Starting Questions
Main Ideas
Structure
Summary
Applications

Starting Questions

1. What is culture?  What is popular culture?  And Cultural Studies?
2. What is a text?  Where are its textual boundaries?  How do we deal with its readers or subjective forms in and of the text?
3. In reading a text, how do we avoid giving an evaluative reading or objective study?  How do we examine a literary text from a "cultural" perspective?

There are three main models of cultural studies research: production-based studies, text-based cultural studies, and studies of lived cultures.  It may be more transformative to rethink each moment in light of the others, importing objects and methods usually developed in relation to one moment into the next.

Structure

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Article Summary

I. Definitions: p. 78 "Actually it is not definition or codification that we need but pointers to further transformations. "

1. CS defined as an intellectual and political tradition (its history and main concerns)
   • the importance of critique -- p. 76  "The critique of economism has been the continuous thread through the whole ''crisis of Marxism''; the critique of gender; critique of scientism
   • three main premises --
     • 1. cultural processes are intimately connected with social relations.
     • 2. culture involves power and helps to produce asymmetries in the abilities of individuals and social groups to define their needs.
     • 3. culture is neither an autonomous nor an externally determined field, but a site of social differences and struggles.
2. CS defined in its relations to the academic disciplines -- interdisciplinary p. 79
3. CS defined in terms of theoretical paradigms
4. CS defined by its characteristic objects of study.

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II. Theoretic Concerns:

1. subjectivity -- with its pressures and tendencies, movement and combination.
   • Consciousness for Marx -- embraced the notion of a consciousness of self and an active mental and moral self-production.
   • Subjectivity includes the possibility that . .  . some elements or impulses are subjectively active--they move us--without being consciously known
   • the stress on forms: p. 81  ". .  . the structured character of the forms we inhabit subjectively: language, signs, ideologies, discourses, myths.  [Structuralist insights] have pointed to regularities and principles of organization. . . "  .
   • 1. we need to look at forms of subjectivity from the point of view of their pressures or tendencies, esp. their contradictory sides.
     2. we need histories of the forms of subjectivity where we can see how tendencies are modified by other definitions.
2. circuit of culture = circuit of capital and its expanded reproduction and a circuit of the production and circulation of subjective forms.
3. publication/abstraction vs. the private and concrete
   • pp. 85-86  Three things occurred in the process of public-action.  1. the car [commodity] (and its texts) became public in the obvious sense: it acquired if not a universal at least a more general significance.  2. at the level of meaning, publication involved abstraction.  3. it was subjected to a process of public evaluation.
   • It became a site of formidable struggles over meaning.
4. forms of study: culturalist, and structuralist
   • p. 86  If the first set of methods are usually derived from sociological, anthropological or social-historical roots, the second set owe most to literary criticism, and especially the traditions of literary modernism and linguistic formalism.
   • Such division is a sure impediment to the development of CS.
   • Private forms, not necessarily "private" -- "They may also be shared, communal and social in ways that public forms are not."  (e.g. Gossip as a private form, but also with discursive forms. TV program and its separate and abstracted form.   <--> "Another Great Day"
5. circulation of public and private forms
   • The public and private forms of culture are not sealed against each other.  There is a real circulation of forms.  Cultural production often involves public-action, the making public of private forms.  On the other side, public texts are consumed or read in private.

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III. Three Moments of Cultural Studies and their transformations

1. production;
   • Taken mostly by sociologists and social historians.
   • Limitations: 1. economism: tendency to neglect what is specific to cultural production in this model.  Cultural production is assimilated to the model of capitalist production in this model.  2. productivism: "production determines all"; that conditions of origins exercise a profound influence on the nature of the product.  --> premature  (e.g. Adorno & Benjamin''s ideas of epic theatre)
   • p. 93  A more sensible approach: 1. grant independence and particularity to a distinct production moment--and to do the same for other moments.  2. consumption is also part of production  (the text as produced vs. the text as read)
2. text-based analysis
   • its paradox: p. 94
   • the importance of being "formal": literary forms are also social categories or subjective forms.  pp. 95-96
   • re-definition of text -- p. 97  we need to work across genre and media, comparatively.
   • structuralist shortcomings: ignore production and readership.  p. 98
   • the necessity of and difficulties in linking the reader in the text to readers in society.  p. 101
     • reading, like all kinds of production, is "inter-discursive."  pp. 102-103
     • post-post-structuralist account of subjectivity  -- 1. accepting structuralist insights as a statement of the problem; 2. taking seriously . . . a discursive self-production of subjects, esp. in the form of histories and memories.  p. 104
3. culture as lived culture
   • to grasp the more concrete and more private moments of cultural circulation.  1. detail, recompose and represent complex ensembles of discursive and non-discursive features.  2. social inquiry of those which do not appear in public sphere.
   • p. 106 its lack: attention to the means of signification as a specific cultural determination.  The virtue of abstraction are eschewed. .
4. p. 108  The moments, though separable, are not in fact discreet, therefore we need to trace what Marx would have called ''the inner connections'' and ''real identities'' between them.
   • e.g. to look for the signs of production process in a text: this is one useful way of transforming the very unproductive concern with ''bias'' that still dominated discussion of ''factual'' media.
   • to read texts as forms of representation;  . .  .The first object, that which is represented in the text, is not an objective event or fact, but has already been given meanings in some other social practice.
   • text analysis --be adapted to, rather than superseding, the study of actual readerships.
     • the formal reading of a text has to be as open or as multi-layered as possible, identifying preferred positions or frameworks certainly, but also alternative readings and subordinated frameworks, even if these can only be discerned as fragments, or as contradictions in the dominant forms.
     • abandon evaluative reading or reading as an ''objective science.''

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Source
Johnson, Richard.  "What is Cultural Studies Anyway?"  What is Cultural Studies: A Reader.  Ed. John Storey.   London: Arnold, 1996.

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