Cultural Studies 3:

Key Concepts and Subject Positions– Consumer as an Example

1. Main issues: Literary Studies vs. Cultural Studies2. Major Theories and Methodologies3. Key Concepts and Subject Positions

Outline

Chap 12 outline Starting Questions Consumption: Marxist Views Consumption: Cultural Studies1. Populist Views –Michel de Certeau2. Stuart Hall – Encoding, decoding 3. Articulation Other Views of Consumption Desire: Combining Marxism and Psychoanalysis Production of Desire -- Slavoj Zizek Desiring Machine: Deleuze and Gattari Another example Next Time

Chap 12 outline

Cultural Studies defined p. 7 – interdisciplinary, objects: culture as a whole way of life and its forms of power, institutions in higher ed which form connections with those outside. Culture as signifying practices Representation—produced, enacted, used and understood in specific social ocntextsMaterialism and Non-reductionism (to class or economic factors) Articulation (later) Pervasive Power, (control by consent) ideology, hegemony in Popular CultureText and reader (later) Subjectivity – product of discoursesMarxism –mode of production, capitalism, commodification, alienation, fetishism, economic determinism vs agency

Chap 10. from a lit. perspective, chap 11. history and methods, chap 12. key concepts

Please comment:The plot of romantic love in 瓊瑤‘ s novels constructs weak women with dreamy eyes and no contact with economic reality, which become an object of fantasy or identification for female reader of that historical period. “Morning” and Notes on a Scandal partly explain and reflect the high rate of divorce in our society. Violent films lead to violent behavior in teenagers. The sensationalism on TV news program appeals to and results in the audience’s interest in and gossip over 八卦news ．In “Madness of Love,” Williams’ concept of romantic love comes from the operas he loves. Contemporary inventions of telecommunication (e.g. Walkman, E-games, cell phone, the Internet) leads to human isolation. 手機對消費者的主體建構有二：鈴聲召喚、漏接焦慮（張小虹）．

Consumption: Marxist Views (1)

regulation of consumption: e.g. Penopticon/surveillance (Foucault; e.g. market s

urvey; our identity defined in terms of numbers.) production of consumption/consumers: e.g.

Culture industry and massification of consumers (Frankfurt school)

1) Parts interchangeable pseudo identity -- (no “real” human contact in Internet chatrooms; cell phone and identity–e.g. next page.)

2) creation of a false need – (Walkman—a recorder without recording functions; endless versions of Windows)

Cell Phone --

Parts interchangeable with different surfaces Youtube—7610 和顏悅色 pink version

Nokia 7610 Affair

Consumption: Marxist Views (2)

production of consumption/consumers: e.g. interpellation (Althusser e.g. “natural

” response to identification with the rings of cell phones, the exchange values of commodities sold in ads);

subject positions in discourse (Foucault; e.g. identifying with the protagonists in 瓊瑤‘ s novels)

Cultural Studies (1): M. de Certeau

Dominant culture and the producers –cumbersome, powerful strategies of control; Consumption 主動的再創造 ("active re-creation" Poster 10

2); Provisional, fragmentary and invisible re-writing

and theft of the power imposed on him/her 機動性、零碎的、不明顯的改寫或竊取 , 利用「加於她身上的力量」在一個不屬於自己的地方「再創造」。

tactics of evasion, resistance, disruption, opposition.

The Practice ofThe Practice of Everyday LifeEveryday Life

Cultural Studies (2): Stuart Hall

(image source)Verbal Communication as a

Speech Event (Jacobson)

“Encoding and Decoding”Communication as a highly structured, asymmetrical and non-equivalent process. -- "meaning structure 1" and "meaning structure 2" may not be the same.

Encoding & Decoding

Implications: behaviorism and textual determinism rejected; a more interactive view of audience reception.

Code-- e.g. Televisiual code –audio-visual sign; Encoder: The production structures – production tea

m, production companies, TV stations, sponsors, TV rating-- within the wider socio-cultural and political structure (where ideologies are from)

Encoding process: (using Roland Barthes) denotation (signified emptied out) connotation myth

* There are encoders and decoders in each of the five levels of production, circulation/regulation, consumption, representation and identification

Cultural Studies (2)

Three positions in decoding of communication : (Stuart Hall)

the dominant-hegemonic -- “preferred” meaning

the negotiated code, the oppositional code -- at the opposition

al code level viewers/listeners/readers “detotalize the message in the preferred code in order to retotalize the message within some alternative framework of reference” (1980: 138). (http://www.sociology.org/content/vol006.002/vannini_myers.html )

From Marxism to Cultural Studies (2)

三種解碼的可能 (32)優勢解讀（ dominant-hegemonic position ）：完全且直接地接收媒體訊息 (preferred meaning) ，順應編碼者的意圖。協商解讀（ negotiated position ）： Hall 認為大部分閱聽人會採取此種解碼形式，閱聽人透過自身的處境條件與媒體的論述進行協商。抗拒解讀（ oppositional position ）：採取此一立場的閱聽人很清楚媒體的論述希望引導閱聽人採取順應的解碼方式（ preferred code ），因此閱聽人選擇另一種與之對立的解讀方式詮釋媒體的訊息。 ( 袁 )

The Practice ofThe Practice of Everyday Life Everyday Life e.g.

Walkman (by extension cell phone) -- criticized for its “anti-social, atomizing effects,” blocking off the world and

the “valuable.” e.g. “As long as they have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition [Shakespeare, the Bible and so on] has to say.” two functions of Walkman – “escape” (individualism: dominant reading) and “enhancement” (negotiated position)

1. possible choices: pop music, audio books, background music”;

2. “when I’m listening to the Walkman I’m not just tuning out. I’m also tuning in a soundtrack for the scenery around me.”

(du Gay 89-93)

Cultural Studies (3): Articulation

articulation (“expressing/representing” and “putting together” textbook p. 9)

articulation of contradictory interpellations/subject positions.

Other Views of Other Views of ConsumptionConsumption

Combining Marxism and Psychoanalysis:

Slavoj Zizek -- use Lacan to analyze popular culture Deleuze and Guattari –against Oedipus complex.

Production of Desire – Slavoj Zizek

Fundamental homology between Marx’s and Freud’s analysis of commodity fetishism and of dreams (the logic of abstraction and symbolization)Dream: manifest content latent thought the unconscious desire Commodity: chancy determination of commodity’s value determination by labor-time (a secret) the unconscious desire

Commodity Fetishism

1. ‘a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things’ (Marx 1974, 77) 2. A misrecognition [of] what is really a structural effect of the network of relations between elements (exchange value or price) [as] “an immediate property of one of the elements” (commodity) (Sizek 23-24) to avoid the Real of our desire.

Production of Desire – Slavoj Zizek

Latent content of dream//that of ideology.Desire: The sublime object of desire: [the Other] that which we most desire but cannot have we are the barred subject. SIdeology: “What [we] overlook, what [we] misrecognize, is not the reality but the illusion which is structuring [our] reality, [our] real social activity.” Popular culture as Fantasy –false attempts to integrate the ‘impossible’ in the Symbolic, which actually avoids ‘the Real’ of our desire.e.g. Hitchcock’s films– revelation and purging of the viewers’ Oedipus complex.

D/G vs. Marxism

Against desire as lack. Against oedipalization, which is supported by Capitalism. The prohibited = the desired. Desire = a flow prior to representation and reproduction Desiring Machines and Nomadic Subject

Marxism: production distribution consumption Exchange value = use value

Deleuze and Guattari: Oedipalization & Capitalism

[Capitalism] reduces all social relations to commodity relations 1) deterritorializes desire by subverting(de-coding) all territorial groupings such as the church, the family, local community, etc.2) It also reterritorializes desire by channeling(re-coding) all production into the narrow confines of the equivalence-form (logic of exchange value); within the state, family, law,commodity logic, banking systems, consumerism, psychoanalysis and other normalizing institutions. (Cf. Bogue 88; Kellner 89)

Our Body as Desiring Desiring MachineMachine

“It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines. . . “ produces a flow of desire; Connected with or interrupted by the other machines; e.g. organ-machine & an energy-machine; the breast; the mouth a machine coupled to it. (The mouth of the anorexic.) Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines.

Desiring Machine

the production of production: continually producing production, of grafting producing onto the product, e.g. A painting by Richard Lindner, 'Boy with Machine,' shows a huge, pudgy, bloated boy working one of his little desiring-machines, after having hooked it up to a vast technical social machine--which, as we shall see, is what even the very young child does.Composed of heterogeneous and independent parts.

Richard Lindner, 'Boy with Machine‘(1954, oil on canvas) (source)

The body without organs

Not an organless body, but body without organization, or the deterritorialized body; an interconnected system of flows and forces. “a body that breaks free from its socially articulated, disciplined, semioticized, and subjectified state (as an ‘organism’), to become disarticulated, dismantled, and deterritorialized, and hence able to be reconstituted in a new way” (Kellner 90-91)

Nomadic subjects

multiple personalities 1.consumption 2.when social codes [e.g. Oedipus] break dow

n in their channelling of desire, then the nomadic subject is possible, traversing the lines of the desiring machines inscribed on the body w/o organs

Model of the giant egg traversed by lines with a wandering point of pure intensity

Another example

為什麼台灣總是有時髦商品熱？中共的威脅、打壓 閹割焦慮 否認機制（ disavowal ） : 不能說清楚，不能講明白 政治焦慮轉移到商品消費1998 年夏天：葡式蛋塔滿足口腔期的匱乏．社會集體式的領聖餅．1999 年夏天：凱蒂貓收藏熱．收藏：肛門期的心理退化．張：既承認也否認泛政治化．

References

Deleuze and Guattari. Ronald Bogue. London New York : Routledge , 1989 Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reappraisal. Elizabeth Wright. Polity,1998. Postmodern theory : critical interrogations. Steven Best and Douglas Kellner. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire : Macmillan , 1991 du Gay, Paul, et al. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of Sony Walkman. Culture, Media and Identities series. London: Sage, 1997.張小虹． 《在百貨公司遇見狼》． 聯合文學 , 2002.《時尚消費、名人效應的閱聽人接收分析》 by 袁千雯 Thesis

Next Time

The Group’s Texts (at EngSite) –(with a focus on 第肆章 閱聽人、媒體與名人效應… 53 第一節 閱聽人時尚相關知識如何影響名人相關效應之詮釋 54 ) 《 20.30.40 》 “The Loveliness of the Long-Distance Runner” – 1.5 in total.