Before I get started I just want to point out that in my 'Storey book' (the new version), the title has the word 'EVERYDAY' spelled as one word and in the page headings that follow in the chapter the, 'EVERYDAY' is split into, 'EVERY' and 'DAY'. As much as my entry could be about this Derridean moment, I'll reserve it for another discussion maybe.
Consumption in Everyday Life : Abstract
by Matt Dewey
The chapter on consumption stems from the the overall conception of a culture as having a material base and is located in a sense of consumables and the processes of consumption as texts. Given that Storey positions all things cultural as texts allows him to then discuss consumption of texts on the level of a tension between objective (political) and subjective (theoretical) interpretations. He states that cultural studies is concerned with consumption for two reasons: a) the plurality of meanings of a text as it is negotiated over time and use (theoretical); b) that these texts are made and remade by consumers in the practices of the ‘everyday’ (political).
In response to what Storey calls the, ‘pessimistic elitism’, of more critical and structuralist cultural studies, culture in his mind should view texts and their consumption as “production in use” (pg. 133), that there is no set place for the actual meaning of a text to be found but that it should be studied as a process and in its processes of continual meaning formation. Storey goes on to discuss the duality in consumption through studies on youth subcultures, fan cultures and shopping.
Subcultural Consumption
Through an analysis of studies of youth subcultures in working class areas of London (Cohen) Storey, states that youth in subcultures are searching for a unity in affluence promised by their parents working class ethic, and an acceptance from the very consumer based society that rejects them. Therefore, in practice, subcultures like, punks and mods, are an example of , “...consumption at its most discriminating. Through a process of ‘bricolage’, subcultures appropriate for their own purposes and meanings the commodities commercially provided... commodities are rearticulated to produce oppositional meanings “ (pg. 135). By a process of essentially reinventing the meaning of texts, subcultures resist the generalization and assimilation that constitutes mass consumption. It is this negotiation, between positions in society(class) and the rewriting of cultural products that embodies the importance of Storey’s two reasons to the study of consumption.
Fan Culture
Storey goes on the analyze fan culture. While subculture youths rewrite texts to embody their conceptual displacement outside of popular culture, fan culture practices embrace particular texts in order to create additional, supplemental, or intensified versions of those texts. Fan cultures surrounding a TV show would engage in consumption, creation, and recreation of different aspects of text, be it characters, themes, genres, in order to develop specialized and hypostatized understandings of the original or related text. The significance of Fan culture is the process of production and appropriation that lead to readings/ consumptions(141) that are entirely separate text. Fans, not unlike subcultural youths, create communities of people who share a common interest in recreating alternative understandings and uses of the ‘popular’ or generally accepted meaning of products.
Shopping
Storey suggests that in looking at shopping from a cultural studies perspective we would find that it is not simply an activity that culminates in the purchasing of a product. Though phenomena such as the department store once served the submissive tastes of the bourgeois, today the act of shopping can serve a number of different social functions such as exercise, interaction with others, employment, and immediate and temporary shelter for the weather stricken or homeless.
To conclude the article description, Storey in general seems to want us to not automatically assume that we are all mindlessly consuming products because of some unseen productive evil. Though we should not forget that there are motive behind advertising and 2-for-one sales, consumption is more nuanced and creative in culture than merely supportive for economic systems. It is a way to share interests and create new ones.
Analysis
“... the problem of capitalism is not production, but consumption”
- Sut Jhally, Advertising and the End of the World (1998)
Although I appreciate Storey’s insistence on the theoretical and political implications in the study of consumption I can’t help but wonder if Storey's two reasons are actual the same, or so incorporated and constitutive of each other that their separation is merely academic. I do, I admit, have problems with seeing how plurality of meanings of texts are separate from the process of creation and recreation of those meanings. It could be as well that my misunderstanding doesn’t even matter or that the two reasons were never placed in dialectical opposition. Storey does though seem to disconnect conceptually another issue of consumption by implying that in order to determine the extent of social control, “requires vigilance and attention to details of the active relations between production and consumption”(133). I thought at first I was making too big a deal out of it but as I read on, it seems particularly important for Storey that the idea of consumption lie evenly outside the process of production (structural) as it does inside in order for his two reasons to be separately considered. I’m not so sure that his analysis frees consumption from structure as much as he aims to.
Though of course the processes of producing a product are mechanically different from the act of buying the product in a store, they are bound intrinsically and inseperably, specifically the United States, to the narrative of capitalism. The relationship between production and consumption is not arbitrary but explicit. The idea that subcultural youth negotiate class issues through recreating the meaning of the products they consume suggest a non- negotiation, or an essential acceptance and adherence, to the logic and promise of consumption. Whether one is ‘discriminately consuming’ or consuming through depression the orientation to material is still complete. This leads me to ask as I was reading the chapter at what point in the discussion of texts and their negotiation is there not a reinforcement or apology for the structure that guides it? Where then, does the power that causes class struggle or forms the hegemony of a mass culture suddenly become innocuous?
If consumption was arbitrary, if for most people it was a leisure activity of whim, as it seems to be for the ‘fan culture’, we could insist that it be studied from a purely humanistic interactive perspective. But this sort of consuming is privileged; Walmart does so well not because it is a cultural mecca of fashion, but because its demographic is the poor and middle class which make up a majority of the population. Consumption is specifically class oriented and class is specifically structural.
The underline idea Storey is discussing in the negotiation of consumption is the negotiation of identity or the formation of it. The idea of identity in consumer goods is a specific articulation of advertising but has its historical roots in the separation of classes. Those who can afford to be discriminating have the ability to pick and choose, have access to this market or that, wear purple instead of green; access and accumulation to such goods defined the bourgeois ethic. To return to the discussion of youth subcultures, punk lost its identity or negotiation with popular culture when specific stores or agents began to cater to their ‘style’ (the idea of 'Style' being an ‘acceptance of’ or ‘hierarchy’ according Stuart Ewen in All Consuming Images, 1988). It is in this idea of identity that consumption is acutely structural as well.
I understand that this places me specifically in the structuralist camp. It could also be my educational background in the study of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Habermas (The Frankfurt School), that has made me acute to accusation of elitism that they have often received. I believe Storey short cuts the importance of the Frankfurt School's influence in the shaping of his own analysis and in the Birmingham experience in general. For instance, his discussion of appropriation he takes from Hebdige (born in 1951), is the same discussion Adorno and Horkheimer had in the, Dialectic of Enlightenment , printed in 1944. Of course this discussion could be traced through Marx and beyond. Adorno (from Marx) reinforces the analysis that it is capitalism that breeds class struggle and that through the logic of the market, or in the problem of consumption, laws, policies, suburbs and educations are created and used to negotiate meaning.
Of course this is not an effort to decide who said what first, but to show for instance that the analysis that comes from the Frankfurt School comes specifically out of resistance to Nazi fascism. If there is an aura of elitism in discussions of the power of culture and structure, those accusation must be in an involved historical perspective. It may seem just as hierarchical to place cultural welfare in the hands of ‘discriminating consumers’.
We may now have to acknowledge, given the extent and speed of global capital, the interminable existence of a consumptive based society. As out-sourcing continues, we will soon no longer produce anything in this country we consume. This separation is not negotiated (in public) but structural. I myself consume many things that would be considered privileged in another context (such as Darfur). I consume free range and recyclables because I can afford to (at the beginning of the month) and can choose to blur the distinctions between negotiated meanings of consumables as art or identity. But this is an affordance of structure and not negotiation.
But this discussion is not to say that Storey is not aware of his privilege either. His effort I believe is to find the particular moments in culture where we are, conceptually at least, free to self actuate. If we are always and continually victims of structure our actualization is always in service of the state or multinational corporation. His discussion of how fan cultures “rereading” (146) of texts frees their attention from ‘what will happen’ to ‘ how things happen’ is particularly convincing for what it may bring to the pedagogy of media literacy, even for the possibilities of media production.
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Chapter Two: Summary
Chapter Two: Television
From: Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture, by John Storey
By: Bridgett Vanderwalker
Summary:
Storey states that “Television is the popular cultural form of the twenty-first century” (9). Storey divides the chapter into four specific theories of how television functions in cultural studies and their various aspects.
Encoding And Decoding Television Discourse
Storey starts with Hall’s ideas presented in his work ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse.’ First media produces a raw event on television which wants to carry across a dominant viewpoint. The media producers have a certain motive in their work but once it leaves their hands it will be absorbed based on the audiences’ preconceived notions that may be different than was intended. The second process is once the product is produced it can then be process and may produce public discourse. The third process involves decoding the message if it meaningful it will open the “market for more consumption if not consumption will end and so will any discussion. Storey stresses that meanings and messages cannot be transmitted but produced and those messages are based in a certain context and time. Misunderstandings are always possible with the intention of the program because it may be too difficult or too strange to the domestic context of outside the dominant code”(12). When an audience is in concord with the program they are operating within dominate and professional code. A second option for audiences is the ‘negotiated code or position.’ “It accords the privileged position to the dominant definitions of events while reserving the right to make a more negotiated application to ‘local conditions’, to its own corporate positions”(13). The third position Hall indentifies is that of “the oppositional code.” This is where the viewer recognizes the preferred message but chooses an alternative meaning. Hall stages how individuals interpret television programs within a social position.
1. The production of a meaningful message in the TV discourse is always problematic ‘work’. Translation: Any message can be interpret in several ways
2. The message in social communication is always complex in structure and form.
3. Messages encoded one way can always be read in a different way.(14)
Hall makes a good point when he says decoding of messages are not exclusive to what social position one holds. He says it is class plus “particular discourse positions produce specific readings”.(15) Hall goes on to say that not all messages hold the same level and this based on the context one finds themselves.
Television Talk
Morely another theorist says “the domestic context of TV viewing,[ ] is constitutive of its meaning”(18). Morely takes a much more individualistic viewpoint in that it is individuals who interrupt television programs. He makes an excellent point in pointing out that watching television is a social act which promotes social relationships and unites people where otherwise certain social groups would not normally associate with each other. Hobson makes a point to point out that people watch different programs for different reasons. The viewers bring many different ideas and feelings to a program and thus they are able to make their own interpretations. Hobson says: “New contexts will bring about the enactment of new significances; a narrative [in this case a soap opera] seemingly discarded seems suddenly to have a new relevance and a new utility”(21). “Hobson insists that viewers ‘work with the text and add their own experiences and opinions to the stories in the programme’”(22). Hobson also comments on that one storyline may have different meanings it is how the individual interprets it that the text comes alive. Hobson says that a text has a material structure which has a variety of interpretations. Viewers view programs from social and discursive and thus a there are limits to the text. In conclusion a program is a stepping stone for discussion of wider social groups that see generalizations that apply to humanity as a whole.
Television And ‘The Ideology Of Mass Culture’
The Dutch theorist, Ien Ang, states that “realism is an illusion created by the extent to which a text can successfully conceal its constructiveness”(26). Essentially, viewing a program is decoding and constructing meaning by intermingling ourselves in the narrative itself so even the most unrealistic texts can have meaning if the viewer is engaged in the text. As long as a show has cultural or individualistic relevance in the human sphere it can be seen as discussion of human issues. Ang say that while some may like or dislike a show it is based on if they are engaging with the text and whether they see the show as a product of mass media. Ang makes a valid point when she says: “fantasy and fiction does not function in place of, but besides, other dimensions of life (social practice, moral or political consciousness)”(31).
The Two Economies Of Television
John Fishe says that “the power of the audience-as-producers in the cultural economy is considerable”(32). Fishe believes cultural commodities such as television and films revolve around two economies financial and cultural. Financial revolves around exchange value while cultural is concerned with meanings, pleasures, and social identities. If TV producers can’t predict what audiences want they will fail to sell their product. In this viewpoint popular culture is seen as ‘a site of struggle’ where both economic and aesthetic concerns are competing for balance.
Questions
1. What American studies have been done recently on the two economies of television where it seems particularly relevant to see the financial side and viewer side and how functions in American society.
From: Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture, by John Storey
By: Bridgett Vanderwalker
Summary:
Storey states that “Television is the popular cultural form of the twenty-first century” (9). Storey divides the chapter into four specific theories of how television functions in cultural studies and their various aspects.
Encoding And Decoding Television Discourse
Storey starts with Hall’s ideas presented in his work ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse.’ First media produces a raw event on television which wants to carry across a dominant viewpoint. The media producers have a certain motive in their work but once it leaves their hands it will be absorbed based on the audiences’ preconceived notions that may be different than was intended. The second process is once the product is produced it can then be process and may produce public discourse. The third process involves decoding the message if it meaningful it will open the “market for more consumption if not consumption will end and so will any discussion. Storey stresses that meanings and messages cannot be transmitted but produced and those messages are based in a certain context and time. Misunderstandings are always possible with the intention of the program because it may be too difficult or too strange to the domestic context of outside the dominant code”(12). When an audience is in concord with the program they are operating within dominate and professional code. A second option for audiences is the ‘negotiated code or position.’ “It accords the privileged position to the dominant definitions of events while reserving the right to make a more negotiated application to ‘local conditions’, to its own corporate positions”(13). The third position Hall indentifies is that of “the oppositional code.” This is where the viewer recognizes the preferred message but chooses an alternative meaning. Hall stages how individuals interpret television programs within a social position.
1. The production of a meaningful message in the TV discourse is always problematic ‘work’. Translation: Any message can be interpret in several ways
2. The message in social communication is always complex in structure and form.
3. Messages encoded one way can always be read in a different way.(14)
Hall makes a good point when he says decoding of messages are not exclusive to what social position one holds. He says it is class plus “particular discourse positions produce specific readings”.(15) Hall goes on to say that not all messages hold the same level and this based on the context one finds themselves.
Television Talk
Morely another theorist says “the domestic context of TV viewing,[ ] is constitutive of its meaning”(18). Morely takes a much more individualistic viewpoint in that it is individuals who interrupt television programs. He makes an excellent point in pointing out that watching television is a social act which promotes social relationships and unites people where otherwise certain social groups would not normally associate with each other. Hobson makes a point to point out that people watch different programs for different reasons. The viewers bring many different ideas and feelings to a program and thus they are able to make their own interpretations. Hobson says: “New contexts will bring about the enactment of new significances; a narrative [in this case a soap opera] seemingly discarded seems suddenly to have a new relevance and a new utility”(21). “Hobson insists that viewers ‘work with the text and add their own experiences and opinions to the stories in the programme’”(22). Hobson also comments on that one storyline may have different meanings it is how the individual interprets it that the text comes alive. Hobson says that a text has a material structure which has a variety of interpretations. Viewers view programs from social and discursive and thus a there are limits to the text. In conclusion a program is a stepping stone for discussion of wider social groups that see generalizations that apply to humanity as a whole.
Television And ‘The Ideology Of Mass Culture’
The Dutch theorist, Ien Ang, states that “realism is an illusion created by the extent to which a text can successfully conceal its constructiveness”(26). Essentially, viewing a program is decoding and constructing meaning by intermingling ourselves in the narrative itself so even the most unrealistic texts can have meaning if the viewer is engaged in the text. As long as a show has cultural or individualistic relevance in the human sphere it can be seen as discussion of human issues. Ang say that while some may like or dislike a show it is based on if they are engaging with the text and whether they see the show as a product of mass media. Ang makes a valid point when she says: “fantasy and fiction does not function in place of, but besides, other dimensions of life (social practice, moral or political consciousness)”(31).
The Two Economies Of Television
John Fishe says that “the power of the audience-as-producers in the cultural economy is considerable”(32). Fishe believes cultural commodities such as television and films revolve around two economies financial and cultural. Financial revolves around exchange value while cultural is concerned with meanings, pleasures, and social identities. If TV producers can’t predict what audiences want they will fail to sell their product. In this viewpoint popular culture is seen as ‘a site of struggle’ where both economic and aesthetic concerns are competing for balance.
Questions
1. What American studies have been done recently on the two economies of television where it seems particularly relevant to see the financial side and viewer side and how functions in American society.
Chapter Four: Film
From: Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture, John Storey
Chapter Four: Film
By: Tyson Livingston
Summary:
For the chapter on film, Storey indicates that his aim is to “discuss key moments in the discussion of film and cultural studies” rather than discuss the most recent developments in this area of the field. He divides the chapter into the following sections: Structuralism and Film, Visual Pleasure in Film, and Cultural Studies and Film.
Structuralism and Film
Storey notes two major works in film cultural studies that occurred in 1975: Sixguns and Society, by Will Wright, and ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, by Laura Mulvey. This first section examines Sixguns and Society, which was classically structuralist in its treatment.
Storey begins by discussing the ideas of Ferdiand de Saussure from which much of structuralist theory is derived. He discussed language as a “system of contrasts and opposites... [that] constructs our access to reality” (74). He indicated that language was divided into two parts which produced a third. These are the signifier, which is the inscription of a word, the signified, which is the mental image initiated by that word, and these two come together to produce the sign. Because of the ways these parts interact, “the way in which we ultimately conceptualize the world is ultimately dependent on the language that we speak and, by analogy, the culture that we inhabit” (74). His ideas also include his concept of Language and Parole, where language refers to the structures and rules, and Parole refers to individual utterance. Storey finishes his discussion of Saussure by indicating that, following structuralism, it is the job of the culturist to show how rules and conventions determine the meaning of a given text. He then refers to Levi-Strauss and his example of myth, and how it works like language.
After discussing Levi-Strauss’s example of myth, he then turns directly to Sixguns and Society and indicates how Wright analyzed the Hollywood Western as American myth. By using binary relations and other structuralist techniques, Wright explored how the interaction of the hero, society, and the villain conceptualized American social beliefs and the myth of the American Dream. He also demonstrated how the evolution of the Western through three different periods reflected the change in those social beliefs and the changing perceptions of how to obtain the American Dream based on those beliefs.
Visual Pleasure in Film
In the second section, Storey discusses Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’ Mulvey seemed to focus on “the male gaze” in cinema, which posited that in film women are viewed as objects of male desire, and also represent the threat of castration.
The first part of this idea seems pretty straightforward, that the woman functions as an object of erotic desire, both for the hero and for the male spectator in the audience. I admit, however, that I am still a little fuzzy on the ins and outs of the second part. Mulvey indicates that when viewing the female form the absence of a penis implies the threat of castration, and that this ‘look’ can only be countered through one of two methods. The first is by investigating the original moment of trauma and then eventually devaluing, punishing, or saving the guilty object. The second is to fetishize the woman so that she becomes a thing of beauty in and of herself, a pure erotic spectacle (78-79). I admit that I am still a little fuzzy on how we get from point A to point B to point C on this part.
Mulvey ultimately argued that this pleasure in the cinema had to be eliminated to free women from ‘the male gaze’. Her work was quite influential, so much so that others have explored and further defined and refined her ideas. For example, examining if the male gaze is always present or just dominate over a ‘female gaze.’ The question has also been raised that her theory doesn’t take into account the possibility of the audience being more than a passive spectator, when in fact the audience would negotiate with the film based on its own experiences and discourse.
Cultural Studies and Film
The last section focuses primarily on the research of Christine Gledhill and Jackie Stacey. Gledhill recognized the act of negotiation between the spectator and the film. She indicated that “meaning is neither imposed, nor passively imbibed, but arises out of a struggle or negotiation between competing frames of reference, motivation, and experience” (80). She further indicated that this negotiation could be studied on three different levels: audience, texts, and institutions.
Stacey elaborates on this approach based on her research from the end of the 1980s where she surveyed women in their 60s who were avid movie-goers in the 40s and 50s. This way she was able to study the actual consumption of the film. Three areas were addressed in her study. The first, escapism was one of the primary reasons her subjects went to the cinema. She determined that this escapism manifested not only from the film itself, but from the environment of the theater, and the community of movie-goers. It also provided a means of escape not only to the utopian vision of the Hollywood screen, but from the hardships of wartime Britain.
The second, identification, indicated that women shared a fluidity of identity with the women onscreen and were able to identify with the actors because of some shared quality or trait, such as hair color. This sharing of identity would often extend beyond he film experience, leaving the spectators with a fantasy of a more powerful and confident self that could ultimately act as a form of resistance.
The third area, consumption, was defined by Stacey as “a site of negotiated meanings, resistance, and of appropriation as well as of subject and exploitation” (84). She gave the example that the fashions of hollywood stars went against the more restricted ideas of british femininity. Therefore the consumption of these films by women were a resistance to extend and negotiate those standards.
Chapter Four: Film
By: Tyson Livingston
Summary:
For the chapter on film, Storey indicates that his aim is to “discuss key moments in the discussion of film and cultural studies” rather than discuss the most recent developments in this area of the field. He divides the chapter into the following sections: Structuralism and Film, Visual Pleasure in Film, and Cultural Studies and Film.
Structuralism and Film
Storey notes two major works in film cultural studies that occurred in 1975: Sixguns and Society, by Will Wright, and ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, by Laura Mulvey. This first section examines Sixguns and Society, which was classically structuralist in its treatment.
Storey begins by discussing the ideas of Ferdiand de Saussure from which much of structuralist theory is derived. He discussed language as a “system of contrasts and opposites... [that] constructs our access to reality” (74). He indicated that language was divided into two parts which produced a third. These are the signifier, which is the inscription of a word, the signified, which is the mental image initiated by that word, and these two come together to produce the sign. Because of the ways these parts interact, “the way in which we ultimately conceptualize the world is ultimately dependent on the language that we speak and, by analogy, the culture that we inhabit” (74). His ideas also include his concept of Language and Parole, where language refers to the structures and rules, and Parole refers to individual utterance. Storey finishes his discussion of Saussure by indicating that, following structuralism, it is the job of the culturist to show how rules and conventions determine the meaning of a given text. He then refers to Levi-Strauss and his example of myth, and how it works like language.
After discussing Levi-Strauss’s example of myth, he then turns directly to Sixguns and Society and indicates how Wright analyzed the Hollywood Western as American myth. By using binary relations and other structuralist techniques, Wright explored how the interaction of the hero, society, and the villain conceptualized American social beliefs and the myth of the American Dream. He also demonstrated how the evolution of the Western through three different periods reflected the change in those social beliefs and the changing perceptions of how to obtain the American Dream based on those beliefs.
Visual Pleasure in Film
In the second section, Storey discusses Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’ Mulvey seemed to focus on “the male gaze” in cinema, which posited that in film women are viewed as objects of male desire, and also represent the threat of castration.
The first part of this idea seems pretty straightforward, that the woman functions as an object of erotic desire, both for the hero and for the male spectator in the audience. I admit, however, that I am still a little fuzzy on the ins and outs of the second part. Mulvey indicates that when viewing the female form the absence of a penis implies the threat of castration, and that this ‘look’ can only be countered through one of two methods. The first is by investigating the original moment of trauma and then eventually devaluing, punishing, or saving the guilty object. The second is to fetishize the woman so that she becomes a thing of beauty in and of herself, a pure erotic spectacle (78-79). I admit that I am still a little fuzzy on how we get from point A to point B to point C on this part.
Mulvey ultimately argued that this pleasure in the cinema had to be eliminated to free women from ‘the male gaze’. Her work was quite influential, so much so that others have explored and further defined and refined her ideas. For example, examining if the male gaze is always present or just dominate over a ‘female gaze.’ The question has also been raised that her theory doesn’t take into account the possibility of the audience being more than a passive spectator, when in fact the audience would negotiate with the film based on its own experiences and discourse.
Cultural Studies and Film
The last section focuses primarily on the research of Christine Gledhill and Jackie Stacey. Gledhill recognized the act of negotiation between the spectator and the film. She indicated that “meaning is neither imposed, nor passively imbibed, but arises out of a struggle or negotiation between competing frames of reference, motivation, and experience” (80). She further indicated that this negotiation could be studied on three different levels: audience, texts, and institutions.
Stacey elaborates on this approach based on her research from the end of the 1980s where she surveyed women in their 60s who were avid movie-goers in the 40s and 50s. This way she was able to study the actual consumption of the film. Three areas were addressed in her study. The first, escapism was one of the primary reasons her subjects went to the cinema. She determined that this escapism manifested not only from the film itself, but from the environment of the theater, and the community of movie-goers. It also provided a means of escape not only to the utopian vision of the Hollywood screen, but from the hardships of wartime Britain.
The second, identification, indicated that women shared a fluidity of identity with the women onscreen and were able to identify with the actors because of some shared quality or trait, such as hair color. This sharing of identity would often extend beyond he film experience, leaving the spectators with a fantasy of a more powerful and confident self that could ultimately act as a form of resistance.
The third area, consumption, was defined by Stacey as “a site of negotiated meanings, resistance, and of appropriation as well as of subject and exploitation” (84). She gave the example that the fashions of hollywood stars went against the more restricted ideas of british femininity. Therefore the consumption of these films by women were a resistance to extend and negotiate those standards.
Chapter Two - Television, John Storey
Summary: John Storey’s Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture, “Chapter 2, Television.”
By Jennifer Lowry
Storey begins this chapter by stating: “Television is the popular culture form of the twenty-first century” (9). He breaks the chapter up into four parts: “Encoding and Decoding Televisual Discourse,” “Television Talk,” “Television and ‘The Ideology of Mass Culture’,” and “The Two Economies of Television”.
Encoding and Decoding Televisual Discourse
In the first section he describes Stuart Hall’s “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse.” Hall argues that there are three moments that televisual discourse must pass through in order to make meaning (9). The first moment is the point at which the media professionals portray a “’raw’ social event” (10). At this point the media professionals have the power because they are in control of “how the ‘raw’ social event will be encoded in discourse” (10). The second moment occurs after the “’raw’ social event” is in the “form of televisual discourse” and the “formal rules of language and discourse are ‘in dominance’” (11). Essentially, the event has been produced in a discourse (encoded), presented in television and now is in the hands of the viewer to interpret its meaning (decoded). This is where the third moment occurs, in the process of the audience decoding the message (‘raw’ social event). “If the event is to become ‘meaningful’ to the audience, it must decode and make sense of the discourse” (11) but the information that is decoded is not always what was encoded. This is where the concepts of dominant or preferred code take place. If the audience is not privy to the dominant code, the decoding of the message will not take on the meaning intended.
Television Talk
David Morley in ‘The Nationwide Audience” tested Hall’s model “to see how individual interpretations of televisual texts relate to ‘social position’” (14). Morley broke decoding into three categories: dominant, negotiated, and oppositional. He determined that social position determines access to different discourses and therefore, social class position is not the only determinant of decoding. Experience also influences interpretation of text; Morley argues that television viewing is a domestic activity, which inevitably plays a role in the interpretation process.
Since television viewing is a social act, television leads to social conversation as evidenced by Dorothy Hobson’s research in Crossroads: The Drama of a Soap Opera. Hobson argues that television interpretation is also influenced by culture and experience, the message changes depending on the viewer’s culture or prior experiences. Television and real life can merge through interpretation, “viewers are able to use events within television narratives to explore issues in their own lives; issues that might otherwise remain too painful to speak about openly in public” (23). Television allows people to distance themselves from the problem by speaking about it in the form of a fictional character or story (25). Hobson argues that women especially use television as a means for social interaction.
Television and ‘The Ideology of Mass Culture’
Dutch Cultural critic Ien Ang came to similar conclusions in her research about the prime time soap opera Dallas. She found that viewers went through a “selective process, reading across the text from denotation to connotation, weaving our sense of self in and out of the narrative” (26). While the viewers may not have everything in common with the characters of a television show, they are able to recognize “fundamental things in common: relationships and broken relationships, happiness and sadness, illness and health” (26). Based upon the information gathered in her research, the viewers are separated into four “reading positions” which Ang calls “the ideology of mass culture” (28).
Mass culture:
Popular culture is the result of capitalist commodity production and is therefore subject to the laws of the capitalist market economy; the result of which is the seemingly endless circulation of degraded commodities, whose only real significance is that they make a profit for their producers (28).
The first group is those who dislike the programme: since the programme is mass culture, the group dislikes it. The second group is those who like the show and still “subscribe to the ideology of mass culture (28). But in order to do so, these viewers read the show through irony. The third group is the fans who “find it necessary to locate their pleasure in relation to the ideology of mass culture; they ‘internalise’ the ideology; they ‘negotiate’ with the ideology; they use ’surface irony’ to defend their pleasure against the withering dismissal of the ideology” (29-30). The final group is “informed by the ideology of populism. The core of this ideology is the belief that one person’s taste is of equal value to another person’s taste” (30), meaning that it is open to individualism and that judgments should not be made against others.
The Two Economies of Television
The final section of this chapter discusses John Fiske’s idea that “cultural commodities – including television – from which popular culture is made circulate in simultaneous economies: the financial and cultural” (32).
Financial economy: “concerned with exchange value”
Cultural economy: “primarily focused on use – ‘meanings, pleasures, and social identities’” (32).
Fiske uses the example of the show Hill Street Blues that was sold to NBC and sponsored by Mercedes Benz.
In the cultural economy, the series changed form a cultural commodity (to be sold to NBC) to a site for the production of meanings and pleasures for its audience. In the same way, the audience changed from commodity (to be sold to Mercedes Benz) to a producer of meanings and pleasures (32).
In this context the audience has power since the production of meaning and pleasure is more difficult to come by than the production of wealth. The producers of television are not always able to predict what will sell (32) giving the consumer the power. Different cultures will also view the same program in different ways, often using it to its own purpose. Fiske uses “the example of the Russian Jews watching Dallas in Israel and reading it as ‘capitalism’s self criticism’” (33).
According to Fiske, “resistance to the power of the powerful by those without power in Western societies takes two forms: semiotic and social” (33).
Semiotic resistance: concerned with meanings, pleasures and social identities
Social resistance: concerned with transformations of the socio-economic system (33).
Popular culture is a “site of struggle” operating mostly in semiotic power (33). “Semiotic resistance – in which the dominant meanings are challenged by subordinate meanings – has the effect of undermining capitalism’s attempt at ideological homogeneity” (33).
Question:
Who really has the power in the reading of television? While the audience obviously holds the power in interpretation, the producers are the ones who determine what is on television in the first place. Is what we interpret really our choice?
By Jennifer Lowry
Storey begins this chapter by stating: “Television is the popular culture form of the twenty-first century” (9). He breaks the chapter up into four parts: “Encoding and Decoding Televisual Discourse,” “Television Talk,” “Television and ‘The Ideology of Mass Culture’,” and “The Two Economies of Television”.
Encoding and Decoding Televisual Discourse
In the first section he describes Stuart Hall’s “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse.” Hall argues that there are three moments that televisual discourse must pass through in order to make meaning (9). The first moment is the point at which the media professionals portray a “’raw’ social event” (10). At this point the media professionals have the power because they are in control of “how the ‘raw’ social event will be encoded in discourse” (10). The second moment occurs after the “’raw’ social event” is in the “form of televisual discourse” and the “formal rules of language and discourse are ‘in dominance’” (11). Essentially, the event has been produced in a discourse (encoded), presented in television and now is in the hands of the viewer to interpret its meaning (decoded). This is where the third moment occurs, in the process of the audience decoding the message (‘raw’ social event). “If the event is to become ‘meaningful’ to the audience, it must decode and make sense of the discourse” (11) but the information that is decoded is not always what was encoded. This is where the concepts of dominant or preferred code take place. If the audience is not privy to the dominant code, the decoding of the message will not take on the meaning intended.
Television Talk
David Morley in ‘The Nationwide Audience” tested Hall’s model “to see how individual interpretations of televisual texts relate to ‘social position’” (14). Morley broke decoding into three categories: dominant, negotiated, and oppositional. He determined that social position determines access to different discourses and therefore, social class position is not the only determinant of decoding. Experience also influences interpretation of text; Morley argues that television viewing is a domestic activity, which inevitably plays a role in the interpretation process.
Since television viewing is a social act, television leads to social conversation as evidenced by Dorothy Hobson’s research in Crossroads: The Drama of a Soap Opera. Hobson argues that television interpretation is also influenced by culture and experience, the message changes depending on the viewer’s culture or prior experiences. Television and real life can merge through interpretation, “viewers are able to use events within television narratives to explore issues in their own lives; issues that might otherwise remain too painful to speak about openly in public” (23). Television allows people to distance themselves from the problem by speaking about it in the form of a fictional character or story (25). Hobson argues that women especially use television as a means for social interaction.
Television and ‘The Ideology of Mass Culture’
Dutch Cultural critic Ien Ang came to similar conclusions in her research about the prime time soap opera Dallas. She found that viewers went through a “selective process, reading across the text from denotation to connotation, weaving our sense of self in and out of the narrative” (26). While the viewers may not have everything in common with the characters of a television show, they are able to recognize “fundamental things in common: relationships and broken relationships, happiness and sadness, illness and health” (26). Based upon the information gathered in her research, the viewers are separated into four “reading positions” which Ang calls “the ideology of mass culture” (28).
Mass culture:
Popular culture is the result of capitalist commodity production and is therefore subject to the laws of the capitalist market economy; the result of which is the seemingly endless circulation of degraded commodities, whose only real significance is that they make a profit for their producers (28).
The first group is those who dislike the programme: since the programme is mass culture, the group dislikes it. The second group is those who like the show and still “subscribe to the ideology of mass culture (28). But in order to do so, these viewers read the show through irony. The third group is the fans who “find it necessary to locate their pleasure in relation to the ideology of mass culture; they ‘internalise’ the ideology; they ‘negotiate’ with the ideology; they use ’surface irony’ to defend their pleasure against the withering dismissal of the ideology” (29-30). The final group is “informed by the ideology of populism. The core of this ideology is the belief that one person’s taste is of equal value to another person’s taste” (30), meaning that it is open to individualism and that judgments should not be made against others.
The Two Economies of Television
The final section of this chapter discusses John Fiske’s idea that “cultural commodities – including television – from which popular culture is made circulate in simultaneous economies: the financial and cultural” (32).
Financial economy: “concerned with exchange value”
Cultural economy: “primarily focused on use – ‘meanings, pleasures, and social identities’” (32).
Fiske uses the example of the show Hill Street Blues that was sold to NBC and sponsored by Mercedes Benz.
In the cultural economy, the series changed form a cultural commodity (to be sold to NBC) to a site for the production of meanings and pleasures for its audience. In the same way, the audience changed from commodity (to be sold to Mercedes Benz) to a producer of meanings and pleasures (32).
In this context the audience has power since the production of meaning and pleasure is more difficult to come by than the production of wealth. The producers of television are not always able to predict what will sell (32) giving the consumer the power. Different cultures will also view the same program in different ways, often using it to its own purpose. Fiske uses “the example of the Russian Jews watching Dallas in Israel and reading it as ‘capitalism’s self criticism’” (33).
According to Fiske, “resistance to the power of the powerful by those without power in Western societies takes two forms: semiotic and social” (33).
Semiotic resistance: concerned with meanings, pleasures and social identities
Social resistance: concerned with transformations of the socio-economic system (33).
Popular culture is a “site of struggle” operating mostly in semiotic power (33). “Semiotic resistance – in which the dominant meanings are challenged by subordinate meanings – has the effect of undermining capitalism’s attempt at ideological homogeneity” (33).
Question:
Who really has the power in the reading of television? While the audience obviously holds the power in interpretation, the producers are the ones who determine what is on television in the first place. Is what we interpret really our choice?
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Storey, CH 2
Bill Schnupp
Abstract: John Storey’s Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture
Summary: Chapter 2: Television
I. The Cycle of Televisual Discourse
The widespread popularity of television as a cultural form led to Stuart Hall’s “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse,” a piece in which the author posits a three-part model of televisual communication:
1. Media professionals convert a “raw” social event into televisual discourse
2. Once the event has taken the form of televisual discourse, formal rules of language and discourse are in play.
3. The audience must decode not the actual event, but the media’s translation. The act of decoding—of making meaning from the translation—is itself a social act, open to encoding in another distinct discourse, This begets a cycle in which production moves to consumption, and back to production, a self-perpetuating cycle that feeds upon itself.
Main ideas: “The circuit starts in the social and ends, to begin again, in the social.”
-“Meanings and messages are not simply transmitted, they are always produced” (11).
II. Decoding and Misunderstandings
Hall assumes two difficulties in the decoding process: first, “misunderstandings of a literal kind. . .[in which] the viewer does not know the terms employed, cannot follow the complex logic of argument or exposition. . .but more often, broadcasters are concerned. . .that viewers are not operating within the dominant of preferred code” (12). Hall’s primary concern is with this second type of misunderstanding, an occurrence directly linked with the engagement of formal language and discourse structures that form the second stage in his model of televisual discourse.
Hall outlines three primary decoding positions:
1. Dominant-hegemonic position, in which the viewer interprets the message
within the confines of the power structure and professional code out forth by the
broadcaster.
2. Negotiated code or position, likely the most common, in which viewers
recognize the authority and legitimacy of the broadcast discourse, but blend often
oppositional elements that have more direct bearing on their personal life.
3.Oppositional code, adopted by viewers who recognize the validity of the
discursive mode, but nonetheless chooses to operated from an opposing frame of
reference.
Hall’s hypothetical decoding positions sparked David Morley’s Nationwide Audience project, an undertaking concerned with how social class influenced decoding, and explored such ideas as:
1. “how and why certain production practices and structures tend to produce certain
messages, which embody their meanings in certain recurring forms”
2. “The message in social communication is always complex in structure and form. It
always contains more than one potential reading”
3. “Messages encoded in one way can always be read in a different way” (14).
In his project, Morley’s population was a collection of twenty-nine different groups, socially stratified to include students, apprentices, schoolboys, shop stewards, middle-class bank managers, and public officials. Each was asked to watch two episodes of the BBC’s Nationwide news program. Morley analyzed each group’s reading, confirming many of Hall’s prior ideas. Morley’s ultimate findings, however, indicated that “decodings are not determined directly from social class position. Rather, it is always a question of how social position plus particular discourse positions produce specific readings; readings which are structured because the structure of access to different discourses is determined by social position” (15).
Main ideas: “When we are interpellated by a text, this is always in a context of other
interpellations”(16).
-“The text reader encounter does not occur in a moment isolated from other discourses, but always in a field of many discourses, some in harmony with the text, some of which are in contradiction with it”(16).
-“decodings are not determined directly from social class position. Rather, it is always a question of how social position plus particular discourse positions produce specific readings; readings which are structured because the structure of access to different discourses is determined by social position” (15).
III. Television and Family
Morley’s Nationwide endeavor led to his Family Television project, an undertaking limited by a lack of time and money, but nonetheless concerned with television practices within the home. Practice—though perhaps not an obvious choice of terms—is accurate regardless, as Morley concern here was “how television is interpreted (literary/semiological approaches) and how television is used (sociological approaches)” (18). Issues of audience decoding and choice as they relate to family leisure were paramount here. In this context, television is a social practice—both a means of interaction and isolation, as well as a valuable and common discursive currency in everyday cultural economy.
Morley’s ideas led to Dorothy Hobson’s Crossroads: The Drama of a Soap Opera. In her study, Hobson viewed the program Crossroads, and conducted open-ended follow-up interviews with, participants (predominantly women). Though light on theory, Hobson’s ethnographic study nonetheless provided some interesting observations.
1. The circumstances of viewing are highly varied: Some viewers sit and watch the program,
while many conduct daily domestic activities.
2. The interpretation—the reading—of the program is ongoing and adaptive, stretching far
beyond the initial moment of consumption.
3. The program serves as a platform for social interaction; a place from which viewers could
actively transition from “program discourse” to personal, domestic, and professional
discourse.
4. Viewers rely on their own experience to judge events on television programs.
5. Soap operas allow viewers a means of interpreting and coping with their problems, shared
both by actual people, as well as characters on the program. Thus, Hobson posits that
innumerable interpretations of a program exist.
6. Discussion of events in a program leads to discussion of events in viewers’ lives, events
otherwise too painful to speak about elsewhere.
7. Interweaving actual events with program fiction leads to the creation of a culture of
viewers.
On the fifth point, Storey disagrees, arguing that that are definite material and contextual limitations on the possible number of interpretations of a specific program. On the final point, however, Mary Ellen Brown echoes Hobson’s point, and furthers it with the contention that viewers undertake a “carnivalesque sense of play in the crossing opf boundaries between fiction and reality. Furthermore, Brown maintains that women’s talk about soap operas is best understood as a fundamental part of the long tradition of women’s oral culture” (24).
Tamar Liebs and Elihu Katz further this strand of argument, and put forth that
soap operas are not escapist, but are instead a forum for social, family, political, and other discussions, as a result of the agenda set between program producers and consumers.
Main ideas: “television talk provides cultural studies with an important bridge between the social and the textual” (25).
-television is a social practice—both a means of interaction and isolation, as well as a valuable and common discursive currency in everyday cultural economy.
-soap operas are not escapist, but are instead a forum for social, family, political, and other discussions, as a result of the agenda set between program producers and consumers.
-the interpretation—the reading—of the program is ongoing and adaptive, stretching far beyond the initial moment of consumption.
-the program serves as a platform for social interaction; a place from which viewers could actively transition from “program discourse” to personal and professional discourse.
-discussion of events in a program leads to discussion of events in viewers’ lives, events otherwise too painful to speak about elsewhere.
-interweaving actual events with program fiction leads to the creation of a culture of viewers.
IV. Television and Mass Culture
Dutch cultural critic Ien Ang took up the soap opera idea in a study in which she placed an add in a popular magazine soliciting viewer opinion about the television series Dallas. Forty-two responses, both from critics and supporters of the program led Ang to the conclusion that the program was popular for its “emotional realism,” and that the degree to which viewers found Dallas good or bad was based on their perception of its realism (good) or lack of authenticity (bad). Interestingly, Ang found that elements of Dallas that were unreal and regarded as such at the denotative level were not considered unrealistic at the connotative level.
Much of the program’s popularity was based on the ease with which viewers could transition between the fiction of the program and the everyday lives. It gives rise to the “melodramatic imagination.” Essentially, Ang found that Dallas “is not a compensation for the presumed drabness of everyday life, nor a flight from it, but a dimension of it” (27).
From these findings, Ang posits “the ideology of mass culture,” the idea that “popular culture is the result of capitalist commodity production and is therefore subject to the laws of the capitalist market economy; the result of which is the seemingly endless circulation of degraded commodities, whose only real significance is that they make a profit for their producers” (28). This theory enabled Ang to lump viewers into four categories: those who strongly dislike the program because it is an example of mass culture; those who give the program an ironical viewing, in which the program is mocked for its melodrama and transformed into a comedic program—the pleasure of viewing results from the fact that the program is, in fact, bad and worthy of mockery; fans, who internalize the ideology of mass culture and appreciate the program for what it is; and the populist, who views with the contention that it is pointless to pass aesthetic judgment on the tastes of others. The first three positions signify an unequal struggle between those who argue from within the security of mass culture, and those who resist it.
Ang concludes that the popularity of such programs lie in their ability to “construct imaginary solutions for real contradictions. . .which in their fictional simplicity and their simple fictionality step outside the tedious complexity of social relations of dominance and subordination” (31).
Main ideas: “popular culture is the result of capitalist commodity production and is therefore subject to the laws of the capitalist market economy; the result of which is the seemingly endless circulation of degraded commodities, whose only real significance is that they make a profit for their producers” (28).
-there is an unequal struggle between those who argue from within the security of mass culture, and those who resist it.
- the popularity of such programs lie in their ability to “construct imaginary solutions for real contradictions. . .which in their fictional simplicity and their simple fictionality step outside the tedious complexity of social relations of dominance and subordination” (31).
V. Fiske’s Two Economies
Chapter two concludes with John Fiske’s argument that television inhabits two economies: financial, concerned with exchange values; and cultural, centered around “meanings, pleasures, and social identities” (32). Resistance to the power of the powerful in Western societies takes two forms: semiotic, concerned with meanings, pleasures and social identities; and social, dealing with transformations of the socio-economic system. The concepts are related, though autonomous. Popular culture is thus involved in the struggle between consensus and conflict, a place where the “hegemonic forces of homogeneity are always met by the resistance of heterogeneity” (33)
Fiske recognizes popular culture as a site of struggle between dominant forces, and diverts attention to how theses forces are coped with, resisted, or evaded.
Main ideas: Resistance to the power of the powerful in Western societies takes two forms: semiotic, concerned with meanings, pleasures and social identities; and social, dealing with transformations of the socio-economic system. The concepts are related, though autonomous.
- Popular culture is thus involved in the struggle between consensus and conflict, a place where the “hegemonic forces of homogeneity are always met by the resistance of heterogeneity” (33).
Key Terms:
Ideology of Mass Culture
Cultural Economy
Discourse
Encoding
Decoding:
Dominant-hegemonic
Negotiated
Oppositional
People:
John Storey
Stuart Hall
David Morley
Dorothy Hobson
Mary Ellen Brown
Tamar Liebs
Elihu Katz
Ien Ang
John Fiske
Questions:
1. What do you make of Storey’s objection to Hobson’s notion of infinite readings? (23)
2. Do you agree with Hobson’s idea that television programs can lead to discussion of events in viewers’ lives, events otherwise too painful to speak about elsewhere? Why or why not?
Abstract: John Storey’s Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture
Summary: Chapter 2: Television
I. The Cycle of Televisual Discourse
The widespread popularity of television as a cultural form led to Stuart Hall’s “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse,” a piece in which the author posits a three-part model of televisual communication:
1. Media professionals convert a “raw” social event into televisual discourse
2. Once the event has taken the form of televisual discourse, formal rules of language and discourse are in play.
3. The audience must decode not the actual event, but the media’s translation. The act of decoding—of making meaning from the translation—is itself a social act, open to encoding in another distinct discourse, This begets a cycle in which production moves to consumption, and back to production, a self-perpetuating cycle that feeds upon itself.
Main ideas: “The circuit starts in the social and ends, to begin again, in the social.”
-“Meanings and messages are not simply transmitted, they are always produced” (11).
II. Decoding and Misunderstandings
Hall assumes two difficulties in the decoding process: first, “misunderstandings of a literal kind. . .[in which] the viewer does not know the terms employed, cannot follow the complex logic of argument or exposition. . .but more often, broadcasters are concerned. . .that viewers are not operating within the dominant of preferred code” (12). Hall’s primary concern is with this second type of misunderstanding, an occurrence directly linked with the engagement of formal language and discourse structures that form the second stage in his model of televisual discourse.
Hall outlines three primary decoding positions:
1. Dominant-hegemonic position, in which the viewer interprets the message
within the confines of the power structure and professional code out forth by the
broadcaster.
2. Negotiated code or position, likely the most common, in which viewers
recognize the authority and legitimacy of the broadcast discourse, but blend often
oppositional elements that have more direct bearing on their personal life.
3.Oppositional code, adopted by viewers who recognize the validity of the
discursive mode, but nonetheless chooses to operated from an opposing frame of
reference.
Hall’s hypothetical decoding positions sparked David Morley’s Nationwide Audience project, an undertaking concerned with how social class influenced decoding, and explored such ideas as:
1. “how and why certain production practices and structures tend to produce certain
messages, which embody their meanings in certain recurring forms”
2. “The message in social communication is always complex in structure and form. It
always contains more than one potential reading”
3. “Messages encoded in one way can always be read in a different way” (14).
In his project, Morley’s population was a collection of twenty-nine different groups, socially stratified to include students, apprentices, schoolboys, shop stewards, middle-class bank managers, and public officials. Each was asked to watch two episodes of the BBC’s Nationwide news program. Morley analyzed each group’s reading, confirming many of Hall’s prior ideas. Morley’s ultimate findings, however, indicated that “decodings are not determined directly from social class position. Rather, it is always a question of how social position plus particular discourse positions produce specific readings; readings which are structured because the structure of access to different discourses is determined by social position” (15).
Main ideas: “When we are interpellated by a text, this is always in a context of other
interpellations”(16).
-“The text reader encounter does not occur in a moment isolated from other discourses, but always in a field of many discourses, some in harmony with the text, some of which are in contradiction with it”(16).
-“decodings are not determined directly from social class position. Rather, it is always a question of how social position plus particular discourse positions produce specific readings; readings which are structured because the structure of access to different discourses is determined by social position” (15).
III. Television and Family
Morley’s Nationwide endeavor led to his Family Television project, an undertaking limited by a lack of time and money, but nonetheless concerned with television practices within the home. Practice—though perhaps not an obvious choice of terms—is accurate regardless, as Morley concern here was “how television is interpreted (literary/semiological approaches) and how television is used (sociological approaches)” (18). Issues of audience decoding and choice as they relate to family leisure were paramount here. In this context, television is a social practice—both a means of interaction and isolation, as well as a valuable and common discursive currency in everyday cultural economy.
Morley’s ideas led to Dorothy Hobson’s Crossroads: The Drama of a Soap Opera. In her study, Hobson viewed the program Crossroads, and conducted open-ended follow-up interviews with, participants (predominantly women). Though light on theory, Hobson’s ethnographic study nonetheless provided some interesting observations.
1. The circumstances of viewing are highly varied: Some viewers sit and watch the program,
while many conduct daily domestic activities.
2. The interpretation—the reading—of the program is ongoing and adaptive, stretching far
beyond the initial moment of consumption.
3. The program serves as a platform for social interaction; a place from which viewers could
actively transition from “program discourse” to personal, domestic, and professional
discourse.
4. Viewers rely on their own experience to judge events on television programs.
5. Soap operas allow viewers a means of interpreting and coping with their problems, shared
both by actual people, as well as characters on the program. Thus, Hobson posits that
innumerable interpretations of a program exist.
6. Discussion of events in a program leads to discussion of events in viewers’ lives, events
otherwise too painful to speak about elsewhere.
7. Interweaving actual events with program fiction leads to the creation of a culture of
viewers.
On the fifth point, Storey disagrees, arguing that that are definite material and contextual limitations on the possible number of interpretations of a specific program. On the final point, however, Mary Ellen Brown echoes Hobson’s point, and furthers it with the contention that viewers undertake a “carnivalesque sense of play in the crossing opf boundaries between fiction and reality. Furthermore, Brown maintains that women’s talk about soap operas is best understood as a fundamental part of the long tradition of women’s oral culture” (24).
Tamar Liebs and Elihu Katz further this strand of argument, and put forth that
soap operas are not escapist, but are instead a forum for social, family, political, and other discussions, as a result of the agenda set between program producers and consumers.
Main ideas: “television talk provides cultural studies with an important bridge between the social and the textual” (25).
-television is a social practice—both a means of interaction and isolation, as well as a valuable and common discursive currency in everyday cultural economy.
-soap operas are not escapist, but are instead a forum for social, family, political, and other discussions, as a result of the agenda set between program producers and consumers.
-the interpretation—the reading—of the program is ongoing and adaptive, stretching far beyond the initial moment of consumption.
-the program serves as a platform for social interaction; a place from which viewers could actively transition from “program discourse” to personal and professional discourse.
-discussion of events in a program leads to discussion of events in viewers’ lives, events otherwise too painful to speak about elsewhere.
-interweaving actual events with program fiction leads to the creation of a culture of viewers.
IV. Television and Mass Culture
Dutch cultural critic Ien Ang took up the soap opera idea in a study in which she placed an add in a popular magazine soliciting viewer opinion about the television series Dallas. Forty-two responses, both from critics and supporters of the program led Ang to the conclusion that the program was popular for its “emotional realism,” and that the degree to which viewers found Dallas good or bad was based on their perception of its realism (good) or lack of authenticity (bad). Interestingly, Ang found that elements of Dallas that were unreal and regarded as such at the denotative level were not considered unrealistic at the connotative level.
Much of the program’s popularity was based on the ease with which viewers could transition between the fiction of the program and the everyday lives. It gives rise to the “melodramatic imagination.” Essentially, Ang found that Dallas “is not a compensation for the presumed drabness of everyday life, nor a flight from it, but a dimension of it” (27).
From these findings, Ang posits “the ideology of mass culture,” the idea that “popular culture is the result of capitalist commodity production and is therefore subject to the laws of the capitalist market economy; the result of which is the seemingly endless circulation of degraded commodities, whose only real significance is that they make a profit for their producers” (28). This theory enabled Ang to lump viewers into four categories: those who strongly dislike the program because it is an example of mass culture; those who give the program an ironical viewing, in which the program is mocked for its melodrama and transformed into a comedic program—the pleasure of viewing results from the fact that the program is, in fact, bad and worthy of mockery; fans, who internalize the ideology of mass culture and appreciate the program for what it is; and the populist, who views with the contention that it is pointless to pass aesthetic judgment on the tastes of others. The first three positions signify an unequal struggle between those who argue from within the security of mass culture, and those who resist it.
Ang concludes that the popularity of such programs lie in their ability to “construct imaginary solutions for real contradictions. . .which in their fictional simplicity and their simple fictionality step outside the tedious complexity of social relations of dominance and subordination” (31).
Main ideas: “popular culture is the result of capitalist commodity production and is therefore subject to the laws of the capitalist market economy; the result of which is the seemingly endless circulation of degraded commodities, whose only real significance is that they make a profit for their producers” (28).
-there is an unequal struggle between those who argue from within the security of mass culture, and those who resist it.
- the popularity of such programs lie in their ability to “construct imaginary solutions for real contradictions. . .which in their fictional simplicity and their simple fictionality step outside the tedious complexity of social relations of dominance and subordination” (31).
V. Fiske’s Two Economies
Chapter two concludes with John Fiske’s argument that television inhabits two economies: financial, concerned with exchange values; and cultural, centered around “meanings, pleasures, and social identities” (32). Resistance to the power of the powerful in Western societies takes two forms: semiotic, concerned with meanings, pleasures and social identities; and social, dealing with transformations of the socio-economic system. The concepts are related, though autonomous. Popular culture is thus involved in the struggle between consensus and conflict, a place where the “hegemonic forces of homogeneity are always met by the resistance of heterogeneity” (33)
Fiske recognizes popular culture as a site of struggle between dominant forces, and diverts attention to how theses forces are coped with, resisted, or evaded.
Main ideas: Resistance to the power of the powerful in Western societies takes two forms: semiotic, concerned with meanings, pleasures and social identities; and social, dealing with transformations of the socio-economic system. The concepts are related, though autonomous.
- Popular culture is thus involved in the struggle between consensus and conflict, a place where the “hegemonic forces of homogeneity are always met by the resistance of heterogeneity” (33).
Key Terms:
Ideology of Mass Culture
Cultural Economy
Discourse
Encoding
Decoding:
Dominant-hegemonic
Negotiated
Oppositional
People:
John Storey
Stuart Hall
David Morley
Dorothy Hobson
Mary Ellen Brown
Tamar Liebs
Elihu Katz
Ien Ang
John Fiske
Questions:
1. What do you make of Storey’s objection to Hobson’s notion of infinite readings? (23)
2. Do you agree with Hobson’s idea that television programs can lead to discussion of events in viewers’ lives, events otherwise too painful to speak about elsewhere? Why or why not?
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Hall article abstract
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.
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.
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.
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