Abstract of Stuart Hall article, “Cultural Studies: two paradigms (1980).
By Matt Dewey
Description
As the title of article suggests, Hall attempts to describe two types of approaches to the study of culture. Hall presents the differences between the two paradigms as based on conceptions of the process and purpose of culture, the importance or place of experience, and the positioning or hierarchy of levels of abstraction such as the existence of dialectical relationships between conditions and consciousness and the function of ideology. The two tendencies of cultural study are characterized specifically by Hall through their overarching basis of a, ‘theory of culture’; one being a culturalist approach, the other a structuralist approach.
Hall describes the culturalist guiding definition of ‘culture’ as, “the sum of the available descriptions through which societies make sense of and reflect their common experiences” (33). This he suggests has ‘democratized’ culture from an elite status, one comprised of the ‘best’ or ‘privileged’ in access, to a framework that involves the common or ordinary; that all things (art, commodity, ideas, process, etc.) create by community (everyone regardless of status) possess the ability to define and redefine (represent) meaning that permeates throughout community process. This approach opens up all cultural phenomena to criticism and dissolves the traditional modernist distinction of high/low culture.
The second paradigm Hall discusses, as if regarding it as a dialectical in itself to culturalism, is the structuralist approach. The study of culture, to the structuralist, is not in the sum of cultural phenomena but in the relationships between and the organization underlying those elements or phenomena and how those patterns are lived an experienced as a whole (34). The term ‘structural’ itself gives the idea of culture a more rigid, determinative, and subjectlessness that the culturalist approach tends to resist.
Because Hall divides the study into two particular approaches his discussion continues in treating issues and phenomena of cultural studies through the perspectives and contradictions of each approach contending that the study of culture benefits from the interactions and conceptual conflicts of the two. Hall ends his discussion with presenting ‘alternative rallying points’ for ‘inadequacies’ of the paradigms that take into account develops of in both study and culture in general. These points further the processes of culture through the repositioning of the important of a ‘subject’ (the individual) in culture, a repositioning of the critic of the political economy of culture (Marx’s base/superstructure), and the idea of control in a decentralized, heterogeneity.
Comments and Questions
“Since our way of seeing things is literally our way of living, the process of communication is in fact the process of community: the sharing of common meanings, and thence common activities and purposes…”
-Raymond Williams as quoted by Stuart Hall (35)
“How we communicate determines how we relate, just as how we relate determines how we communicate”
– Hugh Duncan, (1967)
Halls two paradigms and the conceptual struggle between them are not so new in the sense that the particular descriptions of both amount to similar types of tensions related to pedagogy and, in my particular case, the study of communication in general. Given that I read Hall’s article through the perspective of communication study, a perspective that is itself a member of a dialectical in the study, I would like to start my discussion by relating the approach in hopes that it clarifies my attempt at making sense of not only Hall, but the concept of cultural studies in general.
The history of communication studies shares a residency in the classrooms of English departments and in the study rhetoric. World events (such as WWII) are as much responsible for the separation of communication study and English departments as the tendency for new forming sciences to push for legitimization through specialization, scientification, and the search for a unified theory.
As communication studies concrete escape from English departments after WWII, this process of rupture (what Kuhn suggests in 1970 as a process of revolution in sciences) continued internally and continues today, in communication departments across the world; a) communication study as one of recreating effective speech patterns (science and instrumentalization), and the study of communication for emancipation and understanding (arts and humanities). To put it another way, the split resides in ones orientation to skills training and theories of control and power. This tension materializes in studies of, on one side, speech giving, interpersonal and small group comm., audience analysis; and on the other, studies in perspective, ideology, critical mass comm. study, and theories of power in modern and postmodern contexts. One could also generalize this difference in the larger struggle between academics that apply directly to the business of business and those that are not so applicable or in capital ‘demand’.
Halls quote by Williams above would be a mantra of what I would consider the ideal reference for communication studies, and communication studies ideal and particularly pragmatic approach to cultural studies. Cultural studies, to avoid the formalization both Johnson and Hall resist, is more commonly known as critical communication studies and has its own similar dialectics or oppositions. Some communication theorist believe if one is not studying culture from a specific leftist perspective then they are simply reinforcing status quo formulations of relationships and power. Others believe it is important to study culture from an ‘as is’ context in order to keep research relevant and useful. But in all approaches, as in Halls two paradigms, the same significant questions should be asked and the same final analyses kept in view.
So why the time spent on the comparison? Its my impression that one approach cannot accurately identify or account for the phenomenon of culture, nor a recipe of both. I believe that both the Johnson and Hall articles develop, more than a difference in approaches, but a specific set of ends and conflicts for cultural studies. Drawing from teh different appraoches to communication studies, Hall implicitly, through the use of differences, asks us to decide in our attempts to study culture whether we are to study culture in an effort to explain it, exactly how it is, so others can regal a our intuitiveness, so the processes and research methods can be galvanized and repeated again and again, or are we to study culture for where it breaks down, causes interference and conflict in order to better guide the future? (Though I have taken liberties in my interpretation, I believe Hall tries to suggest a particular path for how to study culture without calling it "correct").
Experience
The most potent and communicatively familiar topic in Halls discussion is centered around the conception of the ontological ability or level of trust in the concept of experience. Hall suggests that though both perspectives acknowledge the importance of experience, where its significance in cultural meaning differs in where one place the power of the institution; where culturalists view experience as an interplay between ‘consciousness and conditions’; to structuralists, experience is merely a reflection of those conditions (40).
On this point I’m not sure I could position myself in either approach. Though I romantically distrust the idea that my experience is ‘structured’, I as well cannot think of a concept of experience (or consciousness) that is removed enough from ‘conditions’ to form a distinct dialectic of interaction as proposed by culturalist. From the perspective of communication studies this tension between structuralists and culturalist embodies the tension between modernist and postmodernist approaches to the age old individual/ community dualism or, to safely wrap up the discussion, the contemporary condition itself through which we must study a communication of emancipation.
There is a saying in comm. studies that suggests ‘one cannot separate the known from the knower’ (I think it was Thomas Kuhn again). This essential states a distrust of objectivity as well as recovers and appreciates the subjective, the human subject in knowledge. My impression of the article is that Hall, in presenting his two paradigms as centering around dialectics of consciousness/conditions, base/superstructure, culture/ideology, is as well suggesting that our approach to the study of culture be equally, if not sharply dialectical as well.
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Abstract of Stuart Hall's "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms"
by Tom Peele
Description of Article
The two paradigms within Cultural Studies that form the basis of Hall's title are culturalism and structuralism. Culturalism claims that experience is the base of culture; structuralism claims that experience is an effect of culture, that culture is an unconscious manifestation, and that consciousness (self-determination) is merely another effect of unconsciousness.
Hall begins this article with a description of the foundational texts of Cultural Studies: Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy, and Williams' Culture and Society and The Long Revolution (31, 31-32). His purpose, here, is to demonstrate that though these scholars' ideas changed over time, the enduring and perhaps defining feature of their work is their insistence on experience as the basis of culture. Hall calls this a culturalist position.
He posits the culturalist position, with its reliance on experience, against a structuralist position, which claims that experience is itself merely an effect of culture; the concept of "genuine experience" is in fact the result of culture itself. Hall claims that Cultural Studies takes place in between these two broad and opposing concepts. The main strength of culturalism is that it insist on human agency and the relevance of individuality. The main strength of structuralism is that it insists that human agency must always be considered within the context of pre-existing conditions.
By happy coincidence, Hall maps two of the main directions we'll take in this course -- the study of Barthes and semiotics, and the study of Foucault and agency within pre-existing conditions.
Key Terms
base and superstructure
culturalist (below)
structuralist (below)
ideology (41)
over-determination (41, 44)
ideological state apparatus (42)
Comments and Questions
Hall tells us that in the history of ideas, what we find is an "untidy bu characteristic unevenness of development. What is important are the significant breaks - where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes" (31). Clearly, here is the premise of this article.
Hall outlines the beginnings of what we currently call "cultural studies," and describes how the field itself emerges "from one such moment" in the form of three foundational texts: Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy, and Williams' Culture and Society and The Long Revolution (31, 31-32).
These texts were made possible by and were in response to British culture in the 1960's and 70's, was "roughly coterminous with what has been called the 'agenda' of the New Left. . . . [and] placed the 'politics of intellectual work' squarely at the centre of Cultural Studies from the beginning" (32, 33).
Like Johnson, Hall doesn't define "culture" or "cultural studies," but he does briefly "resume the characteristic stresses and emphases through which the concept has arrived at its present state of (in)-determinacy" (33).
Again following Williams in Revolution, Hall describes "two different ways of conceptualizing culture"; culture is the sum of the "available descriptions through which societies make sense of and reflect their common experiences" (33). Culture is ordinary, then; this concept constitutes a radical departure from earlier concepts of culture, even though is deals with the question of ideas. It thinks of ideas as all the ways of making meaning, and not just of high literary texts.
The second concept of culture is made up of social practices. This concept seems rather more abstract than ideas, and once I compare it with the concept of culture, it makes both seem abstract almost to the point of incomprehension. The "theory of culture," he writes, "is defined as 'the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life'. Culture is not a practice. . . . It is threaded through all social practices and is the sum of their inter-relationships" (34). One was to study, then, all aspects of culture, and not separate our specific aspects.
My question here, then, is how do we separate a culture's ideas from its social practices? Isn't meaning making itself a social practice? Is that my view simply because of my profession?
For the next several pages, Hall describes the changes in the ways Williams and Thompson defined culture, but concludes that while these changes (and the differences in their ways of thinking) are significant, the key feature of their definitions of culture is that "in their tendency to reduce practices to praxis and to find common and homologous 'forms' underlying the most apparently differentiated areas, their movement is 'essentializing'. They have a particular way of understanding totailty. . . . They understand it 'expressively'" (39). This, then, is what Hall describes as the Culturalist tradition in cultural studies.
Hall then claims that the "'culturalist' strand in Cultural Studies was interrupted by the arrival on the intellectual scene of the 'structuralisms'" (39). Hall describes the difference between the culturalist and structuralist strands in cultural studies:
These are the "two paradigms" to which Hall refers in his title. According the Hall, "it was Lévi-Strauss, and the early semiotics, which made the first break" (39).
On 39, Hall, following Lévi-Strauss, makes a distinction between "praxis" and "practices." I'm curious about this distinction, since the two seem more or less interchangeable to me. The difference, though, doesn't seem particularly important to Hall's argument.
Hall describes some of Lévi-Strauss's contributions to cultural studies (39-41) but summarizes the important distinction between culturalism and structuralism in the following paragraph:
Hall's take, though, is that neither concept is "adequate to the task of constructing the study of culture as a conceptually clarified and theoretically informed domain of study" (42).
The first strength of structuralism that Hall describes is that it stresses determinate conditions. Any cultural analysis must take economic and political conditions into account. Structuralism also offers us the opportunity for abstract thinking, for "movement between different levels of abstraction," as a way of making sense of culture (43). Would culturalism insist on the description of experience only? Would description of experience constitute cultural study? Hall claims that Cultural Studies has driven itself, or been driven into, a "Poverty of Theory" position (43).
Hall describes two more strengths of structuralism (44-45) then moves to a discussion of the strengths of culturalism (45). The first contribution of culturalism that Hall describes is that it insists that consciousness -- deliberate movement within particular constraints -- "properly restores the dialectic between the unconsciousness of cultural categories and the moment of of conscious organization: even if, in its characteristic movement, it has tended to match structuralism's over-emphasis on 'conditions' with an altogether too-inclusive emphasis on 'consciousness'" (45). This seems once again to echo Johnson; a cultural study moves between given conditions and human desire (consciousness).
Hall concludes by describing three other paradigms in cultural studies which he felt were not central but significant to the project of cultural studies--the reconstitution of the subject in structuralist models of cultural studies, a return to classical Marxism's economic model, and Foucault's suspension of "the nearly-insoluble problems of determination" which "has made possible a welcome return to the concrete analysis of particular ideological and discursive formation, and the sites of their elaboration" (47). I disagree, however, with the critique of Foucault in which he claims that the problem with Foucault is that he "so resolutely suspends judgment, and adopts so thoroughgoing a scepticism about any determinacy or relationship between practices, other than largely contingent, that we are entitled to see him . . . as deeply committed to the necessary non-correspondence of all practices to one another" (47). Following David Halperin in St. Foucault, I'll argue that Foucault does offer a very specific analysis of the relationship between practices.
by Tom Peele
Description of Article
The two paradigms within Cultural Studies that form the basis of Hall's title are culturalism and structuralism. Culturalism claims that experience is the base of culture; structuralism claims that experience is an effect of culture, that culture is an unconscious manifestation, and that consciousness (self-determination) is merely another effect of unconsciousness.
Hall begins this article with a description of the foundational texts of Cultural Studies: Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy, and Williams' Culture and Society and The Long Revolution (31, 31-32). His purpose, here, is to demonstrate that though these scholars' ideas changed over time, the enduring and perhaps defining feature of their work is their insistence on experience as the basis of culture. Hall calls this a culturalist position.
He posits the culturalist position, with its reliance on experience, against a structuralist position, which claims that experience is itself merely an effect of culture; the concept of "genuine experience" is in fact the result of culture itself. Hall claims that Cultural Studies takes place in between these two broad and opposing concepts. The main strength of culturalism is that it insist on human agency and the relevance of individuality. The main strength of structuralism is that it insists that human agency must always be considered within the context of pre-existing conditions.
By happy coincidence, Hall maps two of the main directions we'll take in this course -- the study of Barthes and semiotics, and the study of Foucault and agency within pre-existing conditions.
Key Terms
base and superstructure
culturalist (below)
structuralist (below)
ideology (41)
over-determination (41, 44)
ideological state apparatus (42)
Comments and Questions
Hall tells us that in the history of ideas, what we find is an "untidy bu characteristic unevenness of development. What is important are the significant breaks - where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes" (31). Clearly, here is the premise of this article.
Hall outlines the beginnings of what we currently call "cultural studies," and describes how the field itself emerges "from one such moment" in the form of three foundational texts: Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy, and Williams' Culture and Society and The Long Revolution (31, 31-32).
These texts were made possible by and were in response to British culture in the 1960's and 70's, was "roughly coterminous with what has been called the 'agenda' of the New Left. . . . [and] placed the 'politics of intellectual work' squarely at the centre of Cultural Studies from the beginning" (32, 33).
Like Johnson, Hall doesn't define "culture" or "cultural studies," but he does briefly "resume the characteristic stresses and emphases through which the concept has arrived at its present state of (in)-determinacy" (33).
Again following Williams in Revolution, Hall describes "two different ways of conceptualizing culture"; culture is the sum of the "available descriptions through which societies make sense of and reflect their common experiences" (33). Culture is ordinary, then; this concept constitutes a radical departure from earlier concepts of culture, even though is deals with the question of ideas. It thinks of ideas as all the ways of making meaning, and not just of high literary texts.
The second concept of culture is made up of social practices. This concept seems rather more abstract than ideas, and once I compare it with the concept of culture, it makes both seem abstract almost to the point of incomprehension. The "theory of culture," he writes, "is defined as 'the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life'. Culture is not a practice. . . . It is threaded through all social practices and is the sum of their inter-relationships" (34). One was to study, then, all aspects of culture, and not separate our specific aspects.
My question here, then, is how do we separate a culture's ideas from its social practices? Isn't meaning making itself a social practice? Is that my view simply because of my profession?
For the next several pages, Hall describes the changes in the ways Williams and Thompson defined culture, but concludes that while these changes (and the differences in their ways of thinking) are significant, the key feature of their definitions of culture is that "in their tendency to reduce practices to praxis and to find common and homologous 'forms' underlying the most apparently differentiated areas, their movement is 'essentializing'. They have a particular way of understanding totailty. . . . They understand it 'expressively'" (39). This, then, is what Hall describes as the Culturalist tradition in cultural studies.
Hall then claims that the "'culturalist' strand in Cultural Studies was interrupted by the arrival on the intellectual scene of the 'structuralisms'" (39). Hall describes the difference between the culturalist and structuralist strands in cultural studies:
whereas the 'culturalist' paradigm can be defined without requiring a conceptual reference to the term 'ideology' . . . the 'structuralist' interventions have been largely articulated around the concept of 'ideology': . . . in keeping with its more impeccably Marxist lineage, 'culture' does not figure so prominently. (39)
These are the "two paradigms" to which Hall refers in his title. According the Hall, "it was Lévi-Strauss, and the early semiotics, which made the first break" (39).
On 39, Hall, following Lévi-Strauss, makes a distinction between "praxis" and "practices." I'm curious about this distinction, since the two seem more or less interchangeable to me. The difference, though, doesn't seem particularly important to Hall's argument.
Hall describes some of Lévi-Strauss's contributions to cultural studies (39-41) but summarizes the important distinction between culturalism and structuralism in the following paragraph:
despite their apparent overlaps, culturalism and structuralism were starkly counterposed. We can identify this counterposition at one of its sharpest points, precisely around the concept of 'experience,' and the rôle the term played in each perspective. Whereas, in 'culturalism,' experience was the ground - the terrain of 'the lived' -- where consciousness and conditions intersected, structuralism insisted that 'experience' could not, by definition, be the ground of anything, since one could only 'live' and experience one's conditions in and through the categories, classifications and frameworks of the culture. These categories, however, did not arise from or in experience: rather, experience was their 'effect.'(41)
Here, then, seems to be the key definition of the two paradigms -- culturalism relies on the authenticity of experience, while structuralism claims that all experience is determined in advance by the culture in which one finds oneself. This seems to me to be more or less parallel to Johnson's discussion of consciousness and subjectivity, with consciousness being the culturalist position and subjectivity being the structuralist position. Hall, quoting Lévi-Strauss, uses the term consciousness: Ideology is indeed a system of 'representations', but in the majority of cases these representations have nothing to do with 'consciousness' . . . " it is above all as structures that they impose on the vast majority of men, not via their 'consciousness' . . . it is within this ideological unconsciousness that men succeed in altering the 'lived' relations between them and the world and acquiring the new form of specific unconsciousness called 'consciousness'. (41-42)
Thus, consciousness itself is an effect of unconsciousness -- it is merely another form of unconsciousness.Hall's take, though, is that neither concept is "adequate to the task of constructing the study of culture as a conceptually clarified and theoretically informed domain of study" (42).
The first strength of structuralism that Hall describes is that it stresses determinate conditions. Any cultural analysis must take economic and political conditions into account. Structuralism also offers us the opportunity for abstract thinking, for "movement between different levels of abstraction," as a way of making sense of culture (43). Would culturalism insist on the description of experience only? Would description of experience constitute cultural study? Hall claims that Cultural Studies has driven itself, or been driven into, a "Poverty of Theory" position (43).
Hall describes two more strengths of structuralism (44-45) then moves to a discussion of the strengths of culturalism (45). The first contribution of culturalism that Hall describes is that it insists that consciousness -- deliberate movement within particular constraints -- "properly restores the dialectic between the unconsciousness of cultural categories and the moment of of conscious organization: even if, in its characteristic movement, it has tended to match structuralism's over-emphasis on 'conditions' with an altogether too-inclusive emphasis on 'consciousness'" (45). This seems once again to echo Johnson; a cultural study moves between given conditions and human desire (consciousness).
Hall concludes by describing three other paradigms in cultural studies which he felt were not central but significant to the project of cultural studies--the reconstitution of the subject in structuralist models of cultural studies, a return to classical Marxism's economic model, and Foucault's suspension of "the nearly-insoluble problems of determination" which "has made possible a welcome return to the concrete analysis of particular ideological and discursive formation, and the sites of their elaboration" (47). I disagree, however, with the critique of Foucault in which he claims that the problem with Foucault is that he "so resolutely suspends judgment, and adopts so thoroughgoing a scepticism about any determinacy or relationship between practices, other than largely contingent, that we are entitled to see him . . . as deeply committed to the necessary non-correspondence of all practices to one another" (47). Following David Halperin in St. Foucault, I'll argue that Foucault does offer a very specific analysis of the relationship between practices.
Monday, September 3, 2007
What is Cultural Studies, Anyway? Richard Johnson.
What is an Abstract, Anyway?
Text in Red represents elements of the abstract that I expect to see. The private purpose of the abstract is to help you understand the reading; the public purposes are to demonstrate how well you've done the reading and to provide a platform from which a discussion can begin/continue. You should anticipate that I and other members of the class will be responding to and questioning your abstract.
This abstract is probably considerably longer than most will be, but do not limit yourself. Johnson's article is extremely dense and complex, and I'm intrigued by a lot of his ideas. You might also notice that there are spelling and or grammatical errors. I've read through the piece a couple of times and I've run the spell-check, but I'd need another day or two to really polish it.
Article Title
Abstract of Richard Johnson's "What Is Cultural Studies, Anyway?" 1983
Author Name
by Tom Peele
Description of Article
Here, briefly summarize the main points and the trajectory of the article. When you answer this question, imagine that you are taking a comprehensive examination in which you are asked to describe the main point of this and fifty other articles as briefly and accurately as you can within a limited time frame. What would you say?
Notice here that you don't need to talk about whether you liked the article or not and you don't necessarily need to agree with or disagree with the author's ideas. There might be times when you want to reveal whether or not you are in accord with the author, but it's not required. You'll have more of an opportunity for that in the next section. Your goal here is to present the author's ideas as clearly as you can.
Johnson begins his article with a description of the goals of cultural studies (cs). The most inclusive of his insights is that "culture involves power and helps to produce asymmetries in the abilities of individuals and social groups to define and realise their needs" (76). In other words, cs aims to study (in various ways) how culture creates asymmetries of power. He moves on to claim that, among other definitions cs should be defined (to the extent that it should be defined at all) by "its characteristic objects of study" (78).
Before Johnson describes cs's "characteristic objects of study," he presents two key terms--consciousness (the characteristically human ability to desire and dream) and subjectivity (that we are to some extent produced by the culture in which we live)--and claims that for him "cultural studies is about the historical forms of consciousness or subjectivity" (80). He presents these terms because it is in the ambiguous space between--the play between the two--in which the study of culture takes place.
Johnson then presents a map of the "circuits of culture" which include the initial production of an object, the "text" of the object itself and the texts that surround that object, the readings that these texts encounter, and, closely related to the last point, the lived cultures of which those texts are a part. These circuits of culture are in every case influenced by the social conditions in which they are produced, including their political and economic contexts. It is these cultural forms, then--objects or indeed entire cultures as they travel through these circuits--that constitute cs's "characteristic objects of study." Those objects of study, then, or not necessarily things like movies or t.v. shows or student life, but rather how those things move through a circuit.
The map of the circuit of culture also offers Johnson a way to talk about the characteristic approaches to cultural studies--production studies, textual studies, and lived cultures--and the advantages and drawbacks to each method. He concludes by arguing that, to the extent possible, a cultural study should take advantage of all three approaches.
Comments and Questions
In this part of your abstract, you'll present the article as it moves through its main argument(s). You'll also comment on the claims and various constituent arguments that the author is making; this is where you agree, disagree, extend the argument, make further connections, and respond to the text. It's fine here to observe that an argument is poorly made, but then you'll have to demonstrate your reasons. It's also fine to tell us that an article is poorly written, but only insofar as the writing interferes with your understanding of the text. In general, take the tone that you would like someone else to take if they were analyzing your writing. Imagine that the author will read what you write.
In this section, you do not have to cover in detail every aspect of the article. As you'll see, I concentrated heavily on the beginning section of the article as this section seems the most difficult. I have also speculated about what he might be trying to say, and I have offered some examples. The part of the article in which Johnson describes the approaches and their drawbacks seems very clear to me; I didn't need to write about that section of the article in order to understand it.
Johnson breaks this articles into three parts. In the first, he considers "some of the arguments for and against the academic codification of cultural studies," and in the second, "he looks at some strategies of definition short of codification" (75). He concludes by offering some of his own "preferred definitions and arguments."
Codifying cultural studies by formalizing its study is itself against the project of cultural studies, which Johnson claims is a kind of process, a kind of alchemy for producing useful knowledge" (75).
On 76, Johnson notes "where cultural studies has been Marx-influenced." He makes three observations:
The concept of cultural processes seems key here; what are cultural processes? How do we determine where they end, where they begin? Is it helpful to think about beginnings and endings of processes like these? For example, until the 1950s female beauty was exemplified by women like Marilyn Monroe. In the 60s, with the explosion of second wave feminism, the standard for female beauty could only be attained by painful self-punishment and was exemplified by actors like Catherine Deneuve and the model Twiggy.
Men's bodies, over the same time period, seem more or less unchanged:
This is not to say that there aren't exceptions to this rule (or even that it's a rule) but rather just to emphasize that there are cultural processes at work and that when I look at them closely I'm not sure where they begin. Where do our cultural ideas/ideals originate? If Hollywood or the press, where do they get them? How are they manipulated and changed? The study of this process or movement is a fascinating, difficult aspect of cultural studies.
Johnson's second point is that
This is why cultural studies is important, why it can have an impact on the way we live. Culture involves power; representations of people, distribution of labor, accepted ways of thinking, have a material impact on our lives; cultural studies function as a kind of intervention, or social criticism, that can interrupt the flow of the ordinary. How can we change the discourse of specific subjects? How do we interrupt received knowledges?
Johnson's final point is that
Johnson then points out the successful, productive critiques of cultural studies "from the women's movement and the struggles against racism," and these critiques seem to me to exemplify the productive work of cultural studies (76-77).
What happens to this critique, Johnson asks, if we codify the project of cultural studies?
Strategies of Definition
Johnson writes that the aspect of a definition of cultural studies that most interests him is "its characteristic objects of study," but first he discusses other strategies of definition. For Johnson, the key terms of cultural studies are "consciousness and subjectivity, with the key problems now lying somewhere in the relation between the two" (80).
Consciousness, as Johnson describes is, is evidenced by the fact that "human beings are characterised by an ideal or imaginary life, where will is cultivated, dreams dreamt, and categories developed" (80). And how is this important to cultural studies?
Subjectivity: "the possibility, for example, the same elements or impulses are subjectively active--they move us--without being consciously known. . . . subjectivities are produced, not given, and are therefore the objects of inquiry, not the premises or starting-point" (81).
Johnson's point in this section seems to be that for him cultural studies takes place among and between these two concepts: consciousness and subjectivity. The interplay here is between consciousness: will, desire, volition; and subjectivity: the ways in which we move into and inhabit particular identities or cultural forms (student, dutiful son, father). This is a key point, as it insists that we are not wholly determined by the cultural conditions in which we find ourselves, but that we are also self-determining.
In cultural studies, then, we study the various forms by which we identify ourselves, "to abstract, describe and reconstitute in concrete studies forms through which human beings 'live' become conscious, sustain themselves subjectively" (81).
Johnson asks "Where are all the intermediate categories that would allow us to start to specify the subjective social forms and the different moments of their existence?" (82). He seems to be arguing, here, that for cultural studies to be effective it must be more nuanced than it had been; what are the subjective social forms as they move from one state to the next? What are the impulses that move them? While these concepts are fascinating to me, they sometimes seem so abstract as to be impossible to pin down. How, specifically, can this be done? Does Johnson shy away from telling me because CS should not be codified? We are looking, here, "for principles of movement" and to "see how tendencies are modified by the other social determinations, including those at work through material needs" (82).
I read this (perhaps incorrectly) as a study of representations of identity (however that identity is represented and apprehended: observation, interview, survey, and so on. As above, I broadly defined that change of representations of men and women over a 20 year span. Work I have done in the past addresses the representations of gay men and lesbians on television. At any given moment in time, what is the range of representations on a wide variety of programs, such as Will and Grace, Friends, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Queer as Folk (British and American versions) and Six Feet Under. Where, in the history of representation of gay men and lesbians, do these forms fit? How do they break away from or reproduce earlier forms? How is non-normative sexual identity represented? Is it implied, or are there physical manifestations? What are the social and cultural conditions that allow these forms to be represented? How might these forms be read by various viewers, and what are the conditions for decoding these forms? Does reading itself produce the form?
Circuits of Capital - Circuits of Culture; Publication and Abstraction
Johnson describes the circuit and provides and example of the Mini. An interesting example given the resurgence of the Mini. In the next section, Johnson explains the abstract/universal and the concrete/particular categories; I understand these as the various influences on any cultural form, and that one cs approach (perhaps a part of any cultural study?) is to take these influences into account. The chart on page 84 functions in two ways. First, it provides a map of how artifacts of culture (and culture itself) are produced, from production to the final form. The second way in which this chart functions is to map various approaches to the study of culture: the (1) production (2) texts of various kinds (pictures, movies, books, social settings) (3) reader reception, and (4) lived cultures. Johnson goes on in the text to describe the various advantages and disadvantages to each of these approaches. It strikes me that one way of conceiving of a a cultural study is that it works in reverse of this: one begins with the form, then moves back into the conditions of production and the cultural influence that made the form possible. It also seems to me that these approaches are not necessarily discrete. A study that takes these influences and form as its object is in effect a study of the relations of power that Johnson described in the beginning of the article.
In the next couple of sections (Forms of Culture, Forms of Study; Publication and Power) Johnson describes the culturalist (an emphasis on the study of an entire culture, such as ethnography) and the structuralist (an emphasis on the study of particular artifacts of culture) split in cultural studies, and more or less resolves it by de-emphasizing it. No matter what its objects of study, "cultural studies is necessarily and deeply implicated in relations of power" (89).
In From to Perspective of Production and Limits of the Viewpoint of Production, Johnson critiques this approach to cultural studies. I know little about this approach to cs, which is understandable as Johnson writes that it is sociologists, social historians, and political economists who are most likely to take this approach. Johnson's example of the Mini serve as a model for how I think of production: much of it is invisible, hidden, and secret. Further, as I said above, I'm not sure where production begins. Even in his example of the Mini, where were these ideas circulating before they hit the minds of those in charge of the company that produced the Mini--how did smallness and efficiency become a part of the national discourse? The executives at British Leyland weren't working in a vacuum. I've concluded that I can only make tentative stabs at the conditions of production. I might be able to trace certain ideas and themes, but my analyses will always and forever be incomplete. Determining the conditions of production is like determining who started the current fashion trend of women wearing both pants and dress at the same time. Where did it come from?
Johnson's discussion of Text-Based Studies is useful for us since it seems likely that many of us will pursue such studies in this class. Johnson offers that in these studies we articulate the studies of texts (whatever those texts may be) to wider social/cultural narratives.
Johnson's analysis of the term "text" in What is a Text, Anyway? opens the range of possibilities to include virtually any object of study, and also makes that comment that the "text is only a means in cultural study; strictly, perhaps, it is a raw material from which certain forms . . . may be abstracted. But the ultimate object of cultural studies is not, in my view, the text, but the social life of subjective forms at each moment of their circulation, including their textual embodiments" (97). Thus, the purpose for analyzing a text is not to fetishize it but rather to examine it as an artifact in the circulation of meaning.
In the remainder of the article, Johnson describes the drawbacks and advantage to the remaining form of cs analysis: reader based or lived-experience based studies. Johnson thus describes in some detail three kinds of cultural study: "production-based studies, text-based studies, and studies of lived cultures" (107). He concludes by offering that within reason a cultural study should not limit itself to one approach but that it should take advantage of all three.
Text in Red represents elements of the abstract that I expect to see. The private purpose of the abstract is to help you understand the reading; the public purposes are to demonstrate how well you've done the reading and to provide a platform from which a discussion can begin/continue. You should anticipate that I and other members of the class will be responding to and questioning your abstract.
This abstract is probably considerably longer than most will be, but do not limit yourself. Johnson's article is extremely dense and complex, and I'm intrigued by a lot of his ideas. You might also notice that there are spelling and or grammatical errors. I've read through the piece a couple of times and I've run the spell-check, but I'd need another day or two to really polish it.
Article Title
Abstract of Richard Johnson's "What Is Cultural Studies, Anyway?" 1983
Author Name
by Tom Peele
Description of Article
Here, briefly summarize the main points and the trajectory of the article. When you answer this question, imagine that you are taking a comprehensive examination in which you are asked to describe the main point of this and fifty other articles as briefly and accurately as you can within a limited time frame. What would you say?
Notice here that you don't need to talk about whether you liked the article or not and you don't necessarily need to agree with or disagree with the author's ideas. There might be times when you want to reveal whether or not you are in accord with the author, but it's not required. You'll have more of an opportunity for that in the next section. Your goal here is to present the author's ideas as clearly as you can.
Johnson begins his article with a description of the goals of cultural studies (cs). The most inclusive of his insights is that "culture involves power and helps to produce asymmetries in the abilities of individuals and social groups to define and realise their needs" (76). In other words, cs aims to study (in various ways) how culture creates asymmetries of power. He moves on to claim that, among other definitions cs should be defined (to the extent that it should be defined at all) by "its characteristic objects of study" (78).
Before Johnson describes cs's "characteristic objects of study," he presents two key terms--consciousness (the characteristically human ability to desire and dream) and subjectivity (that we are to some extent produced by the culture in which we live)--and claims that for him "cultural studies is about the historical forms of consciousness or subjectivity" (80). He presents these terms because it is in the ambiguous space between--the play between the two--in which the study of culture takes place.
Johnson then presents a map of the "circuits of culture" which include the initial production of an object, the "text" of the object itself and the texts that surround that object, the readings that these texts encounter, and, closely related to the last point, the lived cultures of which those texts are a part. These circuits of culture are in every case influenced by the social conditions in which they are produced, including their political and economic contexts. It is these cultural forms, then--objects or indeed entire cultures as they travel through these circuits--that constitute cs's "characteristic objects of study." Those objects of study, then, or not necessarily things like movies or t.v. shows or student life, but rather how those things move through a circuit.
The map of the circuit of culture also offers Johnson a way to talk about the characteristic approaches to cultural studies--production studies, textual studies, and lived cultures--and the advantages and drawbacks to each method. He concludes by arguing that, to the extent possible, a cultural study should take advantage of all three approaches.
Comments and Questions
In this part of your abstract, you'll present the article as it moves through its main argument(s). You'll also comment on the claims and various constituent arguments that the author is making; this is where you agree, disagree, extend the argument, make further connections, and respond to the text. It's fine here to observe that an argument is poorly made, but then you'll have to demonstrate your reasons. It's also fine to tell us that an article is poorly written, but only insofar as the writing interferes with your understanding of the text. In general, take the tone that you would like someone else to take if they were analyzing your writing. Imagine that the author will read what you write.
In this section, you do not have to cover in detail every aspect of the article. As you'll see, I concentrated heavily on the beginning section of the article as this section seems the most difficult. I have also speculated about what he might be trying to say, and I have offered some examples. The part of the article in which Johnson describes the approaches and their drawbacks seems very clear to me; I didn't need to write about that section of the article in order to understand it.
Johnson breaks this articles into three parts. In the first, he considers "some of the arguments for and against the academic codification of cultural studies," and in the second, "he looks at some strategies of definition short of codification" (75). He concludes by offering some of his own "preferred definitions and arguments."
Codifying cultural studies by formalizing its study is itself against the project of cultural studies, which Johnson claims is a kind of process, a kind of alchemy for producing useful knowledge" (75).
On 76, Johnson notes "where cultural studies has been Marx-influenced." He makes three observations:
- "cultural processes are intimately connected with social relations, especially with class relations and class formations, with sexual divisions, with the racial structuring of social relations and with age oppressions as a form of dependency."
The concept of cultural processes seems key here; what are cultural processes? How do we determine where they end, where they begin? Is it helpful to think about beginnings and endings of processes like these? For example, until the 1950s female beauty was exemplified by women like Marilyn Monroe. In the 60s, with the explosion of second wave feminism, the standard for female beauty could only be attained by painful self-punishment and was exemplified by actors like Catherine Deneuve and the model Twiggy.
 |  |
 |
 Michael Caine |  William Holden |
 Humphrey Bogart |  Richard Burton |
Johnson's second point is that
"culture involves power and helps to produce asymmetries in the abilities of individuals and social groups to define and realize their needs" (76).
This is why cultural studies is important, why it can have an impact on the way we live. Culture involves power; representations of people, distribution of labor, accepted ways of thinking, have a material impact on our lives; cultural studies function as a kind of intervention, or social criticism, that can interrupt the flow of the ordinary. How can we change the discourse of specific subjects? How do we interrupt received knowledges?
Johnson's final point is that
"culture is neither an autonomous nor an externally determined field, but a site of social differences and struggles" (76).
His point here is less clear to me than the other two. For me, points two and three are inextricable. I think of these two as "culture produces asymmetries, but does not exist outside of, independent of, that locations in which those asymmetries are produced." This to me is the key thing about the possibilities of cultural studies--we can change the way representations are deployed by intervening in that deployment, by talking and writing about them, by questioning. That seems to me the project of cultural studies. Johnson then points out the successful, productive critiques of cultural studies "from the women's movement and the struggles against racism," and these critiques seem to me to exemplify the productive work of cultural studies (76-77).
What happens to this critique, Johnson asks, if we codify the project of cultural studies?
Strategies of Definition
Johnson writes that the aspect of a definition of cultural studies that most interests him is "its characteristic objects of study," but first he discusses other strategies of definition. For Johnson, the key terms of cultural studies are "consciousness and subjectivity, with the key problems now lying somewhere in the relation between the two" (80).
Consciousness, as Johnson describes is, is evidenced by the fact that "human beings are characterised by an ideal or imaginary life, where will is cultivated, dreams dreamt, and categories developed" (80). And how is this important to cultural studies?
Subjectivity: "the possibility, for example, the same elements or impulses are subjectively active--they move us--without being consciously known. . . . subjectivities are produced, not given, and are therefore the objects of inquiry, not the premises or starting-point" (81).
Johnson's point in this section seems to be that for him cultural studies takes place among and between these two concepts: consciousness and subjectivity. The interplay here is between consciousness: will, desire, volition; and subjectivity: the ways in which we move into and inhabit particular identities or cultural forms (student, dutiful son, father). This is a key point, as it insists that we are not wholly determined by the cultural conditions in which we find ourselves, but that we are also self-determining.
In cultural studies, then, we study the various forms by which we identify ourselves, "to abstract, describe and reconstitute in concrete studies forms through which human beings 'live' become conscious, sustain themselves subjectively" (81).
Johnson asks "Where are all the intermediate categories that would allow us to start to specify the subjective social forms and the different moments of their existence?" (82). He seems to be arguing, here, that for cultural studies to be effective it must be more nuanced than it had been; what are the subjective social forms as they move from one state to the next? What are the impulses that move them? While these concepts are fascinating to me, they sometimes seem so abstract as to be impossible to pin down. How, specifically, can this be done? Does Johnson shy away from telling me because CS should not be codified? We are looking, here, "for principles of movement" and to "see how tendencies are modified by the other social determinations, including those at work through material needs" (82).
I read this (perhaps incorrectly) as a study of representations of identity (however that identity is represented and apprehended: observation, interview, survey, and so on. As above, I broadly defined that change of representations of men and women over a 20 year span. Work I have done in the past addresses the representations of gay men and lesbians on television. At any given moment in time, what is the range of representations on a wide variety of programs, such as Will and Grace, Friends, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Queer as Folk (British and American versions) and Six Feet Under. Where, in the history of representation of gay men and lesbians, do these forms fit? How do they break away from or reproduce earlier forms? How is non-normative sexual identity represented? Is it implied, or are there physical manifestations? What are the social and cultural conditions that allow these forms to be represented? How might these forms be read by various viewers, and what are the conditions for decoding these forms? Does reading itself produce the form?
Circuits of Capital - Circuits of Culture; Publication and Abstraction
Johnson describes the circuit and provides and example of the Mini. An interesting example given the resurgence of the Mini. In the next section, Johnson explains the abstract/universal and the concrete/particular categories; I understand these as the various influences on any cultural form, and that one cs approach (perhaps a part of any cultural study?) is to take these influences into account. The chart on page 84 functions in two ways. First, it provides a map of how artifacts of culture (and culture itself) are produced, from production to the final form. The second way in which this chart functions is to map various approaches to the study of culture: the (1) production (2) texts of various kinds (pictures, movies, books, social settings) (3) reader reception, and (4) lived cultures. Johnson goes on in the text to describe the various advantages and disadvantages to each of these approaches. It strikes me that one way of conceiving of a a cultural study is that it works in reverse of this: one begins with the form, then moves back into the conditions of production and the cultural influence that made the form possible. It also seems to me that these approaches are not necessarily discrete. A study that takes these influences and form as its object is in effect a study of the relations of power that Johnson described in the beginning of the article.
In the next couple of sections (Forms of Culture, Forms of Study; Publication and Power) Johnson describes the culturalist (an emphasis on the study of an entire culture, such as ethnography) and the structuralist (an emphasis on the study of particular artifacts of culture) split in cultural studies, and more or less resolves it by de-emphasizing it. No matter what its objects of study, "cultural studies is necessarily and deeply implicated in relations of power" (89).
In From to Perspective of Production and Limits of the Viewpoint of Production, Johnson critiques this approach to cultural studies. I know little about this approach to cs, which is understandable as Johnson writes that it is sociologists, social historians, and political economists who are most likely to take this approach. Johnson's example of the Mini serve as a model for how I think of production: much of it is invisible, hidden, and secret. Further, as I said above, I'm not sure where production begins. Even in his example of the Mini, where were these ideas circulating before they hit the minds of those in charge of the company that produced the Mini--how did smallness and efficiency become a part of the national discourse? The executives at British Leyland weren't working in a vacuum. I've concluded that I can only make tentative stabs at the conditions of production. I might be able to trace certain ideas and themes, but my analyses will always and forever be incomplete. Determining the conditions of production is like determining who started the current fashion trend of women wearing both pants and dress at the same time. Where did it come from?
Johnson's discussion of Text-Based Studies is useful for us since it seems likely that many of us will pursue such studies in this class. Johnson offers that in these studies we articulate the studies of texts (whatever those texts may be) to wider social/cultural narratives.
 | In The Importance of Being Formal, Johnson makes an argument for allowing formalism--cultural studies that follow particular forms of analysis, such as semiotics. Johnson writes that "we need to abstract forms in order to describe them carefully, clearly, noting the variations and combinations" (96). The formal analysis that Barthes' version of semiotics provides a means of analysis of cultural artifacts and remains useful (according to Johnson) even in the context of recognizing the meaning shifts and does not remain stable. Over the course of the semester we'll be reading some of Barthes' work and also a piece by D.A. Miller, Place for Us , which relies on semiotics as a method of analyzing culture. |
Johnson's analysis of the term "text" in What is a Text, Anyway? opens the range of possibilities to include virtually any object of study, and also makes that comment that the "text is only a means in cultural study; strictly, perhaps, it is a raw material from which certain forms . . . may be abstracted. But the ultimate object of cultural studies is not, in my view, the text, but the social life of subjective forms at each moment of their circulation, including their textual embodiments" (97). Thus, the purpose for analyzing a text is not to fetishize it but rather to examine it as an artifact in the circulation of meaning.
In the remainder of the article, Johnson describes the drawbacks and advantage to the remaining form of cs analysis: reader based or lived-experience based studies. Johnson thus describes in some detail three kinds of cultural study: "production-based studies, text-based studies, and studies of lived cultures" (107). He concludes by offering that within reason a cultural study should not limit itself to one approach but that it should take advantage of all three.
Sunday, September 2, 2007
Johnson thoughts
Howdy-
This is not a discussion lead: I just like to jot down questions and ideas while they're still fresh, and what better way to get some practice with the blog?
I was engaged by Johnson's discussion of how fragmented--perhaps multidisciplinary is a better term--cultural studies is. His suggestion, that the various disciplinary components of cultural studies should not be compressed into an aggregate, is fascinating to me; nearly all other academic reading I've done suggests otherwise, that a rigid and well-articulated means of inquiry should. . .no, must be employed. In Johnson, it seems less about forming an unbending, formal approach, and more about redefining and repositioning the different components and how they work together. It struck me that this is very similar to the type of inquiry cultural studies, at least to some degree, undertakes: an investigation of how different individuals and groups interact and grapple for power or position in their environments.
The question Johnsons poses at the outset of the piece also caught my eye: "should cultural studies aspire to be an academic disciplne" (75). For me, it raised the question of disciplinary validity. Historically, composition and rhetoric struggled to escape the stigma of a "soft science" until it was legitimized in the eyes of critics through theory-building and research (quantitative and otherwise). The means of inquiry Johnson presents is fascinating to me and clearly valuable, but I wonder if its openness and versatitlity would incite resistance to it being considered a discipline all its own.
That's all for now,
Bill
This is not a discussion lead: I just like to jot down questions and ideas while they're still fresh, and what better way to get some practice with the blog?
I was engaged by Johnson's discussion of how fragmented--perhaps multidisciplinary is a better term--cultural studies is. His suggestion, that the various disciplinary components of cultural studies should not be compressed into an aggregate, is fascinating to me; nearly all other academic reading I've done suggests otherwise, that a rigid and well-articulated means of inquiry should. . .no, must be employed. In Johnson, it seems less about forming an unbending, formal approach, and more about redefining and repositioning the different components and how they work together. It struck me that this is very similar to the type of inquiry cultural studies, at least to some degree, undertakes: an investigation of how different individuals and groups interact and grapple for power or position in their environments.
The question Johnsons poses at the outset of the piece also caught my eye: "should cultural studies aspire to be an academic disciplne" (75). For me, it raised the question of disciplinary validity. Historically, composition and rhetoric struggled to escape the stigma of a "soft science" until it was legitimized in the eyes of critics through theory-building and research (quantitative and otherwise). The means of inquiry Johnson presents is fascinating to me and clearly valuable, but I wonder if its openness and versatitlity would incite resistance to it being considered a discipline all its own.
That's all for now,
Bill
Monday, August 27, 2007
Welcome
Welcome to Cultural Studies. We'll use this space to reflect on the readings and to develop projects of our own.
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