An Introduction to Cultural Studies

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An Introductionto Cultural StudiesDiambil dari Chris Barker, Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000),hal. 3-34.

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Introduction

The kind of cultural studies influencedby poststructuralists theories oflanguage, representation and

subjectivity is given greater attentionthan a cultural studies moreconcerned with the ethnography of

lived experience or with cultural policy Cultural studies does not speak with

one voice, it cannot be spoken with

one voice 2



The language-game of culturalstudies• Cultural studies is constituted by the language-game of

cultural studies

• Language-game : by which the meaning of words arelocated in their usage in a complex network ofrelationships between words and not from some

essential characteristic or referent• Meaning is contextual and relational

• It depends on the relationships between words whichhave family resemblances and on specific utterances inthe context of pragmatic narratives

• In Lyotard's works, the term 'language games',sometimes also called 'phrase regimens', denotes themultiplicity of communities of meaning, the innumerableand incommensurable separate systems in whichmeanings are produced and rules for their circulation

are created 3



Cultural Studies as Politics

For Hall, what is at stake is culturalstudies’ connections to matters of power and politics, to the need for

change and to representations of and‘for’ marginalized social groups,particularly those of class, gender andrace

Knowledge is never a neutral ofobjective phenomenon but a matter ofpositionality , of the place from whichone speaks, to whom, and for whatpurposes 4



The Parameters of CulturalStudies There is a difference between the study of

culture and institutionally located culturalstudies

Cultural studies is a discursive formation : ‘a

cluster (or formation) of ideas, images andpractices, which provide ways of talkingabout, forms of knowledge and conductassociated with, a particular topic, social

activity or institutional site in society’ Cultural studies is constituted by a regulated

way of speaking about objects (which itbrings into view) and coheres around key

concepts, ideas, and concerns 5



The Centre for ContemporaryCultural Studies Though cultural studies has been reluctant to

accept institutional legitimation, the formationof the Centre for Contemporary CulturalStudies at Birmingham University (UK) in the

1960s was a decisive organizational instance Since that time, cultural studies has extended

its intellectual base and geographic scope

There are self-defined cultural studies

practitioners in the USA, Australia, Africa,Asia, Latin America and Europe, with each‘formation’ of cultural studies working indifferent ways

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Disclipining Cultural Studies

Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field in whichperspectives from different discplines can beselectively drawn on to examine the relations ofculture and power

Cultural studies is concerned with all those

practices, institutions and systems of classificationthrough which there are incalculated in apopulation particular values, beliefs, competencies,routines of life and habitual forms of conduct

The forms of power that cultural studies explores

are diverse and include gender, race, class,colonialism, etc.

The prime institutional sites for cultural studies arethose higher education, and as such culturalstudies is like other academic discplines

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Key Concepts in CulturalStudies:

Culture and Signifying Practices Culture: the actual grounded terrain of practices,representations, languages and customs of anyspecific society

Culture: the contradictory forms of common sensewhich have taken root in and helped to shape

popular life Language is not a neutral medium for the formation

of meanings and knowledge about an independentobject world ‘existing’ outside of language, but isconstitutive of those very meanings and that very

knowledge These processes of meaning production are

signifying practices , and to understand culture is toexplore how meaning is produced symbolically inlanguage as a ‘signifying system’

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Representation

Representation: how the world issocially constructed and representedto and by us

The study of culture as the signifyingpractices of representation

This requires us to explore the textual

generation of meaning It also demands investigation of the

modes by which meaning is produced

in a variety of contexts 9



Materialism and Non-Reductionism Cultural studies has developed a form of cultural

materialism which is concerned to explore howand why meanings are inscribed at the momentof production

Cultural studies tries to connect them with

political economy, a discipline concerned withpower and the distribution of economic andsocial resources

One of the central tenets of cultural studies is itsnon-reductionism

Culture is seen as having its own specificmeanings, rules and practices which are notreducible to, or explainable solely in terms of,another category or level of a social formation

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Articulation

Articulation: the formation of a temporaryunity between elements that do not haveto go together

Articulation suggests bothexpressing/representing and a ‘putting-together’

Representations of gender may be ‘put-

together’ with representations of race, asin the case of gendered nationalityabove, in context-specific and contingentways which cannot be predicted before

the fact 11



Power

Power is not simply the glue that holdsthe social together, or the coerciveforce which subordinates one set of

people to another, though it certainly isthis, but the processes that generateand enable any form of social action,

relartionship or order Power, while certainly constraining, is

also enabling

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Popular Culture

Subordination is a matter not just of coercion butalso of consent

Popular culture, with which cultural studies hasbeen especially concerned, is said to be theground on which consent is won or lost

Ideology: maps of meaning which, while theypurport to be universal truth, are historicallyspecific understandings which obscure andmaintain power

Hegemony: the process of making, maintainingand reproducing ascendant meanings andpractices

Hegemony implies a situation where a ‘historicalbloc’ of powerful groups exercises socialauthority and leadership over subordinate groupsthrough the winning of consent 13



Texts and Readers

The concept of text suggest not simply thewritten word, though this is one of its senses,but all practices which signify

This includes the generation of meaningthrough images,sounds, objects (such asclothes) and activities (like dance and sport)

The meanings that critics read into culturaltexts are not necessarily the same as thoseproduced by active audiences or readers

Indeed, readers will not necessarily share allthe same meanings with each other

Further, texts, as forms of representation, arepolysemic

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Subjectivity and Identity

The moment of consumption marks one ofthe processes by which we are formed aspersons

What it is to be a person, subjectivity, andhow we describe ourselves to each other,identity, became central areas of concern incultural studies during the 1990s

The argument, known as anti-essentialism, isthat identities are not things which exist

They have no essential or universal qualities Rather, they are discursive constructions, the

product of discourses or regulated ways ofspeaking about the world

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The Intellectual Strands of CulturalStudies:Marxism and the Centrality of Class Marxism is, above all, a form of historical

materialism It stresses the hisrtorical specifity of human

affairs and the changeable character of socialformations whose core features are located in

the material conditions of existence Thus labour, and the forms of social organization

that material production takes, a mode ofproduction, are central categories of Marxism

The organization of a mode of production is notsimply a matter of co-ordinating objects

Rather, it is inherently tied up with relationsbetween people which, while social, that is, co-operative an co-ordinated, are also matters ofpower and conflict

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Capitalism

The centrepiece of Marx’s work was ananalysis of the dynamics of capitalism, amode of production premised on the privateownership of the means of production

The fundamental class division of capitalismis between those who own the means ofproduction, the bourgeoisie, and those who,being a propertyless proletariat, must selltheir labour to survive

A commodity is something available to besold in the marketplace and commodificationthe process associated with capitalism bywhich objects, qualities and signs are turnedinto commodities

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Marxism and Cultural Studies

On the one hand, Marxism suggests thatthere are regularities or structures tohuman existence which lie outside of anygiven individual

Cultural studies, along with otherdisclipines like sociology, has sought toexplore the characteristics of those

structures On the other hand, Marxism and cultural

studies have a commitment to changethrough human agency achieved by a

combination of theory and action (praxis)18



Culturalism and Structuralism:Culture is Ordinary Culturalism >< structuralism Culturalism stresses the ‘ordinariness’ of

culture and the active, creative, capacityof people to construct shared meaningfulpractices

There is an explicit partisanship inexploring the class basis of culture which

aims to give ‘voice’ to the subordinatedand to examine the place of culture inclass power

‘left culturalism’

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Structuralism

If culturalism takes meaning to be itscentral category and casts it as theproduct of active human agents,structuralism speaks instead of signifying

practices which generate meaning as anoutcome of structures or predictableregularities which lie outside of any givenperson

A structuralist understanding of culture isconcerned with the ‘systems of relations’of an underlying structure (usuallylanguage) and the grammar whichmakes meaning possible

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Deep Structures ofLanguages Structuralism in this sense takes signification or

meaning production to be the effect of deep structuresof language which are manifested in specific culturalphenomena or human speakers but which are not theoutcome of the intentions of actors per se

Structuralism is concerned with how cultural meaning isgenerated, understanding culture to be analogous to (orstructured like) a language

Saussure: meaning is generated through a system ofstructured differences in language

Significance is the outcome of the rules andconventions which organize language (langue ) ratherthan the specific uses and utterances which individualsdeploy in everyday life (parole )

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Culture As Like A Language

We find structuralist principles at work when Levi-Strauss describes kinship systems as ‘like a language’

Barthes→ myths

Culturalism→ focused on meaning production byhuman actors in an historical context

Structuralism→ culture as an expression of deepstructures of language which lie outside of theintentions of actors and constrain them

Culturalism → stresses history

Structuralism→ synchronic in approach, analysing thestructures of relations in a snapshot of particularmoment

Culturalism→ interpretation as a way of understandingmeaning

Structuralism → the possibility of a science of signs, of objective knowledge

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Poststructuralism (andPostmodernism) Poststructuralism → after structuralism Poststructuralism absorbs aspects of structural

lingustics while subjecting it to a critique which, it isclaimed, surpasses structuralism

Poststructuralism rejects the idea of an underlying

stable structure which founds meaning through fixedbinary pairs (black-white; good-bad)

Rather, meaning is unstable, being always deferred andin process

Intertexuality→meaning is the outcome of relationshipsbetween texts

Poststructuralism is anti-humanist in its decentring ofthe unified, coherent human subject as the origin ofstable meanings

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Derrida: The Instability ofLanguage Derrida accepts Saussure’s argument that

meaning is generated by relations ofdifference between signifiers rather than byreference to an independent object world

Derrida introduces the notion of differance,‘difference and deferral’→the production of meaning in the process of signification iscontinually deferred and supplemented in theplay of more-than-one

For Derrida, ‘we think only in signs’ There is no original meaning circulating

outside of ‘representation’ so that writing iscrucial to the generation of meaning

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Foucault and DiscursivePractices Foucault is concerned with the description andanalysis of the surfaces of discourse and their

effects under determinate material and historicalconditions

Discourse constructs, defines and produces the

objects of knowledge in an intelligible way whileat the same time excluding other ways ofreasoning as unintelligible

Discursive practices and discursive formation →the historical conditions and determining rules of

formation of regulated ways of speaking aboutobjects ‘Regime of truth’

Genealogy

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Anti-Essentialism

Essentialism → words have stable referents andsocial categories reflect an essential underlyingidentity

The speaking subject is dependent on the priorexistence of discursive subject positions, empty

spaces or functions in discourse from which tocomprehend the world

Anti-essentialism does not mean that we cannotspeak of truth or identity

Rather, it points to them as being not universals of

nature but productions of culture in specific timesand places

Poststructuralism offers us irony → an awarenessof the contingent, constructed character of ourbeliefs and understandings which lack firm

universal foundations 26



Postmodernism

Postmodernism → the rejection of truthas a fixed eternal object

Lyotard → postmodern: ‘incredulitytowards metanarratives’

Lyotard rejects the idea of grandnarratives or stories that can give uscertain knowledge of the direction,meaning and moral path of human

‘development’ Postmodernism in its understanding that

knowledge is specific to language-games, embraces local, plural and

diverse knowledges 27



Psychoanalysis andSubjectivity Psychoanalysis’ its great strength lies

in its rejection of the fixed nature ofsubjects and sexuality

Psychoanalysis concentrates on theconstruction and formation ofsubjectivity

Not what a subject is but on how s/hecomes into being

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The Freudian Self

Freud → the self is constituted in terms of anego (or conscious rational mind), a superego(social conscience) and the unconscious (thesource and repository of the symbolic workingsof the mind which functions with a different

logic from reason) Through processes of identification with others

and with social discourses we create anidentity which embodies an illusion ofwholeness

The libido or sexual drive does not have anypre-given fixed aim or object

Rather, through fantasy, any object, whichincludes persons or parts of bodies, can be thetarget of desire

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The Oedipus Complex

The Oedipus complex marks the formation ofthe ego and of gendered subjectivity

Prior to the Oedipal moment we are unable todistinguish clearly between ourselves and

other objects, nor do we have a sense ofourselves as male or female

The resolution of the Oedipus complexinvolves the repudiation of the mother as a

love-subject and the separation of the subjectfrom the mother

Psychoanalysis → phallocentrism → bemade appropriate to the political project of

feminism 30

Th P liti f Diff



The Politics of Difference:Feminism, Race and PostcolonialTheory In this context, there has been a

growing emphasis on difference in thesocial field, and in particular on

questions of gender, race and ethnicity

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Feminism

Feminism: a field of theory and politics whichcontains competing perspectives andprescriptions for action

We may locate feminism as asserting that sex isa fundamental and irreducible axis of social

organization which, to date, has subordinatedwomen to men Feminism is centrally concerned with sex as an

organizing principle of social life where genderrelations are thoroughly saturated with power

relations Patriarchy: male-headed family, ‘mastery’, and

superiority Liberal feminism, socialist feminism, radical

feminism

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Problems with Patriarchy

A criticism of the concept of patriarchy isits treatment of the category of womanas undifferentiated

That is, all women are taken to sharesomething fundamental in common incontrast to all men

This is an assumption continually

challenged by black feminists, who haveargued that the movement has definedwomen as white and overlooked thedifferences between black and white

women’s experiences 33



Race, Ethnicity and Hybridity

Ethnicity is a cultural concept centred onnorms, values, beliefs, cultural symbols andpractices which mark a process of culturalboundary formation

The idea of ‘racialization’ has been deployedto illustrate the argument that race is a socialconstruction and not a universal or essentialcategory of either biology or culture

Postcolonial theory → domination-

subordination and hybridity-creolization The denigration and subordination of ‘native’

culture by colonial and imperial powers andthe relationship between place and diasporaidentities

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Questions of Methodology

Cultural studies has not devoted itselfto questions of research methods andmethodology

It is not with the technicalities ofmethod but with the philosophicalapproaches which underpin them, that

is, methodology

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Epistemology

Epistemology: questions about the status ofknowledge and truth has been betweenrepresentationalist (realist) and anti-representationalist (poststructuralism,postmodernism and pragmatism)

Nietzsche’s characterization of truth as a‘mobile army of metaphors and metonyms’

Knowledge is a question not of true discoverybut of the construction of interpretations

about the world which are taken to be true In so far as the idea of truth has an historical

purchase, it is the consequence of power,that is, of whose interpretations are to countas truth

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Key Methodologies in CulturalStudies Work in cultural studies has centred onthree kinds of approach:1. Ethnography, which has often been

linked with culturalist approaches and a

stress on ‘live experience’ 2. A range of textual approaches, which

have tended to draw from semiotics,poststructuralism and Derridean

deconstruction3. A series of reception studies, which areeclectic in their theoritical roots

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Ethnography

Ethnography: an empirical and theoritical approachinherited from anthropology which seeks detailedholistic description and analysis of cultures basedon intensive fieldwork

Ethnography concentrates on the details of local

life while connecting them to wider socialprocesses

Ethnographic cultural studies has been centred onthe qualitative exploration of values and meaningsin the context of a ‘whole way of life’, that is, withquestions of cultures, life-worlds and identities

In the context of media-oriented cultural studies,ethnography has become a code-word for a rangeof qualitative methods, including participantobservation, in-depth interviews and focus groups

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The Problem ofRepresentation Not withstanding qualifications about

reflexivity, ethnography has tried to ‘representthe subjective meanings, feelings an culturesof others’

In this way, ethnography relied on animplicitly realist epistemology

Ethnography has personal, poetic andpolitical, rather than epistemological,

justifications Ethnography now becomes about dialogue

and the attempt to reach pragmaticagreements about meaning between

participants in a research methods 39



Textual Approaches

The three outstanding modes ofanalysis in cultural studies draw from:

1. Semiotics

2. Narrative theory3. deconstructionism

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Texts as Signs

Semiotics explores how the meaningsgenerated by texts have beenachieved through a particulararrangement of signs and thedeployment of cultural codes

Such analysis draws attention to theideological or myths of texts

The media’s selective and value-ladenrepresentations are not ‘accurate’pictures of the world but the site ofstruggles over what counts asmeanin and truth 41



Texts as Narratives

Narrative theory plays a part in cultural studies A narrative is an ordered sequential account which makes

claims to be a record of events

Narratives are the structured form in which stories advanceexplanations for the ways of the world

Narratives offer us frameworks of understanding and rules ofreference about the way the social order is constructed and indoing so supply answers to the question: how shall we live?

Soap opera is the name of a genre

Genres structure the narrative process and contain it

Genres regulate it in particular ways using specific elementsand combinations of elements to produce coherence andcredibility

Genre thus represents systematizations and repetitions ofproblems and solutions in narratives

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Deconstruction

To deconstruct is to take apart, to undo, in orderto seek out and display the assumptions of a text Deconstruction involves the dismantling of

hierarchical conceptual oppositions such asman/women, black/white, reality/appearance,

nature/culture, reason/madness, etc., whichserve to guarantee truth by excluding anddevaluing the ‘inferior’ part of the binary

The purpose of deconstruction is not simply toreverse the order of binaries but to show that

they are implicated in each other Deconstruction seeks to expose the blind-spots

of texts, the unacknowledged assumptions uponwhich they operate

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Reception Studies

Exponents of reception or consumption studiesargue that whatever analysis of textual meanings acritic may undertake, it is far from certain which ofthe identified meanings, if any, will be activated byactual readers/audiences/consumers

Hall: the production of meaning does not ensureconsumption of that meaning as the encodersmight have intended because (television)messages, constructed as a sign system with multi-accentuated components, are polysemic that is,they have more than one potential set of meanings

Understanding is always from the position andpoint of view of the person who understands,involving not merely reproduction of textualmeaning but the production of meaning by thereaders

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The Place of Theory

Theory can be understood as narratives whichseek to distinguish and account for generalfeatures which describe, define and explainpersistently perceived occrurences

Theory does not picture the world more or less

accurately Rather, it is a tool, instrument or logic for

intervening in the world through the mechanisms ofdescription, definition, prediction and control

Theoritical work can be thought of as a crafting of

the cultural signposts and maps by which we areguided

As a political theory, cultural studies has hoped toorganize disparate opposition groups into analliance of cultural politics

An Introduction to Cultural Studies

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