a “way of life”.
Richard Johnson:
Johnson (1986) Johnson described cultural studies as “modern Marxist revival”. He explained that cultural studies were based on three assumptions - “cultural processes are intimately connected with social relations especially class relations and class formations, with sexual divisions, with racial structuring of social relations with age oppressions as a form of dependency. The second is that culture involves power and helps to produce asymmetries in the abilities of individuals and social groups to define and realize their needs. And the third, which follows the other two, is that culture is neither an autonomous nor an externally determined field, but a site of social differences and struggles”. However, Johnson pointed out that cultural studies have been “marked out” for its concerns with “theory”.
Gramsci:
Many experts discussed Gramsci’s writing in context of cultural studies (Hall, 1980; Johnson, 1986). They explained that Gramsci’s writing looked at the study of culture from the viewpoint of cultural producers. He was interested in the culture of popular classes as an area of study. He also wrote about cultural organizers and producers not just as “little knots of intellectuals, but as a whole social strata concentrated around particular institutions – school, colleges, the law, the press, the state bureaucracies and the political parties”.
V. Cultural studies and Communications
The fields of communication and cultural studies are interdisciplinary. The Frankfurt school inaugurated the critical studies of mass communications that developed the early model of cultural studies. There are many models of cultural studies from neo-marxist models developed by Luckas, Gramsci, Bloch and the Frankfurt School in 1930s to feminist and Psychoanalytic cultural studies. The Frankfurt School combined political economy of media, cultural analysis of the texts, and audience reception studies of the social and ideological effects of mass culture and communications. They coined the term “cultural industries” to signify “the process of industrialization of mass produced culture and the commercial imperatives that drove the system”. Adorno’s analysis of popular music; Lowenthal’s studies of popular literature and magazines; and Herzog’s studies of radio opera shows are several examples of Frankfurt School’s approach to culture and mass communication.
During 1980s, a bifurcation was experienced in media studies. This bifurcation was mainly “between the culturalist approaches that focused primarily on texts contrasted with the empirical approaches in the study of mass mediated communication”. The culturalist approach was “largely textual, centred on the analysis and criticisms of all forms of communication as cultural artifacts using methods primarily derived from humanities. The method of communications research, by contrast, employed more empirical methodologies, ranging from straight quantitative research, ethnographic studies of specific cases or domains to specialized historical research”.
VI. Concepts
Ideology Ideology is the central concept in cultural studies (Storey, 1996). Marx and Engels coined this term to describe the dominant ideas and representations in a given social order. All cultural texts have biases and values that represent the values of their creators and often the values of the ruling class (Kellner and Durham, 2006). These values have changed through the time as is showed in the following list:
1. Values of feudal period: Piety, honor, valor, military chivalry. 2. Values of the capitalist era: Individualism, profit, competition, positioning of market and emergent bourgeois class’ consolidation of its power. 3. Values of high-tech and global capitalism: Globalization, digital technologies, unrestrained market society (Kellner and Durham, 2006).
Hegemony Kellner and Durham (2006) explains that ideologies reproduce relations of domination in the arenas of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and further domains of everyday life. They also says that ideologies appear natural, they seem to be common sense, they are usually invisible and elude criticism.
Popular culture Storey (1996) explains that popular culture “can be empowering to subordinate and resistant to dominant understandings of the world. But this is not to say that popular culture is always empowering and resistant.
Mass culture The ideology establishes the view that popular culture is the product of capitalist commodity production and is therefore subject to the laws of the capitalist market economy; the result of which is the endless circulation of degraded commodities, whose only real significance is that they make a profit for their producers. The ideology of mass culture works by interpellating individuals into specific subject positions: as fans, as ironical viewers, and those who strongly dislike the “cultural product” (Storey, 1996).
Subcultures Storey (1996) says that it is through rituals of consumption that subcultures form meaningful identities: “The selective appropriation and group use of what the market makes available work together to define, express, reflect and resonate group distinction and difference.” (Storey, 1996) Hall and Jefferson also say that this involves members of a group in the appropriation of particular objects which are or can be made, “homologous” with their focal concers, activities, group structure and collective self-image. Objects in which they see their central values held and reflected (Storey, 1996)
VII. Method
Cultural studies is grounded in Marxism. Consequently, cultural studies was influenced by Marxism in two main ways (Storey, 1996):
First, cultural studies follows the idea that to understand the meanings of a cultural text or practice, we need to analyze it in its social and historical conditions of production and consumption. However, culture is not a reflection of the structure and history. History and culture are not separate entities. History and text are inscribed in each other and are part of the same process. Culture is important because it helps constitute the structure and shape the history (Storey, 1996).
Cultural texts do not only reflect the history, they make history and are part of its processes and practices (Storey, 1996). According to Kellner and Durham (2006), there are no innocent texts; all the artifacts of the established culture and society have meaning, values, and biases. There is no pure entertainment that does not contain representations of class, gender, race, sexuality. The meanings in cultural texts produce political effects, reproducing or opposing governing social institutions and relations of domination and subordination.
Second, capitalist industrial societies have unequally divisions of ethnic, gender, generational and class lines. Cultural studies argues that culture is the principal arena where this inequalities are established and contested. It is in this arena where there is a continual struggle over meaning and where subordinate groups try to resist the imposition of meanings that are favorable to dominant groups. This is which makes culture ideological (Storey, 1996).
Based on Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, Hall elaborated his “articulation” theory which explains the processes of ideological struggle. He says that meaning is an act of “articulation” and a social production because meaning is always expressed in a specific context, a specific historical moment and within a specific discourse(s). This expression of meaning is always connected to and conditioned by context. Considering this, different meanings can be assigned to the same text. Consequently, meaning is always a potential site of conflict. For that reason, in cultural studies, culture is the major site of ideological struggle. It is the terrain of “incorporation” and “resistance”. It is one of the arenas where hegemony is to be won or lost (Storey, 1996).
Encoding and Decoding Storey (1996) explains that the publication of Stuart Hall’s “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” was probably the moment when cultural studies first emerges from left-Leavisism, ‘pesimistic’ versions of Marxism, American mass communication models and culturalism and structuralism. Hall’s model explains that circulation of “meaning” in televisual discourse passes through three distinctive moments. First, media professionals put into meaningful discourse their particular account of a “raw” social event. Second, the media professionals determine how the “raw” social event will be encoded in discourse. The third moment is the moment of audience decoding (translation of the event). If no meaning is taken, there can be no consumption.
In the third moment the spectator could be in three hypothetical positions from which decodings of a televisual discourse may be constructed. One is the dominant code, the second is the negotiated code, and the third one is the oppositional code (Storey, 1996)
VIII. Limitations.
The events in Eastern Europe and the attacks of postmodern critics have undermined the Marxist paradigm. As a result, many cultural studies researchers have begun to rethink its political project. Angela McRobbie for example says that the debates in the field about ideology and hegemony have been replaced by debates about postmodernism and postmodernity. She explains that the cultural studies’ reaction has been to return to economic reductive forms of analysis and to increase an uncritical celebration of consumerism, in which consumption is understood too exclusively in terms of pleasure and meaning-making. McRobbie calls for an extension of Gramscian cultural analysis and for a return to ethnographic cultural analysis with takes as it object of study “the lived experience which breathes life into the inanimate objects of popular culture” (Storey, 1996).
This is also supported by Davies (1995), who says that the ultimate problem was that cultural studies would move from being part of a social movement to being an appendix of academe, “so institutionalized that it became simply a continuation of the classics and humanities traditions which had acted as the basis of a critique against the disciplinariness of the universities.” Dorothys Smith’s quote of Annan explains this in a very clear way:
“Britain had now acquired a new radical intelligentsia. It overflowed from higher education into broadcasting, journalism, publishing, architecture, design and a multitude of white-collar jobs of which computing was the largest. After the war Marxists such as John Saville, Raphael Samuel, and later the contributors to the New Left Review, had been marginal men. Now in the seventies they appeared as epic figures on campus.”
Elizabeth Long (1997) says that the “everyday” experience of people can bring cultural processes into focus, and resembles cultural studies ideal of examining culture as practice, but it can also remove from notice those cultural forms and processes that are less public, less institutionalized, or less popular than religion, radio, or movies. She says that the turn to “everyday life” can lead to analyses of social practices that downplay their cultural dimension.
Storey (1996) offers a reconciling proposition when he talks about popular culture. He says that making popular culture can be “empowering to subordinate and resistant to dominant understandings of the world, he explicates that it should be denied that popular culture is little more than a degraded culture, successfully imposed from above, to make a profit and secure ideological control. According to Storey (1996), it is important to:
“Distinguish between the power of the culture industries and the power of their influence. Too often the two are conflated, but they are not necessarily the same.”
IX. References
Davies, I. (1995). Cultural studies and beyond. New York, NY: Routledge.
Hall, S. (1980). Cultural studies: Two paradigms. Media, Culture and Society, 2, 57-72.
Johnson, R. (1986). What is cultural studies anyway? Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Kellner, D. (1995). Media culture: Cultural studies, identity and politics between the modern and the postmodern. New York, NY: Routledge.
Kellner, D. M. & Durham, M.G. (2006). Adventures in Media and Cultural Studies: Introducing the KeyWorks. In M. G. Durham & D. M. Kellner (Eds.), Media and cultural studies (pp. ix-xxxviii). USA: Blackwell Publishing.
Long, E. (1997). Introduction: Engaging Sociology and Cultural Studies: Disciplinary and Social Change. In E. Long (Ed.), From sociology to cultural studies: New perspectives (pp. 1-32). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc.
Storey, D. (1996). Cultural studies and the study of popular culture. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press.
Cultural studies: Definitions, culture and context, formations of cultural studies. Science Encyclopedia, The History of Ideas II. <a href="http://science.jrank.org/pages/7610/Cultural-Studies.html">Cultural Studies - Definitions, Culture And Context, Formations Of Cultural Studies, The Project Of Cultural Studies, Cultural Studies, Theory, And Power</a>.
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