An Introduction to Cultural Studies- Simon During

the following write up on An Introduction to Cultural Studies is by Dhanya Joy

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The cultural studies deal with the study of culture from a sociological rather than an aesthetic viewpoint. The early cultural studies were an engaged form of analysis, because it studied about the social inequalities. The theory of cultural studies is different from the objective social sciences. It relied more on the literary criticism which considered more political.

The rapid development of Cultural Studies as a “new discipline” is closely related to the progress of postmodernism. It may even be considered the real product of the era. Postmodernism opens the paradigm of mini narratives instead of grand narratives, and cultural studies applies the paradigm that “culture” is not an abbreviation of “high culture”. Text, for cultural studies, is an object of discussion, and consequently it’s not merely written, because anything can be text. Cultural studies considers cultural text to be mode of representation, in which cultural studies sees its form and meaning make sense only when there is an examination of its intersections in all complexity. Text is the product of a complex interaction of production, response, and reception.

Simon During noted that cultural-studies appears as a field of study in Great Britain in the 1950s out of Leavisism. From this fact, should easily understand that this study is still closely related to the study of literature, and this consequently means that any methods one has used with literature may be applied to cultural studies as well. However, for one or more reasons, people are probably led into confusion as the object of discussion in cultural studies is not merely a piece of canonical literature. Even, in its development cultural studies tends to grasp or to pierce into any kinds of text, because for cultural studies anything can be text. This condition will surely remind us of the phenomenon of postmodernism which “completes” the era of modernism. Therefore, we may be certain that cultural studies stands as an extension of literary studies and develops in accordance with the progression of postmodernism’s philosophical thought.

According to During ‘culture’ was not an abbreviation of a ‘high culture’ assumed to have constant value across time and space. It is an extension of literary studies in which it struggles not to be trapped by the canon created by the modernists, and as a result this field of study has an extensive range in terms of objects of discussion and, consequently, theories. Since ‘culture’ is not the abbreviation of ‘high-culture’, the understanding of text is also developed. Simon During said that culture was broken down into discrete messages, ‘signifying practices’ or ‘discourses’ which were distributed by particular institutions and media. Since the understanding of text (in literary studies) is an object of discussion, cultural studies extend the paradigm of text to that which is not only written and canonical, because text is a mode of representation.

Cultural studies looks at various kinds of texts within the context of cultural practice, that is, the work, production, and material stuff of daily life, marked as it is by economics and class, by politics, gender, and race, by need and desire. The term cultural studies itself, of course, suggests that it is the study of culture, or, more particularly, the study of contemporary culture. Even assuming that we know precisely what ‘contemporary culture’ is, it can be analysed in many ways – sociologically, for instance, by ‘objectively’ describing its institutions and functions as if they belong to a large, regulated system; or economically, by describing the effects of investment and marketing on cultural production. This means cultural studies should be a cultural analysis of a text from some aspects. It examines the form and structure of cultural texts as they create meaning. Raymond William also noted that this study of culture is interdisciplinary and broad..

Simon During’s An Introduction to Cultural Studies is a wide-ranging and stimulating introduction to the history and theory of Cultural Studies from Leavisism, through the era of the CCCS, to the global nature of contemporary Cultural Studies. Each thematic section examines and explains a key topic within Cultural Studies. This includes time, space, media and the public sphere, identity, sexuality and gender and value.

The most basic and most radical assumption of cultural studies is that the basic unit of investigation is always relationships, and that anything can only truly be understood relationally; thus, studying culture means studying the relationships between configurations of cultural texts and practices on the one hand, and everything that is not in the first instance cultural, including economics, social relations and differences, national issues, social institutions, and so forth on the other. It involves mapping connections, to see how those connections are being made and where they can be remade. As a result, cultural studies always involves the study of contexts sets of relations located and circumscribed in time and space, and defined by questions. And cultural studies is always interdisciplinary because understanding culture requires looking at culture's relationship to everything that is not culture. Moreover, cultural studies is committed to a radical contextualism; it is a rigorous attempt to contextualize intellectual work. This contextualism shapes the project of cultural studies profoundly, and involves a commitment to complexity, contingency, and constructionism.

Cultural studies refuses to reduce the complex to the simple, the specific to the exemplary, and the singular to the typical. It refuses to see this complexity as an inconvenience to be acknowledged only after the analysis. It employs a conjunctive logic where one thing is true, another may also be true and thereby refuses the illusion of a total, all-encompassing answer. It avoids confusing projects with accomplishments; and it refuses to put off until later the resistances, the interruptions, and the fractures and contradictions of the context.

Cultural studies believes in contingency; it denies that the shape and structure of any context is inevitable. But cultural studies does not simply reject essentialism, for anti-essentialism is, in its own way, another version of a logic of necessity: in this case, the necessity that there are never any real relations. It is committed to what we might call an anti-anti-essentialism, to the view that there are relationships in history and reality, but they are not necessary. They did not have to be that way, but given that they are that way, they have real effects. Above all, there are no guarantees in history that things will form in some particular way, or work out in some particular way. Reality and history are, so to speak, up for grabs, never guaranteed. It operates in the space between, on the one hand, absolute containment, closure, complete and final understanding, total domination, and, on the other hand, absolute freedom and possibility, and openness.

Finally, cultural studies assumes that relationships are produced or constructed, and not simply always the result of chance. The relations that make up a context are real through the various activities of different agents and agencies, including people and institutions. Insofar as we are talking about the human world—and even when we are describing the physical world, we are within the human world as well—cultural practices and forms matter because they constitute a key dimension of the ongoing transformation or construction of reality. However, the effects of cultural practices are always limited by the existence of a material or nondiscursive reality. Cultural studies, then, does not make everything into culture, nor does it deny the existence of material reality. It does not assume that culture, by itself, constructs reality. To say that culture is constitutive—that it produces the world, along with other kinds of practices does not mean that real material practices are not being enacted, or that real material conditions do not both enable and constrain the ways in which reality functions and can be interpreted. Cultural studies is, in the first instance, concerned with cultural practices. To put it simply, the culture we live in, the cultural practices we use, and the cultural forms we place upon and insert into reality, have consequences for the way reality is organized and lived.

The commitment to a radical contextualism affects every dimension of cultural studies, including its theory and politics, its questions and answers, and its analytic vocabulary—which includes concepts of culture (text, technology, media), power, and social identity. Cultural studies derives its questions, not from a theoretical tradition or a disciplinary paradigm but from a recognition that the context is always already structured, not only by relations of force and power, but also by voices of political anger, despair, and hope. Cultural studies attempts to engage the existing articulations of hope and disappointment in everyday life and to bring the messy and painful reality of power as it operates both outside and inside the academy into the practice of scholarship.

There are two features that characterized cultural studies, when it first appeared in Great Britain in the 1950s. It concentrated on ‘subjectivity’ which means that it studied culture in relation to individual lives, breaking with social scientific positivism or ‘objectivism’.

Cultural studies insist that one cannot just ignore or accept the division and struggle in the society. It was developed out of Leavisism through Hoggart and Williams, who came from working-class families. They wrote in the interests of the society and their own individual experiences. According to the Leavisites, culture was not simply a leisure activity. Because it is all about forming mature individuals with concrete and balanced sense of life.

Culture could also be seen as a form of ‘governmentality’, that is, a means to produce conforming or ‘docile’ citizens, most of all through the education system. The most sophisticated concept that emerged in cultural studies was that of articulation. It emphasizes how hegemony mutates in terms of its elements and contents. It is a process of making alliances and connections, releasing energies rather than of presenting a static set of values and knowledge’s.

The notion of polysemy remains limited in that it still works at the level of individual signs as discrete signifying units. Cultural studies has been interested in how groups with least power practically develop their own readings of, and uses for, cultural products – in fun, in resisitance, or to articualate their own identity. Theorists have pointed out the fact that private discourse always comes from somewhere else and its meanings cannot be wholly mastered by those who use it. The problem confronted this new model of cultural studies as, it broke society down into fractions united by sexuality, gender, or ethnicity.

Cultural studies see theory as a resource to be used to respond strategically to a particular project, to specific questions and specific contexts. The measure of a theory's truth is its ability to enable a better understanding of a particular context through experiences. Thus, cultural studies cannot be identified with any single theoretical paradigm or tradition. It continues to wrestle with various modern and postmodern philosophies, including Marxism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism.

Cultural studies do not begin with a general theory of culture but rather views cultural practices as the intersection of many possible effects. It does not start by defining culture or its effects, or by assembling, in advance, a set of relevant dimensions within which to describe particular practices. Instead, cultural practices are places where different things can and do happen. The common assumption that cultural studies is a theory of ideology and representation, or of identity and subjectivity, or of the circulation of communication, or of hegemony, is mistaken. Cultural studies often address such issues, but that is the result of analytic work on the context rather than an assumption that overwhelms the context.

Cultural studies has taken the force of arguments against ‘meta-discourses’ and does not want the voice of the academic theorist to drown out other less often heard voices. Like the other studies, cultural studies are politically driven. It is committed to understanding power—or more accurately, the relationships of culture, power, and context—and to producing knowledge that might help people understand what is going on in the world and the possibilities that exist for changing it.

The study of cultural studies, then, is a way of politicizing theory and theorizing politics. Cultural studies is always interested in how power infiltrates, contaminates, limits, and empowers the possibilities that people possess to live their lives in dignified and secure ways. Cultural studies also approaches power and politics as complex, contingent, and contextual phenomena and refuses to reduce power to a single dimension or axis, or to assume in advance what the relevant sites, goals, and forms of power and struggle might be. Consequently, it advocates a flexible, somewhat pragmatic or strategic, and often modest approach to political programs and possibilities. For cultural studies, knowledge based on statistical techniques belongs to the processes which ‘normalize’ society and stand in opposition to cultural studies’ respect for the marginal subject. The study of Cultural theories carries the notion of ‘popular’ and the everyday life of the individuals. Now we need to think of cultural studies not as a traditional field or discipline, nor as a mode of interdisciplinarity, but a field within multidisciplinarity, which thinks of engaged cultural studies less as an academic specialism than as a critical moment within a larger, dispersed, not wholly politicized field, is, then, a way of shoring up differences and counter-hegemony inside the humanities in an epoch of global managerialism.

Works cited

www.wordiq.com/definition/Cultural_studies

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/routledge/09502386.html

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Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies- Stuart Hall

the following write up on Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies is by Rinu Dina John

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Stuart Hall is one of the most influential figures in cultural studies. He was part of the time when cultural studies was originated as an academic discourse or discipline. In this essay he questions the seriousness with which this discourse is engaged with a personal version of the history of the cultural studies.

According to Hall cultural studies emerged as a disciple out of the 1950s disintegration of classical Marxism and its thesis that the economic base has a determining effect on the cultural superstructure. He speaks of two interruptions that the trajectories of cultural studies faced namely feminism and racism. But what is stable in cultural studies is the conjunctional knowledge based on the idea of Gramsci. It means knowledge situated in and applicable to, specific and immediate political/historical circumstances. In addition, the awareness that the structure of representations which forms culture’s alphabet and grammar are instruments of social power requiring critical examination. What he does is to trace the history of the development of cultural studies. He does it by referring to some theoretical legacies, namely the New Left and some theoretical moments, namely Racism and Feminism

According to Hall cultural studies has a discursive formation in Foucault’s sense. It means it has no single origin. It is a multiple discourse and has many histories. It is always a set of unstable formation. It has ‘centre’ only in quotation. It has many trajectories. It does not mean it is not a organised or policed disciplinary area. It means cultural studies refuse to be a meta narrative. It is a project that is open to that which it does not know. But at the same time just because there is no fixed centre doesn’t mean that there is no possibility of taking a particular position and arguing for it. He doesn’t believe that knowledge is close but he believes in arbitrary closure. This is what allows for politics. Every practice that intends to make a difference in the world should have some points of difference or distinction. It is the question of positionalities. But we should always keep in mind that positions are never absolute or final.

Cultural studies in the academies of the advanced capitalist countries have transformed the object of studies in the humanities. In particular, in English departments, cultural studies has challenged the predominance of the governing categories of literary studies (the "canon," the homogeneous "period," the formal properties of genre, the literary object as autonomous and self-contained) in the interest of producing "readings" of all texts of culture and inquiring into the reproduction of subjectivities. To this end, pressure has been placed on disciplinary boundaries, the methods which police these boundaries, and modes of interpretation and critique have been developed which bring, for example, "economics" and "politics" to bear on the formal properties of texts. In addition, the lines between "high culture" and "mass culture" have been relativized, making it possible to address texts in terms of their social effectivity rather than their "inherent" literary, philosophical or other values.

He speaks of one of the important theoretical legacies part of the origin of cultural studies namely the emergence of New Left in Britain with the disintegration of classical Marxism. Classical Marxist thesis was that economic base has a determining effect on the cultural superstructure. Classical Marxism was mainly engaged with power, capital, exploitation etc. and did not talk about the objective cultural studies such as culture, ideology, language, the symbolic etc.

He also speaks of certain movements that provoke theoretical movements. There were two such movements in relation to cultural studies. They are racism and feminism. These two movements were considered as interruptions that the cultural studies faced. These interruptions led to new theoretical formulations within cultural studies. These interruptions are good.

An Intelligent Critic's Guide to Indian Cinema- Ashish Nandy

the following write up on An Intelligent Critic's Guide to Indian Cinema is by Abhay Shetty

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1. The Cultural Matrix of the popular film.

The writer Ashish Nandy makes a clear distinction on how the cultural capital of Indian is much influenced by the middle class of the urban India be it cinema, cricket or anyother forms of entertainment, Nandy goes on explaining that the urban middle class politics which is only a part compared to the rest of the Indian rural population has a mojor influences in giving momentum to these areas of entertainment. " Urban India also would continue to provide a critical mass sustaining a level of intellectual activity and creative initiative difficult or impossible to achieve in smaller Third World societies ". Claiming that these urban middle class are the intellectual powers which sustain and encourage creative initiations which is assumed to be impossible by the third world countries. Thanks to its political presence compared to the other third world countries which have in compare provided to its westernized bourgeoisie." These classes have often provided the baseline for a critique of modernity as well as of traditions". Thinker and social reformers of Ninteenth and twetieth century of India have all provided for such a intellectual growth to the middle class in India irrespective of the social background of these reformers like Rabindranath Tagore , Bankmchandra Chattopadhyay, Gandhi and Bhimrao Ambedkar. " They Shared an Idiom and culture", and this is because they shared the cultural intellectual together irrespective of their social backdrop. Intellectuals or creative individuals from cinema , art and literature are forming a definite culture that mediates between the classical and the non-classical or folk, and between West and East. Nandy terms another set of the divients of the culture as Low-brow middle class for they 'vulgate' the new concepts of ethics and conciousness into the masses. Stating them to be 'underground' which has taken a legitamate popular form, threatening the high culture of the middle class.

The need for this new self assertion of the low -brow is because " The accelerating process of social change in India uprooted increasing number of people from their folk traditions".For the middle class it was their relatibility to the sanskrit tradition and for the upper class it was westernized concepts so the low-brow needed a self assertion of their culture to mingle in this melting pot of the urban. And this clash of the middle class and the low brow was in a sense resolved with the with a new fromation of expression " a middle -brow medium of self expression to serve as a new urban folk expression and a popular form of classicism". Thus a new mass culture formed. The new culture thus formed has certain traits of its own. The first one being including the elemants of the low-brow dominant and laying of the western high cultuer which was once prominant in the Indian Middle class culture. But the new mass culture doesnt reject the classical culture but inly undeplays it .Secondly there is a sense of prdictability and readability in the then popular culture of the urban middle class. Where as the urban mass culture now is purely on the creativity of the producer that cares to stimulate the sensibility of the masses. The third is that popular culture plays a mediatory rle between the classical and the folk , modern and tradition which is fragmented geograohically .where as in mass culture it has a very pan india effect reaching out to people through out the nation. The fouth being that the mass culture is not being critical of the of the current political culture and political sterotypes.where as the popular middle class culture relies on concepts such as sanity, maturity and normality .

Thus leading us to the common features and differences between art films, middle-brow cinema and commercial cinema . "All three depend on middle class for legitamacy and critical acclaim" by stating so Nandy also give middle class a certain power fram or structure to value all the three bases of cinema. Firstly according to the writer the commercial films center around the value system of the society basing itself on subtle criticizm of society but yet ahdering to the larger social mores and values. Thus criticising the middle class values to too. Where as art cinema or high-brow cinema writer terms it give a ruthless criticism of the social potholes and and gives a deep analysis of cinema as such. Where as the middle bro cinema fails to have to arty face of the high brow cinema but constantly try to achieve the artiness among their cinema. Which carries on the tradition od "good popular cinema".The writer goes on making such distinctions from one genre of cinema to the other.

2. Beyond Oriental Despotism

Politics and femininity in Satyajit Ray

In this section the writer shows how in Satyajit Ray's movie Shatranj how the west and the east is percieved and the western notions of Masculinities are projected as against that of eastern notions of femininity.The femininity is only potrayed at the expense of masculinity.

3. Shyam Benegal and the case of missing Krsna

Nandy potrays how the Indian epics do not have Hero in sense of the greek myths. but also touches upon where the intellectuals felt a need for a Karna to be potrayed as a hero in the curret day scenario.

4. The Double in Commercial Films

The use of double role as an alter ego is being projected to that of an fight between the eastern and the western concepts of the double, in reference to main stream Indian cinema.

5. Cultural Spaces and Aesthetic Spaces

The art films and the main stream indian movies share different spaces and with respect to their spaces they function accordingly. Nandy also adds on that these spaces should not be interchanged because the masses do not recognise the the aesthetics spaces and only rely on the cultural spaces of the movies or cinema.

Bibilography :

1. Nandy, Ashis; 1995; Intelligent Film Critic’s Guide to Indian Cinema; The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves; New Delhi; OUP; pp 196-236

Cultural Industry Reconsidered -Theodor W. Adorno

the following write up on Culture Industry Reconsidered is by Inchara Ravi

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Culture Industry Reconsidered was written by Theodor W. Adorno, a German philosopher. He was born on September 11, 1903. He belonged to the Frankfurt School of social theory. The Frankfurt School takes its name from the Institute for Social Research established in Frankfurt, Germany in 1923. Adorno along with Max Horkheimer published a book named ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ in 1947. In this book they use the term ‘cultural industry’ for the first time.

In the essay Cultural Industry Reconsidered, Adorno replaces the expression ‘mass culture’ with ‘culture industry'. This is to avoid the popular understanding of mass culture as the culture that arises from the masses. He prefers calling it ‘culture industry’ because of the commodification of the culture forms or artistic objects. He opines that the cultural forms create a means of income for their creators and profit has become more important than the artistic expression. Hence, culture has turned into an industry and the cultural objects are looked at as products. One of the characteristics of cultural industry is that it intentionally integrates both the high and low art.

By referring to the term industry, Adorno does not point to the production process instead he is looking at the ‘standardization of the thing itself’ and to the rationalization of distribution techniques and not strictly to the production process. It is industrial more in a sociological sense, in terms of incorporation of the industrial forms of organization even though nothing is manufactured. He also makes clear the difference between the technique used in cultural industry and the technique used in works of art. In the works of art the technique refers to the formal organization of the object, with its inner logic, where as in cultural industry it refers to the distribution and the mechanical production. Thus technique in cultural industry is external to the object where as in the works of art it is internal. Adorno opines that a work of art is not different than a commercial product in the industrial era.

Adorno says that the masses are secondary and are ‘an appendage of the machinery’ in the cultural industry. He argues that, the culture industry claims to bring order in the chaotic world it provides human being with something like a standard and an orientation, yet the thing that it is claiming to preserve is actually being destroyed. The mass media is supposed to enlighten the mass, to bring about rational thinking and also demystification. But mass media is deceiving people in the name of enlightenment. They are actually controlling the people rather than liberating their thoughts.

The current culture industry acts as if it satisfies the consumers’ need for entertainment, but masks the manner by which these needs are standardized, manipulating the consumers to obsess about its products. A relevant example for Adorno’s view on mass media is cinema and television. Each film is the replica of what has been already done, but people believe it to be different from what has been done before. As a result of this critical thinking, individuality of an object or an idea is lost due to the commodification by the cultural industry.

The essay also makes a reference to Benjamin’s theory of the ‘aura’. It says that the Culture Industry doesn’t have an alternative to the aura. Hence, it is going against its own ideologies. Adorno's concept of culture industry indicates the necessity for rethinking his theory of mass culture.

References

http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC20folder/AdornoMassCult.html

EMPIRE, NATION, AND LITERARY TEXT- Susie Tharu and Dr. K. Lalitha

the following write up on Empire, Nation and the Literary Text is by Rekha Kamath

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The essay ''Empire, Nation and the Literary Text'' is a combined effort of Prof. Susie Tharu and Dr. K. Lalitha. By using ''Radhika Santwanam'' (Appeasing Radhika), a classic work of the eighteenth century Telugu poetess ''Muddupalani'' as an example, the authors have attempted to portray the imbalance in the cultural authority during the colonial period, and its changing trends. In the introductory section, the essay reveals the efforts made by Bangalore Nagaratnamma, philanthropist and savant of the twentieth century, in trying to bring back to the public eye the great classic of Muddupalani which had gone unnoticed.

Muddupalani was a courtesan attached to the retinue of Pratapsimha (1739-1763), a Nayaka king of Tanjavur. Traditionally the only women who had an access to scholarship and arts like dancing, music, and literature were courtesans. Many of such women commanded respect for their learning and their accomplishments. One such accomplishment was Muddupalani’s Radhika Santwanam. It consists of 584 poems divided into four sections. The poems are stories involving Radha, Krishna’s aunt, who brings up Ila Devi from childhood and then gets her married to Krishna. The poems are a detail description of Ila Devi’s puberty and her consummation of her marriage with Krishna. In these poems Radha advises Ila Devi how to respond to Krishna’s love-making, and Krishna how to tenderly handle Ila Devi. At a point of time, the poems change course and Radha, unable to bear the pain and grief of her own separation from Krishna, whom she desires herself, breaks down and rages against Krishna for having abandoned her. When Krishna gently appeases her, she is comforted by his loving embrace. This is what gives Muddupalai’s creation its title.

The introduction of the essay shows the serious implications of the efforts made by Bangalore Nagaratnamma in reprinting the classic ''Radhika Satwanam'' (Appeasing Radhika) in 1910, during the reign of the British in India. She did so with a very clear intention of making the classic work of Muddupalani available to the public again. But this resulted in Muddupalani’s work being criticized as obscene and was banned from being printed, published, or even read. Even though the ban was lifted with the winning of Independence, the text didn’t achieve the recognition that it deserved. Radhika Santwanam gives a chance to take a peek into the ideological conjunctures of the last 250 years of Indian critiques.In the sections following the introduction, the authors attempt to "trace the changing political economies of gender, caste and class, serviced in turn by changes in literary taste as well as by altogether new notions of the function of literature and the nature of the literary curriculum."

The third section of the essay elaborates on the accomplishments of courtesans or ganika during Maddupalai’s time. Unlike the non-Muslim women upper caste women of that time, this section of the community got a chance to get well-versed with the literature of various languages including Sanskrit. As the culture of the Thanjavur court grew into a singularly composite one, the national culture also showed signs of miscegenation. The Thanjavur rulers were displaced by a Maratha dynasty and therefore there was a cultural influence too. This also showed changehad an impact in Muddupalani’s writings. Verses and secular prose narratives started replacing the poems. But what gave Muddupalani's works their uniqueness were the subversion of the received form. Usually it is the man is the lover and the woman is the loved one. But in Radhika Santwanam the woman's sensuality is at the center. "Legitimation of female desire and its endorsement of a woman's right to pleasure" is what makes Radhika Santwanam a unique classic.

The fourth section of the essay concentrates on the reason for the shift in ideologies. The work that was uncontroversial during its time became totally unacceptable when Bangalore Nagaratnamma brought its reprinted version into the open in 1911, the time when British rule in India was at its peak. The era saw major shifts in political, economic, and social ideologies. Thanjavur lost its relevance as the British started taking over places that were once ruled by Indian rulers. Artists, singers, dancers, especially the women, lost their status in the society and were forced to take up peury and prostitution.

The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception- Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

the following write up on The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception is by Jaimon Antony

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The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception is an excerpt from the final chapter of critical theorists Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) and Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) Dialectic of Enlightenment. The book is the cornerstone of critical theory and essentially claims that science is irrational and that the Enlightenment is a trick and nothing happened during that time period. Adorno claims that enlightenment was supposed to bring pluralism and demystification but instead society is said to have suffered a major fall as it is corrupted by capitalist industry with exploitative motives. Both Adorno and Hokeimer belong to the Frankfurt school which tried to theorize ‘cultural Industry’ as being controlled by the Capitalist Economy.

Elements

This essay remains a classical denunciation of ‘cultural Industry’. This is a socialist approach to the industrialization of cultural commodities. Adorno and Hokheimer are of the opinion that the transition of the cultural production from the artisanal stage to the industrial stage has made the society lose its capacity to nourish true freedom and Individuality – as well as the ability to represent the real conditions of existence. According to them the modern cultural industry produces standardized goods to satisfy the larger need of the capitalist economy.

Adorno and Horkheimer begin by defining the “culture industry” as an economic union of microcosm and macrocosm in a society of producers and consumers united by work and pleasure whose technology does not extend beyond standardization and mass production. They move through all aspects of popular culture (from their time period)-radio, movies and music- applying the Marxist idea of alienation of labor to the condition of consumers in a post-Enlightenment capitalist society. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that since the Enlightenment popular culture has become a sort of factory, producing standardized cultural goods to manipulate the masses into passivity, which they term the “culture industry”. Horkheimer and Adorno viewed the mass-produced culture as a threat to true or “high” arts. They argue that the “culture industry”, by trying to satisfy the demands of the capitalist economy, deceives the masses, homogenizes culture, and creates false needs.

The role of capitalism is key, “the dependence of the most powerful broadcasting company on the electrical industry, or of the motion picture industry on the banks, is characteristic of the whole sphere, whose individual branches are themselves economically interwoven.” Horkheimer and Adorno claim that the media--advertisements, movies, radio broadcasts--are essentially propaganda used to maintain society’s state of false consciousness; this propaganda hide the reality of domination and oppression of the masses under capitalism.

The essay stresses that culture industry has become so successful that ‘art’ and ‘life’ are no longer wholly separable. The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture Industry and flawless techniques used in the expressions of art duplicate empirical objects in such a way that the consumer can’t really make distinction between what is real and what is unreal. This Idea was later taken up by theorists of postmodernism to reinstate that real life has become indistinguishable from art. while emphasizing the fact that the ‘mass culture’ is a threat to the ‘high art’, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that there can be no more original culture – that there can be no art in modern capitalism.

Observations

Adorno and Hokheimer are too cynical about the ‘cultural Industry’ that they fail to see the opportunities and collective creativity which ‘cultural Industry’ provides for all kinds of Individuals. They become highly pessimistic that they even undermine the Marxist notion that the consumers will be able to overthrow or overcome the capitalist manipulation and deception of the society.

References

· Adorno, T., & Horkheimer, M. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press (2002)

· During, Simon. The Cultural Studies Reader. Routledge( 1999 )

· Jameson,Fredric. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press. (1991)

Encoding/Decoding- Stuart Hall

the following is a write up on Encoding/Decoding by Rini Thomas

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In this paper I have tried to attempt my understanding of Stuart Hall’s work. The essay mainly focuses on the process of communication that has been commonly understood by the mass in terms of an encoder, the message and the decoder. Here it is a set pattern where the sender is the authoritative source for the receiver in terms of the sent message. But there is a necessity to rethink and restructure the whole stereotypical notion. The already existing structure is linear in motion and so there needs to be a change in the structure. The way in which Hall looks into is a more valid structure so to speak in a distinctive way. This is a much more sustained approach where the process is structured – production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction. Here the structure has taken an alteration from the already existing one, where, the sent message is taken or understood or interpreted in different ways by different audience. This structure has been adopted or incorporated by Hall from Marx’s Grundrisse and Capital, which shows how this structure sustains a form of passage.

The focus is on meanings and messages in the form of certain vehicles which are encoded and how it is transferred to the various audience. This can be paralleled with “Reader Response Criticism” where the reader becomes the centre focal point. Language forms a completely vital source here as language is cultural based and the meanings are comprehended through language by the mass in various ways. For example a poem like “Telephone Conversation” by Wole Soyinka written by an Afro-American can be understood by an Indian audience through their understanding of the existing oppression by the hegemony in terms of Dalits. “The ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’, he argues are relatively autonomous and the communicative process is of determinate moments” (p 167). He says raw history cannot be transmitted by a television newscast. For example, a movie in the caliber of Troy is not the literary text itself. It is an offshoot with some changes and the audience views it differently.

Further, Hall in detail elaborates how the television communication process is a labour process through Capital. There are various institutional structures that go into the production of a programme. Hall states that, “Production here constructs the message” (p 167). Figure 1 clearly states how the process takes place. Before the encoding takes place there are certain plans in terms of framing the technical infrastructure, relations of production and framework of knowledge which is encoded (meaning structures 1) then transferred to a programme as a meaningful discourse which is then decoded (meaning structures 2) and then interpreted into various technical infrastructures, relations of production and frameworks of knowledge. He also focuses on the medium ‘television’, how it is a complex sign which is three dimensional, transferred to a two dimensional image and exhibited. The images exhibited in television are real and not natural. The visual and the aural both are conglomerated and they form an integral part of the production even in the depiction of a cow. Here we come across both connotation and denotation. Denotation is the literal meaning which is cow that denotes a domestic animal and from there connotation occurs; the identification of the cow’s colour or physical attributes, etc. But anything and everything is cultural bound. Culture brings in dominant meanings. The problem with the mass is that of ‘subjective capacity’ as opposed to the ‘objective’. We have different subjective ideals and not just one objective view.

An old-fashioned Indian would consider the change in dressing style (modern) to be spoiling the ‘Indianness’ whereas a youngster would argue saying that it is necessary. The subjectivity changes from person to person.

Hall frames three hypothetical positions from which decodings of a television discourse may be constructed, viz-a-viz, the dominant hegemonic position, the negotiated code and the oppositional code. The hegemonic code is always the dominant followed by the bourgeois, the negotiated code followed by the majority and the oppositional code which is just the minority which accepts it. The whole component takes us to the theory propounded by Ferdinand de Saussure, where the sign, signifier and the signified changes from person to person, from culture to culture and from school of thought to another. Thus this essay focuses on how the entire communicative notion can be reframed and agreed upon by the mass.

Notes

Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding*”. Birmingham, 1973.

Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses- Louis Althusser

the following write up on Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses is by Nidhi V. Krishna

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In his essay, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Louis Althusser demonstrates that in order to exist, a social formation is required to essentially, continuously and perpetually reproduce the productive forces (labour-power), the conditions of production and the relations of production. The reproduction of productive forces is ensured by the wage system which pays a minimum amount to the workers so that they appear to work day after day, thereby limiting their vertical mobility. The reproduction of the conditions of production and the reproduction of the relations of production happens through the State Apparatuses which are insidious machinations controlled by the capitalist ruling ideology in the context of a class struggle to repress, exploit, extort and subjugate the ruled class.

The Marxist spatial metaphor of the edifice, describes a social formation, constituted by the foundational infrastructure i.e., the economic base on which stands the superstructure comprising of two floors: the Law-the State (politico-legal) and Ideology. Althusser extends this topographical paradigm by stating that the Infrastructural economic base is endowed with an “index of effectivity” which enables it to ultimately determine the functioning of the superstructure. He scrutinizes this structural metaphor by discussing the superstructure in detail. A close study of the superstructure is necessitated due to its relative autonomy over the base and its reciprocal action on the base.

Althusser regards the State as a repressive apparatus which is used by the ruling class as a tool to suppress and dominate the working class. According to Althusser, the basic function of the Repressive State Apparatus (Heads of State, government, police, courts, army etc.) is to intervene and act in favour of the ruling class by repressing the ruled class by violent and coercive means. The Repressive state apparatus (RSA) is controlled by the ruling class, because more often than not, the ruling class possesses State power.

Althusser takes the Marxist theory of the State forward by distinguishing the repressive State Apparatus from the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA). The ISAs consist of an array of institutions and multiple realities that propagate a wide range of ideologies such as Religious ISA, Educational ISA, Family ISA, Legal ISA, Political ISA, Communications ISA, Cultural ISA etc. He accentuates the differences between the RSA and the ISAs as follows:

1. The RSA functions as a unified entity (an organized whole) as opposed to the ISA which is diverse and plural. However, what unites the disparate ISAs is the fact that they are ultimately controlled by the ruling ideology.

2. The RSA function predominantly by means of repression and violence and secondarily by ideology whereas the ISA functions predominantly by ideology and secondarily by repression and violence. The ISA functions in a concealed and a symbolic manner.

He declares that the School has supplanted the Church as being the crucial ISA which augments the reproduction of the relations of production (i.e., the capitalist relations of exploitation) by training the students to become productive forces (labour-power) working for and under the Capitalist agents of exploitation. The Educational ISAs, which assume a dominant role in a Capitalist economy, conceal and mask the ruling class ideology behind its liberating qualities so that their hidden agendas become inconspicuous to the parents of the students.

Althusser compares “ideology” to Freud’s “unconscious”. In the same sense that Freud had stated that the unconscious was eternal, he hypothesizes that ideology too is eternal due to its omnipresence. Therefore, ideology in general has no history.

Althusser posits that it is not possible for a class to hold State power unless and until it exercises its hegemony (domination) over and in the ISA at the same time. The importance of ISAs is understood in the wake of class struggles because ISAs are not only a crucial stake in class struggle but they are also the site of class struggle. The resistances of the exploited classes are able to find means and opportunities to express themselves in the ISAs to overpower the dominant class. An oppressed class can end its oppression by over powering the dominant/ruling class by utilizing the contradictions within the ISAs or by conquering combating positions in the ISAs during struggle.

The crux of Althusser’s argument is the structure and functioning of “ideology”. Althusser explains the structure and functioning of ideology by presenting two theses. Firstly, he posits that ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. This distortion of reality is caused by material alienation and by the active imagination of oppressive individuals who base their domination and exploitation on the falsified representations of the world in order to enslave the relatively passive minds of the oppressed. Secondly, he posits that ideology always has a material existence in the form of concrete entities or apparatuses (ISAs). Hence, an individual’s belief in various ideologies (imaginary realities) is derived from the ideas of the individual who is a subject endowed with a consciousness that is defined by the ISAs. This (false) consciousness inspires and instigates the subject to behave in certain ways, adopt certain attitudes and participate in certain regular practices which conform to the ideology within which he recognizes himself as a subject. The ideas of the subject are inscribed in the ritual practices based on the “correct” principles of that ideology. Hence, despite the imaginary distortion by ideology, a subject derives his beliefs from the ideas which become his material actions and practices governed by material rituals which are all defined by material ideological apparatus and derived from the same.

Althusser’s central thesis states that ideology transforms individuals as subjects by a process of interpellation or hailing. The Family ISA is at work even before a child is born because it predetermines the identity of the child before its birth. Hence, an individual is always-already a subject. An individual is subjected to various levels of ideological subjection and each level of subjection or each ISA that subjects the individual influences the individual’s day to day activities and thereby determines his real conditions of existence. Further, Althusser demonstrates that the recognition of oneself as a ‘free’ subject within an ideology is only a misrecognition because the notion of a ‘free’ subject in ideology is only an illusion. In reality, the subject is subjugated, limited, restricted and controlled by ideology to such an extent that he has limited freedom and diminutive individual agency. Due to this misrecognition the subject acts and practices rituals steeped in the dominant ideology that are detrimental to his/her own welfare.

Understanding Culture- Mrinalini Sebastian

the following write up on Understanding Culture is by Foram Jakhria

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Mrinalini Sebastian in her essay Understanding Culture focuses on various ways in which “Culture” has been defined and understood. She also agrees to Raymond Williams’ idea of ‘Culture’ as a synonym of ‘Civilization’. But through this essay, She tries to highlight ‘Culture’ and its meaning within the context of India – which is needed to be redefined.

Raymond Williams’ notion of Culture cannot be applied to Indian audience because his ideas are meant for his countrymen. In this essay, Sebastian cites Raymond Williams, but places her own view of Culture with relation to India specifically. She attempts to point out that Indian Culture or our understanding of ancient Indian Culture came from the descriptions, views, perspectives, photographs, etc of India collected by the colonizers or the western travelers.

Indian Culture which is known for its Religion, Temples, Classical Music, Dance, Mysticism, etc was recognized by the colonial powers. Colonizers considered Indian Culture as the one that is in opposition to their Western Culture and therefore, thought there is a need to revive Indian Culture to a large extent. For them, Indian Culture was the Culture of the ‘Other’. And what Sebastian points out by tracing this historical past that today India’s Culture has great amount of Colonial influence and impact.

Not only colonial past alone, but also Globalization and Liberalization have changed the image of our Indian Culture. Sebastian points out that our legal structures, policies, systems of Governance and Education, etc are heavily shaped by mimicking our colonial masters. Then, What is really “Indian” in it? Is what she addresses the readers to question. She throws light upon the missing ‘Indianness’ in our current Indian Culture.

In Sebastian’s view, ‘Culture’ needs to be redefined and re-understood by placing it in our own context. For this, we have to come-up with our own theories and frameworks about Culture by taking into consideration our colonial legacies and also, exploring new ways of understanding Culture by our own experiences of everyday life. The central idea of writing this essay is Understanding our own Culture by our own perspectives rather than relying on others to understand our Culture from their view points about India.

Net and Multiple Realities- Jodi Dan

the following write up on Net and Multiple Realities is by Vipin George

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There is no doubt that the Internet is a wondrous creation. The entire world is rapidly becoming obsessed with it. Everywhere you look, you are bound to see something related to the Internet. Jodi dean, in one of her most recent essays “The Net and Multiple Realities” deals with her understanding of net and the way net is perceived in the modern society. The essay is divided in two parts. The first part of the essay is centred around three issues. Firstly, what is the significance of considering net as a public sphere? There are arguments for and against this proposal. Some consider it as a public sphere as it gives opportunities for interaction, and register their thoughts and opinions in political discussions. It is almost like the way democracy functions. Democracy as a political system is based on discussion, inclusion and participation. Due to the advancement of net, there is the emergence of ‘world Public Sphere’, which means the information is no more the privilege of the elite but everyone has access to information and can register their thoughts. “The internet is a great facility to enhance democracy and individual participation in politics, only if the thoughts and voices of different people are posed properly, with organization and clarity, through a website that is recognized by the state and government, a website that has legitimacy” However, the challenge in considering net as a true public sphere is due to the fact that even today net is limited to the urban population even though it is making inroads in to the rural area. Again, people who engage on net debate and discussion are the techno-savvy elite and not the masses or the majority of the population. In my opinion, there is a long way to go before net can be considered as a true public sphere representing the masses.

Secondly, Jodi Dean tries to redefine net as communicative capitalism. The most significant aspect of net is that it is a medium of communication. Today it has become a system like capitalism with its own rules, regulations and structure. These regulatory interventions are invoked and pursued to make the net safe for commercial exchange, to protect the intranets of financial markets, establish the trust necessary for consumer confidence in online transactions, and to make appear as a public sphere what is clearly the material basis of the global economy. “Communicative capitalism designates that form of late capitalism in which values heralded as central to democracy take material form in networked communications technologies.” However, we think that net is encouraging participation but actually it is a financially mediated exchange centred on advertising, public relations and the means of mass communication. Thus, it only strengthens capitalism and the elite, and gives a false sense of participation, power and hope to the mass. Of course, this view of looking at net may be a Marxist way of perceiving the net and its role in our society. The net allegedly opens the world to everyone, regardless of race, creed, and sex which makes it democratic but still not everyone can afford to go online.

Thirdly, in order to have a critical perspective on the net and its relation to public sphere there is a need to consider public sphere as a construct, and subject it to critique. The ideology of techno-culture is centred on publicity. Publicity makes communicative capitalism seem natural and unavoidable. It gives us the matrix that tells us what to think, what to see, and what to desire. The new media is presented as the new democratic public, where we have all the privileges of democracy without the mess created by millions of people interacting together. But a closer look at the technoculure reveals that what it offers is not democracy but a communicative capitalism. As Saskia Sassen's research on the impact of economic globalization on sovereignty and territoriality makes clear, the speed, simultaneity, and interconnectivity of electronic telecommunications networks produce massive distortions and concentrations of wealth. An integral element of this communicative capitalism is the publicity. It makes today’s communicative capitalism seem perfectly natural.

In the second part of the essay Jodi defines net in terms of two concepts such as zero institution and neo-democracy. Zero institution as a concept was introduced by Claude Levi-Strauss. It means a shared understanding (assumption) that is never represented. “Like Hitler, assumes that marriage is solely for procreation . Kall assumes humans are simply “cells” in the body politic, nothing more.” (Thompson) It is an institution that has no positive function at all. Dean considers net as a zero institution because it allows myriad conflicting constituencies to understand themselves as part of the same global structure even though they disagree over that the architecture of this structure. For example, “where tradition and kinship have been superseded by modernity "the nation" takes on the role of a zero-institution."Liberals" and "conservatives" may have opposing, or even mutually exclusive, understandings about social organization but both groups agree they belong to a larger community that binds them together regardless of conflict and difference.” This conflict links net to be considered as neo-democracy. Neo-democracies are configured through contestation and conflict. It is like the public sphere that has been the site of political legitimating through discussion and debate over matters of common concern. In the same way the neo-democratic networks are contestatory networks, networks of engagements around issues of vital concern to their constituents.

Internet is here to stay and it has its wide ramifications for our social, political, economic and cultural life. It is of great help to student’s community as information and knowledge recourse have become easily available and affordable.

References

Dean, Jodi. “The Net and Multiple Realities” The Cultural Studies Reader. Eds. Simon During, London: Routledge, 2007. Print.

“Communicative Capitalism: Jodi Dean” Internet and it’s Effects. 28 Oct. 2008. Web. 5 Feb. 2011. http://mustafa-internetanditseffects.blogspot.com/2008/10/communicative-capitalism-jodi-dean.html

“Zero Institution” Ghost of a Flea. 31 August, 2005. Web. 6 Feb. 2011. http://www.ghostofaflea.com/archives/006359.html

“Zero Institution” Web. 5 Frb.2011. http://www.valdosta.edu/~tthompson/ppts/3330/fall09/kallocain3_09.pdf

A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste - Pierre Bourdieu

the following is a write up on A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste by Josy Mary Edwin

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Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) was a French sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher. His best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Bourdieu’s work is influenced by much of traditional anthropology and sociology which he undertook to synthesize into his own theory. His key terms were habitus(which is adopted through upbringing and education), capital and field. He extended the idea of capital to categories such as social, capital, cultural capital and symbolic capital. For Bourdieu each individual occupies a position in a multidimensional social space. He or she is not defined only by social class membership, but by every single kind of capital he or she can articulate through social relations.

Bourdieu claims that how one chooses to present one’s social space to the world, one’s aesthetic disposition depicts one’s status and distances oneself from lower groups. Specifically he says that these dispositions are internalized at an early age and guide the young towards their appropriate social positions, towards the behaviors that are suitable for them, and a dislike towards other behaviors. Bourdieu theorizes that class fractions which are determined by a combination of the varying degrees of social, economic and cultural capital, teach aesthetic preferences to their young.

The development of aesthetic dispositions are very largely determined by social origin rather than accumulated capital and experience over time. The acquisition of cultural capital depends heavily on the family background. People inherit their cultural attitudes and accepted definitions that their elders offer them. According to Bourdieu, tastes in food, culture and presentation are indicators of class because trends in their consumption seemingly correlate with an individual’s fit in society. He believes that class distinction and preferences are most obvious in the ordinary choices of everyday life, such as furniture, clothing or cooking. In fact the strongest and most important mark of infant learning would probably be in the tastes of food. Meals served on special occasions are an interesting indicator of the mode of self presentation adopted in showing off a life-style. The idea is that their likes and dislikes should mirror those of their associated class fractions.

The degree to which social origin affects these preferences surpasses both educational and economic capital. At equivalent levels of educational capital, social origin remains an influential factor in determining these dispositions. How one describes one’s social environment is closely related to social origin because the instinctive narrative springs from early stages of development. Also, across the divisions of labor economic constraints tend to relax without any fundamental change in the pattern of spending. This observation according to Bourdieu reinforces the idea that social origin, more than economic capital, produces aesthetic preferences because regardless of economic capability, consumption patterns remain stable..

Postmodernism or the Cultural logic of late Capitalism- Frederic Jameson

the following is a write up on Postmodernism or the Cultural logic of late Capitalism by Rungkan Leelasopawut

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In this essay, Jameson lays out the differences in culture between the modern and postmodern periods. He also devotes a lot of time to the effects of these changes on the individual. Jameson is concerned with the cultural expressions and aesthetics associated with the different systems of production. He is not interested in a mechanism of change. This is a primarily descriptive article. Jameson draws on the fields of architecture, art and other culturally expressive forms to illustrate his arguments. The heaviest emphasis is placed on architecture. It is essential to grasp postmodernism as discussed here not as a style, but as a dominant cultural form indicative of late capitalism.

Postmodernism is differentiated from other cultural forms by its emphasis on fragmentation. Fragmentation of the subject replaces the alienation of the subject which characterized modernism. Postmodernism is concerned with all surface, no substance. There is a loss of the center. Postmodernist works are often characterized by a lack of depth, a flatness. Individuals are no longer anomic, because there is nothing from which one can sever ties. The liberation from the anxiety which characterized anomie may also mean a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well. This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings are now free-floating and impersonal. Also distinctive of the late capitalist age is its focus on commodification and the recycling of old images and commodities. A prime example of this is Warhol's work, as well as Warhol himself. Jameson refers to this cultural recycling as historicism - the random cannibalization of all styles of the past. It is an increasing primacy of the 'neo' and a world transformed into sheer images of itself. the actual organic tie of history to past events is being lost.

All of these cultural forms are indicative of postmodernism, late capitalism, or what Jameson calls 'present-day multinational capitalism.' (Yessirree, Jameson is a Marxist.) Jameson claims that there has been a radical shift in our surrounding material world and the ways in which it works. He refers to an architectural example, a postmodern building Symbolic of the multinational world space which we function in daily. We, the human subjects who occupy this new space have not kept pace with the evolution which produced it. There has been a mutation in the object, unaccompanied as yet by an equivalent mutation in the subject; we do not yet possesses the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace. Therein lies the source of our fragmentation as individuals.

This latest mutation in space, postmodern hyperspace, (the Bonaventura hotel is the example) has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world. This is the symbol and analougue of our inability at present to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects. We are now a world where spatial differentiation is more important than temporal differentiation, which was dominant in past eras. Late capitalism aspires to a total space, a vastness of scale heretofore unknown.

To conclude, Jameson maintains that postmodernisms not only a currently fashionable style but the cultural dominant. Jameson points out that what modernists were once considered to be great aesthetic and highly creative and represent the urbanization is now changed. Post modernism is something that has great significant impact in every aspects of our daily live. Whether we want it or not, we will be forced to imbibe it by any means. Post modernism is nothing but the influence of media or so- called mass culture. Post modernism in short can be called as the capitalism or mass culture. Therefore post modernism has the culture of popularity.