Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Cultural Studies final
- England: Based in response to class issues
- America : Based in response to power and race issues
- Field of research and teaching
that investigates the ways in
which "culture" creates and
transforms indiviual experiences,
everyday life, social relations,
social institutions and power.
- Understanding the process
through which societies and
diverse groups within them come
to terms with history, community
life, and the challenges of the
future.
- Culture
- The word
culture
originated in
the world of
farming as a
term for
tending crops
and animals
(agriculture
- Agriculture -
meaning in the
18th century for
cultivating the
mind rather than
crops
- Then becomes associated
by the early 19th century
with a knowledge of lating
and greek and the fine arts.
Because these were
standards in a gentlemans
education, the acquisition
of culture was a sign on
ones elite status
- Ideology
- Idealist represents
something to be
strived for and for
this reason it is prone
to claims of elitism
- can refer to a
systematic body
of ideas
articulated by a
particular group
of people
- to indicate how
some texts and
practices present
disorted images
of reality
- to draw attention
to the way in which
texts (television
fiction pop songs,
novels, feature fils,
etc.) always preset
a particular image
of the world.
- operates mainly at
the level of
connotations, the
secondary, oftn
unconscious,
meanings that texts
and practices carry,
or can be made to
carry.
- not simply as a body of ideas,
but as a material practice. is
encountered in the practices
of everyday life and not simply
in certain ideas about eveday
life.
- Raymond Williams
- Made significant
contributions to our
understanding of cultural
theory, cultural history,
television, the press, radio
and advertising.
- "the analysis of culture'
outlines the three
general categories in
the definition of
culture.
- the "ideal",in which
culture is a state or
process of human
perfection, in terms
of certain absolute
or universal values
- The 'documentary'
record: the surviving
texts and practices
of a culture.
- the "social:
definition of
culture, culture is
a description of a
particular way of
life.
- when he insists on
culture as a definition of
the 'lived experience' of
'ordinary' men and
women, made in their
daily interaction with the
texts and practices of
everyday life, he finally
breaks decisively with
Leavisism.
- Marxism
- Insists that all texts and
practices must be
analyzed in relation to
their historical cultural
conditions of production
- What is text's
historical cultural
condition of
production?
- Difficult and
contentious body of
work. Body of
revolutionary theory
with the purpose of:
Changing the world,
(philosophers
interpret), Theorist
change it.
- "Marxism is the theory of how te
normaliy of our everyday
world,....... its workday habits
and its working day, its monetary
stresses and pressures on one
end and its leisure and freedom
on the other, is driven from
within by what marx called 'class
struggle'
- The Base: Economic in
nature, capitalism the
superstructure: Ideas,
beliefs, philosophy
- William
Morris
- The first Englist
Marxist, best known
as a designer and
poet, morris was,in,
his later life, also a
revolutionary
socialist.
- argued that creative
labour is not just an
activity to be enjoyed
or avoided: it is an
essential part of what
makes us human.
- Definition of art : used in
traditional forms of art
history; for morris it includes
all creative human production
- Ultimately, for
morris, art is 'the
expression of
pleasure in the
labour of
production'.
- Attempt to link
the quality of
high culture with
the fortunes of
productive labor
- Matthew
Arnold
- "culture and anarchy" - secures
and coninues to sustain his
reputation as a cultural critic.
(A poet and an Artist)
- Defines culture in idealist terms:
Something to strive for (the
opposite of culture "doing as one
likes") Individuals acting out of self
interest, without regard for the
greater good
- Argues that culture is a
combination of broad
intellectual interests with A
GOAL OF SOCIAL
IMPROVEMENT.
- Whatever goals one
pursued in life, they had
to be socially useful
- Responds to a social
transformation in Victorian
Britain in which agriculture
is replaced with the new
industrial economy.
- Louis Althusser
- most significant
contribution to the field is
his different attempts to
theorize the concept of
ideology
- According to Althusser, a social
formation consists of three
practces: the economic, the poliical
and the ideological.
- first definition of
Ideology: the claim that
idelogy - ' a system
(with its own logic and
rigour) of
representations
(images, myths, ideas
or concepts)' is a
practice through which
meand womn live their
relations to the real
condtions of existince
- RSA's - ensure physical
enforcement of the
law, primarily work by
repression (the police)
ISA's - generae beliefs
and values (family,
schools)
- Marxist Theorist
- Ferdinand de Saussure
- Develops a science of signs
based on linguistics suggesting
any language is just a complex
system of signs that express
ideas with rules that govern
their usage
- Suggests there is no natural
relationship between a
signifier (the word "dog")
and the signified (the
mental concept of the
actual animal)
- Swiss Linguist
Theorist associated
with Structuralism
- Structuralism
- Holds that al human actvity
and its products, even
perception and thought itself
are constructed and not natural
and in particular everything
has meaning because of the
language system in which we
operate
- Closely related to semiotics: the
study of signs, symbols and
communication and how
meaning is constructed and
understood
- Roland Barthes
- Demonstrates the way
Mass Media disseminates
ideological views based
on its ability to make
signs, images and
signifiers work in a
particular way, conveying
deeper mythical
meanings within popular
culture than the surface
images immediately
suggest
- Examples: Union Jack
Flag signifies: the
nation, the crown, the
empire and
"Britishness" in general
- Popular Culture
- Simply culture
that is widely
favoured or well
liked by many
people.
- it is the culture that is left over
after we have decided what is
high culture
- "Mass Culture" - a hopelessly commercial culture, mass
produced for mass consumption its audience is a mass of
non discriminating consumers.
- The culture that originates from "the People" it takes issue with
any approach that suggests that it is something imposed on "the
people from above.
- a site of struggle
between the
"resistance" of
subordinate groups
and the forces of incorporation
operating in the
interests of
dominant groups. it
is not the imposed
culture of the mass
culture theorists nor
is it an emerging
from below
spontaneousy
oppostional culture
of the people
- Mass Culture
- "one of the key terms
that governs the official
distinction between
American/unamerican.
- Aesthetic liberal position that
bemoans the fact that given the
choice the majority of the population
choose so called second and third
rate cultural texts and practices in
preference to the texts and practices
of high culture
- The corporate-liberal or
progressive evolutionist
position that claims that
popular culture serves a
benig function of
socializing people into the
pleasures of consumption
in the new capitalist
consumerist society
- The radical or
socialist position
which views mass
culture as a form of
or means to social
control
- Jacques
Lacan
- Seeks to anchor
psychoanalysis firmly in
culture rather than biology.
As he explains, his aim is to
turn the meaning of Freud's
work away from the
biological basis he would
have wished for it towards
the cultural references with
which it is shot through
- large
influence on
the study of
film.
- Born in a condition of
lack and spend our
entire lives trying to
overcome the condition.
- Lacan argues that we make a journey
through three determining stages of
development. The first is the mirror stage
the second is the fort da game and the
third is the oedipus complex.
- Slavoj
Zizek
- Aruges that reality is a
fantasy construction that
enables us to mask the
real of our desire
- Fantasy is not the same as
illusion rather fantasy
organizes how we see and
understand reality.
- our fantasies are what make us
unique they provide us with our
point of view organizing how we
see and experience the world
around us.
- it doesnt really matter
where things happen, its
kinda whats going on in
your head that makes life
interesting.
- Feminism
- Radical feminists argue that
women's oppression is the result
of the system of patriarchy, a
system of domination in which
men as a group have power over
women as a group
- Marxist feminist analysis the
ultimate source of oppression is
capitalism. The domination of
women by men is seen as a
consequence of capita's domination
over labour.
- Liberal feminism differs from both Marxist and radical
feminisms in that it does not posit a system patriarchy
or capitalism - determining the oppression of women.
Instead it tends to see the problem in terms of male
prejudice agains women, embodied in law or
expressed in the exclusion of women from particular
areas of life.
- Dual systems theory represents the coming
togeter of Marxist and radical feminist analysis in
the belief that women's oppression is the result
of a complex articulation of both patriarchy and
capitalism.
- Post Feminism
- Can be used to describe a type of feminism,
a theortical position within feminism, and a
tendency in contemporary popular culture.
- Refers to the way in
which the boundaries
between feminists
and non feminists
have become fuzzy.
- Freudian
Psychoanalysis
of text.
- Author centred, treating the text as the
equivalent to an author's dream. Freud identifies
what he calls the class of dreams that have never
been dreamt at all, dreams created by
imaginative writers and ascribed to invented
characters in the course of a story.
- reader centered, and derives from the secondary
aspect of the author centered approach. This
approach is concerned with how texts allow
readers to symbolically play out desires and
fantasies in the texts they read. A text works
like a substitute dream.
- Feminism no longer has a
simple coherece around
a set of easly defined
principles but insteadis a
much richer, more
diverse and contradictory
mix than it ever was in
the 1970's