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a. Derives from the Latin Cultura, whose root was Colere, which invoked the following meanings: inhabit, cultivate, protect, honour with worship.
b. By the early 15C we got "Culture" from the French Couture, and for us it meant "husbandry" or the tending of natural growth in farming -- "Acqua-culture" -- "He's cultivating soybeans instead of corn this year"
c. By extension, "culture" then became a metaphor having to do with human development, as in Thomas More's phrase from his book Utopia: the Utopians were primarily concerned with " the culture and profit of their minds" -- this was important because in 1516, when More was writing, the age of Humanism (an early Renaissance movement that emphasised the cultivation of human reason over submission to divine will) had begun -- so the birth idea of culture was contemporaneous with the birth of humanism, and of the modern world. -- "We must cultivate a sense of duty in our children"
d. The above was a verb: to culture means to cultivate, to grow. As one of the ways we use the word in this course, however, it is a noun, a thing -- but not a thing you can touch or see
-- rather an abstract noun having to do with a "whole way of life"
-- this was not common until the late 18C
-- at the height of the Enlightenment (L17C - L18C movement emphasising reason over faith in human affairs)and the dawn of the Industrial Revolution (ca. 1780, England: the invention of the first factories to produce goods under the capitalist system).
e. Earlier in the 17C another meaning that we still use today arose, associated with economic class: there was a growing middle class in England at this time, who both threatened the Aristocrats power base and also wanted access to their status and privilege: thus culture became laden with the meaning of refinement, manners and artistic education: to be cultivated meant to have access to those practices and institutions favoured by the aristocracy, the acquisition of personal refinement. Thus this meaning of the word culture has to do with the "elevated" or "higher" practies of the upper classes: painting, dance, literature, of course, but also other intellectual and spiritual pursuits:
-- "He's a cultured individual, isn't he?"
Associated with wealth and status, it also gained a negative connotation that it possesses to this day
-- "He's a culture vulture"
-- "Oh yes, since moving to Forest Hill she's become very much into Cul-chah!"
f. Simultaneously in Germany, the word "Kultur" was taking on the meaning of civilization: becoming "civilized" meant becoming part of a secular social development. Then, it became possible of different groups of people -- different classes, different regions, developing their own cultures in the plural sense of the word: though enlightenment thought emphasised one rational way of becoming civilized (submitting to the truths of science, for example), the growing Romantic reaction to such "mechanical" certainties and the mechanization of human life under the industrial revolution allowed thinkers to oppose a natural (and therefore good) folk culture that was pre-urban, pre-literate, and preindustrial to the increasing sense that capitalist industry was unnatural, mechanical and dehumanising. This meaning of culture thus concerns the "whole way of life" of a "people" who may or may not be identical with another new word, "nation".
-- "The Irish immigrant culture of the appalachians is where the folk music tradition in America began"
(Distilled from Raymond Williams' Keywords Entry) |
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| The German Philosopher Immanuel Kant called this ability to silence your own biases and to let a work of art speak for itself disinterestedness, by the way: not bringing preconceived notions to a work of art |
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| knowledge of what is considered to be canonical or of authoritative importance to a given culture |
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| 01-04 Canon(-ical)(-icity)(-ize) |
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| The American Heritage Dictionary has eleven separate definitions of the term canon, the most relevant of which is "an authoritative list, as of the works of an author" and "a basis for judgment; standard; criterion." Canon is also defined as "the books of the Bible officially recognized by the Church," and the idea of a literary canon also implies some such official status. To enter the canon, or more properly, to be entered into the canon is to gain certain obvious privileges. The gatekeepers of the fortress of high culture include influential critics, museum directors and their boards of trustees, and far more lowly scholars and teachers. Indeed, a chief enforcer of the canon appears in middlebrow anthologies, those hangers on of high culture that in the Victorian period took the form of pop anthologies like Golden Treasury and today that of major college anthologies in America. To appear in the Norton or Oxford anthology is to have achieved, not exactly greatness but what is more important, certainly -- status and accessibility to a reading public |
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| 01-05 Historical Materialism |
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| The central concept of social analysis in the work of Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Frederick Engels (1820-1895). The core idea is that the political and intellectual history of human societies is shaped most importantly by the social and technical organization of economic production and exchange. This view suggests that it is not principally intellectual ideas and knowledge that shape the structure and cultural values of social life, but rather the shape of social life, especially in the social organization of economic production, that chiefly shapes intellectual ideas and knowledge (Online Dictionary of the Social Sciences) |
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| An early Renaissance movement that emphasised the cultivation of human reason over submission to divine will. More Broadly: An ethical doctrine that asserts the central importance of human life and experience on earth and the right and duty of each individual to explore and develop their potential. Humanism is, to some extent, in opposition to religious doctrines, like Christianity, that diminish the importance of earthly life and assert that human existence is merely a stage of preparation for heavenly life after death. In the social sciences humanism is evident in those groups who argue that social theory must conceive of the human actor as a subject rather than an object. (Online Dictionary of the Social Sciences) |
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| The revival of science, art and literature under the influence of classical models in the 14th–16th centuries after the discovery of Greek and Arabic texts in Moslem Spain by Christian conquerors. |
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| 01-08 Enlightenment (Project of) |
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1. A L17C - L18C movement emphasising reason over faith in human affairs.
2. Project of Enlightenment": In order to understand what postmodernism is about it is essential to understand what modernity means for the social sciences and this is linked to what is deemed to be the ‘enlightenment project’. The age of enlightenment ushered in human rationality as the source of knowledge, thus encouraging the rejection of previous authorities such as the church or custom. This new acceptance of human rationality became linked to science as the key to understanding the natural and social worlds, and led to a search to understand causality and to the belief that human rationality would lead to a more enlightened age, a progressive age characterized by human liberation. These beliefs shape social sciences by giving science a privileged position in the pursuit of truth, encouraging the search for sets of concepts to provide a framework for understanding social life regardless of particular social situations or time and the acceptance of ‘metanarratives’ (large and abstract social theory including sociology) as superior to other narrative accounts about society. Much of this is apparent in some of the works of Karl Marx. Marxian theory is a large metanarrative about the historical development of western societies such that it includes all stories about society and because of its claim to be based on scientific observation and its use of a conceptual framework (modes of production, relations of production) it claims a privileged position and a universal nature (it is to apply to all capitalist societies). Further, it is claimed that by using the metanarrative the consciousness of workers can be enhanced (corrected) and an age of liberation will follow. Modernity or the enlightenment project is reflected in ‘positivism’, the importance of the ‘scientific method’, the belief that social science can be used to better society and the sweeping away of the subjective beliefs of ‘ordinary actors’.
(Online Dictionary of the Social Sciences) |
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Denoting attitudes, activities, or other things that have no religious or spiritual basis
SECULARIZATION: The process of organizing society or aspects of social life around non-religious values or principles. The term is linked closely to Max Weber's concept of a growing ‘disenchantment of the world’ as the sphere of the magical, sacred and religious retreats in cultural significance before the driving force of rationalization of culture and social institutions powered by emergent capitalism. See: RATIONALIZATION (Online Dictionary of the Social Sciences) |
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A movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that marked the reaction in literature, philosophy, art, religion, and politics from the neoclassicism and formal orthodoxy of the preceding period. Romanticism arose so gradually and exhibited so many phases that a satisfactory definition is not possible.
The aspect most stressed in France is reflected in Victor Hugo's phrase "liberalism in literature," meaning especially the freeing of the artist and writer from restrains and rules and suggesting that phase of individualism marked by the encouragement of revolutionary political ideas. The poet Heine noted the chief aspect of German romanticism in calling it the revival of medievalism in art, letters, and life. Walter Pater thought the addition of strangement to beauty (the neoclassicists having insisted on order in beauty) constituted the romantic temper.
An interesting schematic explanation calls romanticism the predominance of imagination over reason and formal rules (classicism) and over the sense of fact or the actual (realism), a formula that recalls Hazlitt's statement (1816) that the class beauty of a Greek temple resided chiefly in its actual form and its obvious connotations, whereas the "romantic" beauty of a Gothic building or ruin arose from associated ideas that the imagination was stimulated to conjure up.
Among the aspects of the romantic movement in England may be listed: sensibility; primitivism; love of nature; sympathetic interest in the past, especially the medieval; mysticism; individualism, experimental verse forms; the dropping of the conventional poetic diction in favor of fresher language and bolder figures; the idealization of rural life (Goldsmith); enthusiasm for the wild, irregular, or grotesque in nature and art; unrestrained imagination; enthusiasm for the uncivilized or "natural".
The term designates a literary and philosophical theory that tends to see the individual at the center of all life, and it places the individual, therefore, at the center of art, making literature valuable as an expression of unique feelings and particular attitudes (the expressive theory of criticism) and valuing its fidelity in portraying experiences, however fragmentary and incomplete, more than it values adherence to completeness, unity, or the demands of genre.
Although romanticism tends at times to regard nature as alien, it more often sees in nature a revelation of Truth, the "living garment of God," and a more suitable subject for art than those aspects of the world sullied by artifice. Romanticism seeks to find the Absolute, the Ideal, by transcending the actual, whereas realism finds its values in the actual and naturalism in the scientific laws the undergird the actual.
(A Handbook to Literature, Sixth Edition C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon). |
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| The doctrine that there is no one truth about the text for all readers -- or, perhaps, no one truth about any question. More Broadly: Belief that human judgments are always conditioned by the specific social environment of a particular person, time, or place. Cognitive relativists hold that there can be no universal knowledge of the world, but only diverse interpretations of it. Moral relativists hold that there are no universal standards of moral value, but only the cultural norms of particular societies (A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names) |
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| The doctrine that there is, as regards moral or philosophical truth, there can be one demonstrable correct proposition: e.g. murdering babies is wrong. More Broadly: the view that there are no exceptions to a rule. In moral philosophy, such a position maintains that actions of a specific sort are always right (or wrong) independently of any further considerations, thus rejecting the consequentialist effort to evaluate them by their outcomes. In political theory, absolutism is the view that a legitimate sovereign is unrestrained by the rule of law (A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names) |
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| 02-03 Cultural Relativism |
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| A type of relativism, which holds that our values are true for our own culture, but relative to those of other cultures, that there can be no point of view outside of our own culture to judge the practices of others -- i.e. we have no privileged viewpoint on whether, say, the stoning to death of wives who have been raped is an acceptable practice. Enlightenment thinkers argue otherwise -- that all humans have, for example certain inalienable rights, regardless of where they come from or what group they belong to. |
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Basic Definition: A set of ideas, values, and beliefs that is accepted by a society, a class, or some other socially significant group of people. This value system supports a series of norms, or definitions of acceptable behavior. Ideology therefore exerts significant influence over the individuals living within a society. Once the population has accepted an ideology, individuals will act according to the ideology's norms, or risk facing disciplinary measures.
Theoretical Variations: Marx focused on the controlling function of ideology. A capitalist system benefits those groups who control the means of production. In such a system, there is a threat of revolt from those whom the system oppresses. The dominant class uses ideology to neutralize this threat. Using its control over the means of information dissemination (e.g. in the media), the dominant class can impose its own ideology on the larger population. This ideology naturalizes the power structure of the existing system. In other words, it suggests that the existing system is the best possible system for all of the members of society (if not the only possible system). The coercion (which can be both overt/physical or covert/subconscious) by which the dominant class gains acceptance for its ideology is called ideological domination. Although the term ideology predates Marx, Marx's use of the term seems to have imbued it with some powerful and persistent connotations. Chief among these is the concept that ideology does not connote any set of values held by a group of people, but rather a system of beliefs held by the dominant class and inflicted upon the oppressed classes. Such a framework makes it difficult to analyze the constant power struggles that go on in a society for control of the value system. To remedy this deficiency, Gramsci introduced the closely related concept of hegemony, which basically describes the situation in which a particular ideology has gained complete acceptance within a social group. The distinction made in the Stuart Hall text book is that hegemony is basically ideology without the Marxist connotation of a fixed system imposed by a dominant group (i.e. government). Hegemony is open to negotiation, or the constant power struggle between different social groups. As a theoretical concept, hegemony therefore allows for the investigation of this power struggle as it occurs in various media forms and other social sites. Hegemony and the aspect of power also link ideology to Foucault's concept of power/knowledge. Knowledge consists of a system of meaning that is accepted by a group of people. Those who can control the system of meanings have power over the values of society and therefore the norms that regulate behavior (and even thought) according to these values. Different discourses struggle for control over the system of meaning and the power that comes with this control. In this way, a discourse is very similar to an ideology, in that it is a system of beliefs and practices. However, as with hegemony, discourse does not contain the overtone of "coming from the dominant class" that the term ideology has. |
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| A discipline and theory produced within a range of Western institutions (i.e., diplomatic practices, academic disciplines, art museums, periodicals, narrative forms) which serves to construct pernicious myths about Near and Middle East cultures. Among these myths or fantasies is the image of the oriental as lacking subjectivity and as deviously fanatical. The older stereotypes of the Orient developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and famously detailed by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978) have returned with great force in the general views adopted since 9/11 about the beliefs and practices of Middle Easterners. |
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| Theories start with an attempt to answer questions, especially those beginning with the word "why", more systematically. The theory of evolution is "just a theory" as creationists claim, but creationism isn't a theory -- it's a story, or to put it more formally -- the bible is a narrative, a story in which events are connected and made meaningful through their telling. In the history of philosophy, theory began when the first philosophers started to look for natural rather than supernatural explanations for natural events -- human kind began the long, slow process of abandoning mythos for logos, the supernatural myth for the rational word. |
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| Branch of philosophy that investigates the possibility, origins, nature, and extent of human knowledge. Although the effort to develop an adequate theory of knowledge is at least as old as Plato epistemology has dominated Western philosophy only since its modern era (of Descartes and Locke, as an extended dispute between rationalism and empiricism as psiible foundations of knowledge). Contemporary postmodern thinkers (including many feminist philosophers) have proposed a different mettaphor from foundation (of a house) -- the temporary, local spider web, i.e. the contextualization of knowledge as part of an intersubjective process. (Adapted from A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names). Many cultural theorists examine the practices and underlying conditions of epistemologies to discover how learning and knowledge are situated within discourses and institutions of expertise, power, and capital. |
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[From In Search of Authority Ch 10: "Myths and Demystification"]
The word myth has two uses:
1. "A story that teaches a fundamental" (often allegorical) or mystical/religious truth (146)
2. "A lie designed to delude, mystify and perhaps exploit you".
The first definition suggests that myths speak to what is eternally true in human nature, to a need that we all share to make sense of our lives, as in the Myth of Sisyphus, whose condemnation to eternally roll a ball up and down a mountain may be allegorically likened to how we often feel our own lives are on some meaningless treadmill (147).
These kinds of myths are said by depth psychologists to live deep in the human soul (Gk: Psyche), in the collective unconscious from where they speak their eternal and universal truths to human kind, who find them working in their dreams and in their works of art (or in works of art that "speak" to them).
These eternal but mysterious and never fully knowable truths are called archetypes, and our lives are constructed of them, regardless of what century we live in or what continent we come from. But from the other side of the coin -- "from the side of the person on whom they are imposed", myths look less like eternal truths than like misleading stories, especially if the audience lacks the training to "assess them critically". T
he French Critic Roland Barthes examined myth (particularly the myths of "proper" middle class or bourgeois life) from this angle in his book Mythologies. A gay man from a provincial and Protestant background in a largely Catholic nation, Barthes was uniquely positioned as an somewhat of an outsider looking in on his own culture, [like an Anthropologist from Mars] (148). As Barthes saw it, "The central feature ...of myth [was its] substitution of an "eternal status" for history[…] A historical event (such as the [French] Revoultion may be presented not in terms of what actually happened (an outcome of a conflict between groups in society, the result of which was uncertain at the time), but as an event that had to happen, as though some omnipotent force (or god) had decreed it would happen […] that would make it appear inevitable"(148). Thus history becomes myth, driven by the ideology that supports the values of contemporary society. But this also happens on the much more basic level of our everyday life. There may or may not even be someone trying to deceive us -- that process may be unconscious, as when asked to describe Trent University to a foreign visitor you might play up the positive aspects of your time here and play down the negatives -- this happens in families all the time!
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| 03-03 Signified Signifier Referent (Barthes) |
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Definition
| Barthes comes to his understanding of language from Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure had severed the “natural” link that we all assume exists between the words we use and the things they represent. For Saussure the verbal sign (or word) therefore has two components, a signifier (the sound or visual image) and a signified (what it means at any given moment). These aspects are mental phenomena: you can see, hear and understand a word silently and with your eyes closed. The choice of the sound or word “tree” is arbitrary – it could be any sound, and is different ion different languages. Saussure writes: “There is no internal [that is, natural or essential] connection between the idea “sister” and the French sequence of sours s-ö-r which acts as its signal”. In English, sis-trr is the sound pattern, and yet we still get the same idea. The signified and signifier, sound pattern and concept are like two sides of one coin: they are so intimately linked that each triggers the other in our minds. Thirdly and most controversially, meanings of words are not determined by reference to the external material world, but by relation to each other – this is what he means by no positive terms, only a system of differences: what gives the word “tree” meaning is that it is not “grasss” “flower” or “moss”. Thus you cannot have any ideas outside of language, and your ideas are produced by language: language speaks you: different language = different person Another way of putting this is: the concept, signified or truth cannot exist without a signifier. |
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| According to Althusser, the main purpose of ideology is in "'constituting' concrete individuals as subjects" (Lenin 116). So pervasive is ideology in its constitution of subjects that it forms our very reality and thus appears to us as "true" or "obvious." Althusser's example is the hail from a police officer: "'Hey, you there!'" (Lenin 118): "Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject" (Lenin 118). The very fact that we do not recognize this interaction as ideological speaks to the power of ideology: What thus seems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes place in ideology [....] That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, "I am ideological." (Lenin 118) 4) "individuals are always-already subjects" (Lenin 119). Although he presents his example of interpellation in a temporal form (I am interpellated and thus I become a subject, I enter ideology), Althusser makes it clear that the "becoming-subject" happens even before we are born. "This proposition might seem paradoxical" (Lenin 119), Althusser admits; nevertheless, "That an individual is always-already a subject, even before he is born, is [...] the plain reality, accessible to everyone and not a paradox at all" (Lenin 119). Even before the child is born, "it is certain in advance that it will bear its Father's Name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable. Before its birth, the child is therefore always-already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by the specific familial ideological configuration in which it is 'expected' once it has been conceived" (Lenin 119). Girls being portrayed in magazines playing with dolls and loving the color pink is an example of gender role interpellation – and parents now often have an ultrasound scan so they can prepare their room for either a boy or a girl… Interpellation refers to the power of an image to speak “just for me”. This power of coercion is an affixed part of interpellation. In order for viewer interpellation to be effective, the viewer must understand himself or herself as being a member of a social group that can also relate/understand what makes the image meaningful. An image may speak to you personally, but it can do so only if you are a member of a group who share the same codes and conventions. Advertising seeks to interpellate consumers by constructing the "you" within an advertisement. One of the most famous examples of interpellation in our culture is an image that has already been discussed, at length, in class. |
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| 03-05 Subject / Subjectivity |
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| Subjectivity can be described as the condition of being a person and/or the processes by which we become persons, that is, how we are constituted as subjects and come to experience ourselves. Thus, to ask about subjectivity is to pose the question what is a person?’ and to answer the question is to construct a narrative or story about the self. For cultural studies, subjectivity is often regarded, after Foucault, as an ‘effect’ of discourse because subjectivity is constituted by the subject positions that discourse obliges us to take up. According to Foucault, the discourses of disciplinary power that constitute subjectivity can be traced historically so that we can locate particular kinds of ‘regimes of the self’ in specific historical and cultural conjunctures. That is, the subject is held to be wholly and only the product of history generated by discourses that enable speaking persons to come into existence. Foucault describes a subject that is the product of power that individualizes those subject to it. Here power is not simply a negative mechanism of control but is productive of the self. The disciplinary power of schools, work organizations, prisons, hospitals, asylums and the proliferating discourses of sexuality produce subjectivity by bringing individuals into view. They achieve this by categorizing, naming and fixing subjects in writing via the discourses of, for example, medicine. (The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies) |
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| We need to labour in order to survive. We would rather not do anything at all except seek pleasure and avoid pain (pleasure principle). Another way of saying this is that we choose to delay gratification of desires. Max Weber pointed out that this delay was more pronounced in Capitalist culture than in any other. |
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| At the centre of our psyche is a free floating psychosexual energy called libido, which constantly demands to be satisfied. The id, to satisfy the demands of libido, operates on the pleasure principle. This drives us throughout our life to seek maximum pleasure for ourselves, and to minimise pain |
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| We must repress this desire in order to put food on the table (reality principle). Mythologically, this is analogous to Adam and Eve being cast out of the Garden of Eden: as punishment for disobeying God’s one command and eating fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they were condemned to toil in the dirt, and to die, to return to the dust of which they were made. |
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| 06-04 Patriarchy & Oedipal/Electra Complexes |
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Definition
| At first, the child is involved as a dyad or bipolar relationship with the mother, due to the reality of nursing. When the father enters a complicated triangular relationship is formed involving such concepts as Castration and the Oedipus and Electra Complexes. The link between nurturing and eros means that the child develops an incestuous desire to keep the mother all it itself. Then boys and girls split in the object of their affections, desiring to possess the opposite sex paren and seeing the same sex parent as a rival for affection. Boys see that girls are castrated, and imagines that the father has power to do this to himself as well Boys give up on incestuous desire, adjust to the reality principle of male power of domination, live for the future when they can possess male power themselves. In learning to identify with the father, the boy is initiated into patriarchy, or symbolic rule by "The Father". Only by repression of real desire can boys become a gendered subject. If he fails to identify with his father, he will idealise the mother, leading to various neuroses (incl homosexuality). Girls become disillusioned with their mothers when they realise that they are both castrated. The father is sought after for a while, but learning that she cannot seduce him, the reality principle teaches the girl to identify with the mother, becoming a gendered subject when she adopts social norms concerning reproduction of babies, a substitute for the penis she cannot have. |
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| 06-05 Freudian Subjectivity |
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Definition
a. We transit from pleasure to reality principle.
b. We move from natural, incestuous desires to cultural, socially formed relationships outside the family.
c. Castration and the power of the phallus becomes symbolic of the wider power of masculinity to wield patriarchal authority in moral, religious, legal matters. The child turns this masculine dictatorial power inward on itself , which develops the voice of conscience, or the Super-ego
d. We can only become active members of society by becoming a split subject: by walling off socially unacceptable behaviours into the repressed realm of the unconscious, where these desires are still anarchically and chaotically active, though unseen by us.
The censor patrols the border between consciousness and unconsciousness, making sure we don't witness ourselves desiring anything antisocial, "immoral" or perverse (as our conscious, gendered subjectivity would see it).
When these energies are pushed too far down into the unconscious, there is a need to release psychic pressure, through neurotic (mildly abberrant or self-destructive) behaviours (we all have them). This is called "The Return of the Repressed" |
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| In order to create social culture, we sublimate (literally "make sublime" which itself literally means "raise up")or direct our personal desires "upwards" toward some socially acceptable or useful goal -- something bigger than ourselves) |
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Definition
Dreams are "the royal road to the unconscious".
a. They are "symbolic fulfillment of unconscious wishes" (hence: wish fulfillment)
b. They are never literal manifestations of what we really desire -- if they were they might wake us up or cause psychic harm.
Two techniques are used in dreams to distort the literal message:
Condensation (multiple desires expressed by one "overdetermined" image/metaphor)
Displacement (meaning is shifted to something loosely associated with the desire)/metonymy).
In Freud's "Irma" dream, he displaces his own anxiety about being a competant doctor onto two other "bad" doctors . Dreams mix whatever happened that day with imporetant "residues" from childhood. |
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"Freudian slips":
discussed in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life:
i. "I'll Pick You Up At Sex"
ii. I need to change my wife -- Annie Hall
iii. Jokes.
"He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore. And thus the task of making conscious the most hidden recesses of the mind is one which it is quite possible to accomplish." - Sigmund Freud |
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| 06-09 Imaginary (Lacanian) |
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Definition
| "A condition in which we lack any defined centre of self, in which what 'self' we have seems to pass into objects, and objects into it, in a ceaseless closed exchange. In the pre-Oedipal state, the child lives a 'symbiotic' relation with its mother's body which blurs any sharp boundary between the two: it is dependent for its life on this body, but we can equally imagine the child as experiencing what it knows of the external world as dependent upon itself. (Eagleton 142) |
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| 06-10 Mirror Stage (Lacanian) |
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Definition
| The child's first development of an ego, of an integrated self-image, begins to happen. The child, who is still physically uncoordinated, finds reflected back to itself in the mirror a gratifyingly unified image of itself; andalthough its relation to this image is st ill of an 'imaginary' kind - the image in the mirror both is and is not itself, a blurring of subject and object still obtains - it has begun the process of constructing a centre of self. This self, as the mirror situation suggests, is essentially narcissistic. We arrive at a sense of an 'I' by finding that 'I' reflected back to ourselves by some object or person in the world. This object is at once somehow part of ourselves - we identify with it and yet not ourselves, something alien. The image which the small child sees in the mirror is in this sense an alienated' one: the child 'misrecognizes' itself in it, finds in the image a pleasing unity which it does not actually experience in its own body. The imaginary for Lacan is precisely this realm of images in which we make identifications, but in the very act of doing so are led to misperceive and misrecognize ourselves. (Eagleton 143) |
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| Normally the ego relates to external reality, while eros relates to love for the Other, but for narcissists, external reality no longer really exists; only his own ideas, feelings, or urges matter, as if the person overvalues their own ideas, his own body, his own person: “The libido that has been withdrawn from the external world has been directed to the ego" |
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Term
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Definition
a. The father signifies what Lacan calls the Law, which is in the first place the social taboo on incest: the child is disturbed in its libidinal relation with the mother, and must begin to recognize in the figure of the father that a wider familial and social network exists of which it is only part. Not only is the child merely a part of this network, but the role it must play there is already predetermined, laid down for it by the practices of the society into which it has been born (Eagleton 143).
b. Before the arrival of the father, the child/signifier and image in the mirror/signified are one: whole.
c. The father's arrival initiates a sense of difference -- sexually as well as in ordinary language. This moves the child out of the imaginary into the symbolic order |
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| 06-13 Symbolic Order (Lacanian) |
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Definition
A language system not chosen by them but by society, full of norms laid upon him. But this path is a one way street -- there is no going back to a sense of wholeness or identity with oneself -- acquiring language radically alienates us from ourselves, and from the real which lies outside the border of language.
This potentially endless movement from one signifier to another is what Lacan means by desire. All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill. Human language works by such lack: the absence of the real objects which signs designate, the fact that words have meaning only by virtue of the absence and exclusion of others (Eagleton 145). We try to make up for our lack by acquiring objects.
For Lacan, the unconscious is "shaped like a language" in that the repressed reality we are unaware of is full of constantly shifting and sliding meanings. But our ego needs to operate in reality, and nails meanings to words, or tries to Lacan boldly rewrites Descartes's 'I think, therefore I am' as: 'I am not where I think, and I think where I am not.' |
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| 06-14 Ideology (Althusser) +Imaginary (Lacan) =? |
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| Just as a small child mis-conceives of his mirror image as his self, so we see ourselves through categories that society wants us to define ourselves by. Thus the unconscious says more about our social relationships than it does about something somewhere "inside" our individual selves. |
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The notion of the Other is closely linked to those of identity and difference in that identity is understood to be defined in part by its difference from the Other. I am male because I am not female, I am heterosexual because I am not homosexual, I am white because I am not black and so forth.
Such binaries of difference usually involve a relationship of power, of inclusion and exclusion, in that one of the pair is empowered with a positive identity and the other side of the equation becomes the subordinated Other. One theoretical source for this idea is the master–slave discussion staged by the philosopher Hegel and another is the deconstruction of the binaries of Western philosophy found in the work of Derrida.
The master is inseparable from the slave, the identities of men are interlocked with those of women and the subjectivity of the colonial ruler is forged in tandem with the colonized subject. Indeed, the discussion of Orientalism presented by Said contains one of the better known uses of the concept of the Other. Here what constitutes the Orient is a projection by Western powers onto the empty subject position of the Other.
(Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies) |
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| 1. the rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless. 2. Philosophy: the belief that nothing has a real existence - Origin: (L: Nihil = nothing +ism) |
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| 07-02 Classicisism/Hellenic |
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| Of or emulating the culture of Ancient Greece, with its emphasis on human perfection, reason and delight in the senses, in music, in harmony: Nietzsche claims the best in Hellenic culture combines attributes of the Apollonian and Dionysian. Calassicism stresses Apollonian elements [as opposed to Romanticism which, crudely speaking, stresses the Dionysian] |
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| Relating to the sensual, spontaneous, and emotional aspects of human nature - Dionysus (Gk.) = Bacchus (L.) = God of wine, earthly delight, religious ecstasy, wild abandon (& passion in art) |
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| 07-04 Apollonian/Apollinian |
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| Relating to the rational, ordered, and self-disciplined aspects of human nature - Apollo (Gk.) = Phoebus (L.) = Sun god: Reason, Order (& order in art), Harmony, Concord |
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| The branch of philosophy concerned with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being and knowing . Origin: based on Greek ta meta ta phusika ('the things after the Physics'), referring to the sequence of Aristotle's works. Meta- a. denoting a change of position or condition: metamorphosis b. denoting something of a higher or second-order kind: metadata (data about other data) Metafiction (fiction that overtly challenges or discusses the methods of fiction). |
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| An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government, originally associated with the Italian political party of the same name in the 1920s (meaning: "bundle of sticks). In both its Italian and German forms it was marked by a Romanticism of the notion of the Folk or "original" or "pure" inhabitants of the "Ancestral Land", combined with a rigid, authoritarian social structure that united the aristocratic (land owning) and plutocratic (Capitalist/Corporate, thus Plutocrat = rule by those that own) classes along with a celebration of national military strength as an expression of the vigor or "virility" of the nation state. Employed selective Xenophobia (fear of foreigners) to create mythology of the "blood ties" that united the land or folk (hence the Italian "Bundle of sticks" symbol, and the Nazis' use of the Aryan [an ancient people who invaded India from the north] Swastika to promote Nordicist theories of one genetically pure, white people. |
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| 18C Enlightenment movement. - (aka Whiggism:) a philosophy or movement that has as its aim the development of individual freedom. Classical liberalism’s characteristic beliefs are those of Rousseau - in essential, innate (inborn) human goodness. But also human rationality: Liberalism assumes that people have the ability to solve problems. and improve the human condition (social progress through changing social order). These beliefs were paralleled by a drive to "liberate" the economic market from the "chains" of the feudal aristocracy, such that today's "neo-liberals" oppose government regulation of the "free" market, but instead advocate “Laissez-faire” (“leave alone”) capitalism, which presupposes the playing field on which we compete is already level. They also believe that And that each "Rational, utility maximising individual" continually makes free, fully conscious choices, choices that largely determine where they finish in the great race of life. This idea is closely linked to that of Utilitarianism in some senses, at least in the latter's supposition that all that is valuable in life can be related in economic terms (See Dickens' Gradgrind and Arnold's Philistines). Neo-liberalism attempts to extend its market orthodoxy to spaces and practices once deemed protected from the brute logic of capitalist economics, i.e., education, labor, medicine, morality. |
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| The state of being created by modernization: "Modernity typically refers to a post-traditional, post-medieval historical period, one marked by the move from feudalism (or agrarianism) toward capitalism, industrialization, secularization, rationalization, the nation-state and its constituent institutions " -- Chris Barker, Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (2005, 444) |
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| 09-02 Surplus Labour + Reproduction |
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| Labour performed in excess of the labour necessary for self-reproduction (to produce the means of livelihood of the worker – to keep he and his family alive, in other words). This is equivalent to the "profit" that accrues to the capitalist. Before Capitalism, peasant producers generally had direct access to the means of their own reproduction and to the land itself. This has meant that when their surplus labour has been appropriated by exploiters, it has been done by what Marx called 'extraeconomic' means - that is, by means of direct coercion, taxation exercised by landlords or states employing their superior force, their privileged access to military, judicial, and political powerThis in France became centralized and tax-based – office holders becoming a key position |
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| 09-03 Social Property Relations |
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| The relationship between classes over productive property (i.e. agricultural land, or factories): it refers to who controls and benefits from whatever that property produces. Only in capitalism is the dominant mode of appropriation based on the complete dispossession of direct producers, who (unlike chattel slaves) are legally free and whose surplus labour is appropriated by purely 'economic' means. Because direct producers in a fully developed capitalism are propertyless, and because their only access to the means of production, to the requirements of their own reproduction, even to the means of their own labour, is the sale of their labour-power in exchange for a wage, capitalists can appropriate the workers' surplus labour without direct coercion. |
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| The market in capitalism has a distinctive, unprecedented function. Virtually everything in capitalist society is a commodity produced for the market. And even more fundamentally, both capital and labour are utterly dependent on the market for the most basic conditions of their own reproduction (Meiksins Wood 97). This unique system of market dependence has specific systemic requirements and compulsions shared by no other mode of production: the imperatives of competition, accumulation, and profit-maximization, and hence a constant systemic need to develop the productive forces. These imperatives, in turn, mean that capitalism can and must constantly expand in ways and degrees unlike any other social form. It can and must constantly accumulate, constantly search out new markets, constantly impose its imperatives on new territories and new spheres of life, on all human beings and the natural environment. This process creates a culture of capitalism or "culture of improvement" where the highest cultural value is also driving force of society: the pursuit of ever-increasing rates of profit - an imperative that is imposed upon capitalists and workers alike. |
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| Under capitalism, for the first timea propertyless (see "Enclosure") proletariat must sell their labour to survive. As a consequence, they are then faced with the products of their own labour in the form of commodities that now wield power and influence over them. Here the workers are doubly alienated; first by the transformation of the core of human activity, namely the labour process, into meaningless actions, and second, through separation from the products of their own labour. According to Marx, capitalism also alienated workers from each other through competition, division and individualism as well as from their ‘species being,’ by which he means the human potential for self-determination. More broadly, in Cultural Studies the concept of alienation comes with the sense that the cultural circumstances of modernity are inherently those of inauthenticity and dislocation. In particular, the cultural experience of modern urban life (see Simmel) is understood to be one of anonymity, isolation and anxiety as expressed through the themes and aesthetic style of modernism. Here alienation connotes a psychological condition of estrangement, disaffection and emotional distance that is a consequence of the impersonality and speed of living generated by modern technology, commodification and city life. (Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies) |
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| The physical process involved in first removing peasants from common land at the birth of capitalism, but also the legislative processes of cutting the feudal ties of rights and obligations that connected peasant with nobleman: Enclosure therefore means subjecting all peasant or aboriginal communities to the imperatives of the capitalist "free" market. This is also known as "Primitive accumulation", which "cut through traditional lifeways like scissors. The first blade served to undermine the ability of the people to provide for themselves. The other blade was a system of stern measures required to keep people from finding alternative survival strategies outside the system of wage labor [...] even before capitalism had become a significant political force [...] Indeed writers of every persuasion shared an obsessional concern with the creation of a disciplined labor force." -- Michael Perelman The Invention of Capitalism (2000,14-15) |
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| A phrase associated with Max Weber who wrote that the new emphasis on materialism and wordly success that arose with Protestantism had imprisoned human society in an iron cage of self perpetuating rationalization and depersonalisation (Online Dictionary of the Social Sciences) |
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| 10-02 Dialectical thinking |
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Definition
| To think dialectically is to see the social world not as a "given" or as a "thing", but as a process or set of relationships whose primary expression is contradiction. Thus social organization, culture and intellectual ideas change because of the development of contradictions that create challenges to the existing state of affairs and lead to the emergence of something new from this tension. Georg Hegel (1770-1831) developed this idea in Western philosophy when he claimed that every existing social arrangement or intellectual belief system represents a ‘thesis’ - a way of doing or thinking about things - that gives rise to a contradictory, or opposing, ‘antithesis’. From the contest between ‘thesis’ and ‘antithesis’ emerges something new and unique: a ‘synthesis’. There is some element of this conception in the writing of Karl Marx (1818-1883) when he claims that contradictions arise in capitalism and the resolution of these contradictions produces a new type of social and economic system. This suggests that the seeds of capitalism's demise or transformation are located within capitalism and are not generated from outside (Online Dictionary of the Social Sciences) |
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| The social processes (economic, technological, governmental, educational etc) associated with the "perpetual becoming" that is the maelstrom or whirlpool of modernity (Berman, 16). Modernization promises to give people the tools and power to change what is changing them, but it also induces the aesthetic reaction to modernity: modernism, those visions and ideas that arise out of the need to cope with the stresses of unceasing modernization. |
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| 12-01 Qualitative VS Quantitative (Simmel) |
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Definition
Qualititative = Everything human (the emotional, meaning, experience, narrative - all that which is unverifiable by the senses or science [empiricism/empirical]).
Quantitative = anything that is verifiable by the senses and which can be represented by numbers, statistics. Money and reason are thus related by quantity, and share a "hard" "matter of fact" attitude towards not only things, but also people (Simmel 213-14). Science and money are both indifferent to the personal, to relationships, and reduce everything to utilitarian concerns: at best, people become rationally calculating economic egoists, while at worst we become mere "cogs" (219-220) in the modern machine (cf. Chaplin). |
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| Under modern conditions, especially in Metropolitain life, humans tend to develop a protective shell which shields us from the overabundance of change and sensory/emotional stimulation. We thus tend to act rationally rather than emotionally, making us somewhat desensitized or shallow (Simmel 213-14) towards our fellow human beings whom we label "strangers" -- we are alienated, estranged from them. Toward the world of things, we have an attitude that everything is mow "homogeneous, flat, [levelled], gray" (215-16). The city "hollows out the core of things", and everything float[s] in the same specific gravity" in the river of money. This devalues the core self, whch can only feel stimulated or alive again through the "stimulant" effect of purchase and consumption. Paradoxically, the blase feeling which causes us to be indifferent to others also is a social lubricant that reduces social friction in the crowded city |
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| A citizen of the world: the metropolitan resident is more citizen of the world than of his or her own country, as metropolitan life weakens the ties to the local, the familial, the racial and cultural. The social lubricant caused by the blasé attitude produces alienation but also freedom for the individual, and if the division of labour compels him or her to compete it also gives each a distinctive identity. If the city's crowds can induce the most intense feelings of isolation and loneliness, it also creates an intellectual distance between who we were in a rural setting and who we might become: as citizens of the world, we feel our horizons expand immeasurably. The city's "inner life" is thus an "international" one (Simmel 217-18). |
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| 14-01 Base and superstructure |
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Definition
| The metaphor of the base and superstructure derives from Marxism and is a way of explaining the relationship between the economy and culture. As such it forms the basis of a perspective known as cultural materialism. Broadly speaking, it is argued that the cultural superstructure is shaped and determined by the economic base or mode of production, so that, for Marxism, culture is the consequence of a historically specific mode of production. As such it is not a neutral terrain because the class-based relations of production express themselves as political and legal relations. Here culture naturalizes the social order as an inevitable ‘fact’ so obscuring the underlying relations of exploitation. Consequently, culture is understood to be inherently the domain of ideology, a conceptualization that forms the basis of cultural studies’ fascination with issues of ideology and hegemony (Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies). |
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| In short: the work of art's aesthetic value gained through its uniqueness. Before the ability of reproduce art, the value was instilled into it because it was the only one of its kind. Also important in the understanding of aura is the idea of distance. The ritualistic value of a work of art is also instilled by it being at a mysterious, unknowable "distance" from us.. That intangible quality to a structure that at its core is, really, just a bunch of a stone is what Benjamin is getting at when he talks about ritual. Once a work of art loses this aura and this ritual value, it is forced to find meaning through its exhibition value. The meaning of art that can be so easily reproduced is transformed into the arena of product. And this meaning can now be co-opted for its use as a tool of political manipulation (for better or worse). Walter Benjamin specifically addresses this when writes that valuing art because of exhibition instead of ritual means that "it begins to be based on another practice-politics" (Benjamin 214). With the rise of secular art, this ritual value was overtaken by the artwork's authenticity, or aura, a halo-like religious afterglow, which, even in a secular age, accounted for the sense of wonder with which a spectator beheld it. But now, the rise of the mechanical ability to reproduce virtually any work of art has resulted in a withering away of the value of this aura. |
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To claim that a category is authentic is to argue that it is genuine, natural, true and pure. For example, it might be claimed that the culture of a particular place is authentic because uncontaminated by tourism, or that a youth culture is pure and uncorrupted by consumer capitalism. In this sense, the concept of authenticity is closely related to the notion of essentialism in that authenticity implies immaculate origins. It follows then that the anti-essentialism of poststructuralism and postmodernism rejects the idea of the authentic as such, replacing it with the notion of ‘authenticity claims’. That is, nothing is authentic in a metaphysical sense; rather, cultures construct certain places, activities, artefacts etc. as being authentic. (Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies).
For Benjamin, "the presence of the original [art work] is the prerquisite to the concept of authenticity" (Benjamin 220). The authentic cannot be reproduced, only forged. But with the rise of mechanical reproduction, the "authentic" began to lose its "authority", first becaus, e..g., the camera can idolate previously unseen details, and second because the viewer is now more important, can make use of the art work in ways previously unimagined. |
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| A "Grand" Meta-Narrative (Harvey 42) is a term coined by postmodernists to refer to those modern theories of modernity which attempt to give explanations of it as a totality, that is, as a unified whole capable of being understood by theory. From postmodernism's point of view, modernist meta-narratives merely told attractive narratives or "stories" about the possibility of capital-T Truth , Liberation , and Progress. |
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(verb: reify) means "thingification", literally: "making [some idea] into a thing": which has two parts:
(a.) the tendency, on the one hand, for social institutions to act as if the categories they create (e.g. "English Literature", "Human Rights", "Free Trade" ) have actual, objective existence: Or, as Peter Berger (The Social Construction of Reality, 1966) put it, when specifically human creations are misconceived as "facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will." It also means
(b.) Treating living human beings as if they were mere things (e.g. as embedded in contemporary notions of workers as "human capital", "human resources"), such that human labour is nothing but a commodity, something to be bought and sold like pork bellies or oil (see Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, 1923) |
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According to Fredric Jameson, capitalism has evolved into a new phase that has created postmodernism as its "cultural logic". Seven key related developments support his argument:
1) "new forms of business organization (multinationals, transnationals) beyond the monopoly stage" (Postmodernism xviii-xix).
2) an internationalization of business beyond the older imperial model; in the new order of capital, multinational corporations are not tied to any one country but represent a form of power and influence greater than any one nation.
3) "a vertiginous new dynamic in international banking and the stock exchanges (including the enormous Second and Third World debt)" (Postmodernism xix).
4) "new forms of media interrelationship".
5) "computers and automation".
6) planned obsolescence. As Jameson puts it, "the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation" (5).
7) American military dominationsuch that "the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror" . |
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| 16-04 Structure of Feeling |
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| Raymond Williams: ‘... a particular sense of life, a particular community of experience hardly needing expression, through which the characteristics of our way of life ... are in some way passed, giving them a particular and characteristic colour ... a particular and native style ... it is as firm as “structure” suggests, yet it operates in the most delicate and least tangible parts of our activity. In one sense this structure of feeling is the culture of a period ... and it is in this respect that the arts of a period ... are of major importance’ (The Long Revolution, 1961: 64) [It is the] 'practical consciousness' [and lived values of a generation. It is ] ‘... especially evident at those specific and historically definable moments when new work produces a sudden shock of recognition. What must be happening on those occasions is that an experience which is really very wide suddenly finds a semantic figure which articulates it’ (Politics and Letters, 1979:162) |
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Derives from the work of the historian and philosopher Michel Foucault. Here, discourse is said to ‘unite’ language and practice and refers to regulated ways of speaking about a subject through which objects and practices acquire meaning...Foucault argued that discourse regulates not only what can be said under determinate social and cultural conditions but also who can speak, when and where. Here, through the operation of power in social practice, meanings are temporarily stabilized or regulated ... Discourse is not a neutral medium for the formation and transfer of values, meanings and knowledge that exist beyond its boundaries... Rather, discourse constructs meaning. Though material objects and social practices have a material existence outside of language, they are given meaning or ‘brought into view’ by language and are thus discursively formed.
(Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies). |
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A parody is a work created to mock or make fun of an original work. The Oxford English Dictionary defines parody as imitation ‘turned as to produce a ridiculous effect.’ Parody is often used in comedy. For example, The Simpsons features parodies of well-known films. The literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin saw parody as a natural development in the life cycle of any genre: a genre will always reach a stage where it begins to be parodied.
Pastiche, on the other hand is "blank parody", "the random cannibalisation of all the styles of the past" (Fredric Jameson Postmodernism (1991)). "Pastiche appears at the moment when parody has become impossible [. . . Its chief quality is an empty] nostaligia: Today, we cannot focus our own present, as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representation of our current experience." |
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| A space for democratic public debate and argument that mediates between civil society and the state in which the public organizes itself and in which ‘public opinion’ is formed. Within this sphere individuals are able to develop themselves and engage in debate about the direction of society. The concept of the public sphere plays a particularly important role in the work of Jürgen Habermas, who traces its historical development from the rise of literary clubs, salons, newspapers, political journals and institutions of political debate and participation in eighteenth-century European ‘bourgeois society’. In this context, argues Habermas, the public sphere was partially protected from both the church and the state by the resources of private individuals. Here the public sphere was in principle, though not in practice, open to all (Sage DCS). James Howard Kuntsler, in his book The Geography of Nowhere, argues that postwar suburban development, which brought with it the rise of the shopping mall, has contributed to the decline of the public sphere, as the privately owned mall has literally replaced the public sphere in American built space. |
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The concept of hegemony played a significant part in the development of cultural studies and was a core concept of the field during the 1970s and 1980s. According to this theory, there is a strand of meanings within any given culture that can be called governing or ascendant. The process of making, maintaining and reproducing this authoritative set of meanings, ideologies and practices has been called hegemony. For Gramsci, from whom cultural studies appropriated the term, hegemony implies a situation where a ‘historical bloc’ of ruling class factions exercises social authority and leadership over the subordinate classes through a combination of force and, more importantly, consent. Gramscian concepts proved to be of long lasting significance within cultural studies because of the central importance given to popular culture as a site of ideological struggle. In effect, Gramsci makes ideological struggle and conflict within civil society the central arena of cultural politics, with hegemonic analysis the mode of gauging the relevant balance of forces. Within Gramscian analysis, a hegemonic bloc never consists of a single socioeconomic category but is formed through a series of alliances in which one group takes on a position of leadership. Ideology plays a crucial part in allowing this alliance of groups (originally conceived in class terms) to overcome narrow economic-corporate interest in favour of ‘National-Popular’ dominance. Thus, ‘a cultural–social unity’ is achieved through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills and heterogeneous aims are welded together to form a common conception of the world. The building, maintenance or subversion of a common conception of the world is an aspect of ideological struggle involving a transformation of understanding through criticism of the existing popular ideologies. Hegemony can be understood in terms of the strategies by which the worldviews and power of ascendant social groups are maintained. However, this has to be seen in relational terms and as inherently unstable since hegemony is a temporary settlement and series of alliances between social groups that is won and not given. Further, it needs to be constantly re-won and re-negotiated so that culture is a terrain of conflict and struggle over meanings. Hegemony is not a static entity but is constituted by a series of changing discourses and practices that are intrinsically bound up with social power. Since hegemony has to be constantly re-made and rewon, it opens up the possibility of a challenge to it; that is, the making of a counterhegemonic bloc of subordinate groups and classes. Neo-Gramscian hegemony theory has been challenged on the grounds that Western culture no longer has a dominant centre either in terms of production or meaning. Rather, culture is heterogeneous both in terms of the different kinds of texts produced and the different meanings that compete within texts. Right across the Western world, it is argued, we have been witnessing the end of anything remotely resembling a ‘common culture’. In particular, the past thirty years have seen the fragmentation of lifestyle cultures through the impact of migration, the ‘reemergence’ of ethnicity, the rise and segmentation of youth cultures and the impact of gender politics. Above all, the restructuring of global capitalism, niche marketing and the aestheticization of daily life through the creation of an array of lifestyles centred on the consumption of aesthetic objects and signs has fragmented the cultures of class blocs
(From the Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies)
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| The idea of homology within cultural studies marks the synchronic relationship by which social structures, social values and cultural symbols are said to ‘fit’ together. The concept is used to describe the ‘accord’ between a structural position in the social order, the social values of subcultural participants and the cultural symbols and styles by which they express themselves. In particular, the theory of homology connects a located lived culture as a set of constitutive relationships to the surrounding objects, artefacts, institutions and practices. Homological analysis records snapshots of social structures and cultural symbols. It involves two levels of related analysis; the examination of the social group and the investigation of their preferred cultural item. It is concerned with how far the structure and content of particular cultural items parallel and reflect the structure, style, typical concerns, attitudes and feelings of the social group. Homological analysis is fundamentally structural in its exploration of the continuous play between the cultural group and a particular item which produces specific styles, meanings, contents and forms of consciousness. Thus Willis holds that the ensemble of the bike, noise and ‘rider on the move’ expresses the ‘motorbike boys’’ culture, values and identities so that the strength of the motorcycle matches the secure character of the bikers’ world. Accordingly, the motorcycle underwrites the boys’ commitment to tangible things, to toughness and power and to masculine assertiveness and a rough camaraderie. Subcultural participants are not held to have cognitive understandings of homologies in the way that the cultural theorist does; nevertheless, the creativity and cultural responses of groups are not random but expressive of social contradictions. Thus subcultures are said to live out important criticisms and insights into contemporary capitalism and its culture. They ‘understand’ in the logic of cultural action something of their own conditions of existence. Indeed, the concept of homology, crossed with that of bricolage, was to play a significant part in cultural studies’ seminal work on youth cultures whereby the creative, expressive and symbolic work of subcultures was read as a form of resistance. Thus, the boots, braces, cropped hair, Stayprest shirts and Ska music of Skinheads in the late 1960s and 1970s was grasped as a stylistic symbolic bricolage that communicated the hardness of working class masculinity and resonated with the group’s situated social relations in a homological unity. (From the Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies) |
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The signifier ‘culture’ in subculture has traditionally referred to a ‘whole way of life’ or ‘maps of meaning’ that make the world intelligible to its members. The prefix ‘sub’ has connoted notions of distinctiveness and difference from the dominant or mainstream society. Hence a subculture is constituted by groups of persons who share distinct values and norms which are held to be at variance with dominant or mainstream society and offers maps of meaning that make the world intelligible to its members. A significant resonance of the prefix ‘sub’ is that of subaltern or subterranean. Thus, subcultures have been seen as spaces for deviant cultures to renegotiate their position or to ‘win space’ for themselves. Hence, in much subculture theory the question of ‘resistance’ to the dominant culture comes to the fore. In particular, for cultural studies writers of the 1970s, subcultures were seen as magical or symbolic solutions to the structural problems of class. Subcultures attempt to resolve collectively experienced problems and generate collective and individual identities. Thus subcultures legitimize alternative experiences and scripts of social reality and supply sets of meaningful activities for their ‘members’. For many cultural studies writers (for example, Willis), the cultural symbols and styles by which subcultures express themselves represent a ‘fit’ (or homology) between the group’s structural position in the social order and the social values of the subculture’s participants. Thus particular subcultural items parallel and reflect the structure, style, typical concerns, attitudes and feelings of the group. Consequently, the creativity and cultural responses of subcultures are not random but expressive of social contradictions. Indeed, the creative, expressive and symbolic works of subcultures are read as forms of symbolic resistance expressed as style.
(From the Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies) |
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