Name : Divya d. Vaghela
Sem :2
Batch : 2018-20
Roll no :07
Email-ID : Vaghela.divya230@gmail.com
Paper no :08
Subject : The cultural studies
Topic : 1) Identity
2) Everyday
Words : 1857
Introduction :
# what is cultural studies?
Cultural studies is one of the more controversial intellectual formations of the 1990s and the first decade of the third millennium. It has experienced a period of rapid growth in the academy, appearing at many universities in a variety of forms and locations (although rarely as degree-granting departments). At the same time, it has been broadly attacked both from inside the university and outside academia.Because the word " culture " itself is so difficult to pin down," cultural studies " is hard to define. As was also the case in chapter -8 with Elaine Showalter's " cultural " model of feminine differences, " cultural studies " is not do much a discrete approach at all, but rather a set of practices. As Patrick Brantlinger has pointed out, cultural studies is not " a tightly coherent, unified movement with a fixed agenda, " but a " loosely coherent group of tendencies, issues and questions ". The discipline of psychology has also entered the field of cultural studies. For example, Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious structured as a language promoted emphasis upon language and power as symbolic systems. From Michael Foucault came the notion that power is a whole complex of forces; it is that which produces what happens.
Over the last thirty years, cultural studies has developed into a diverse and lively international intellectual field. As Stuart Hall, one of its founders, has put it: " Today, cultural studies programmes exist everywhere, especially in the United States..... Where they have come to provide a focal point for interdisciplinary studies and research, and for the development of critical theory. The institutional success of cultural studies is demonstrated by a number of major international journals, global and national associations, increasing numbers of international conferences, academic programmes and publishers catalogues advertising new and essential publications in the field. As a field of study, cultural studies has had important effects on the study of literature. It has challenged the idea of canonical literature, and affected the way literary texts are theorized and read. It has introduced cross and interdisciplinary perspectives. It has sought to theorized the role of literature in society in new ways and to look at literary texts in relation to cultural institutions, cultural history and other cultural texts, forms and Practies. It has further focused attention on the circuit of literary production.
So, now let's talk about Identity..............
~ Identity :
• The identity of a person is, for cultural studies, dependent upon the roles played by that per person, the signs that designates that person. Identity is constituted through experience and representation is a significant part of experience.Experience includes the consumption of signs, the making of meaning from signs and the knowledge of meaning. However, cultural studies believes that experience also masks the connections between different structures in society. We do not always understand that we are not in control of our lives, and that we are subject to ideogical control. That is, experience often makes us believe that we are free agents, when we are in reality victims of discursive and ideological regimes that treat us as consumers alone. We do not always have the power of choice - that is in itself an illusion generated through representation. As we have seen, these signs are part of a discourse. Therefore, it follows that girls assimilate qualities of the ' feminine ' because they are brought up within the discourse of femininity. The culture's values inculcate notions of ' femininity'and ' masculinity ' in the children, where the roles they will play are clearly demarcated from childhood ( care, nature, home for girls, to continue with the above example). As adults the relation between the genders is therefore already set : women will be in charge of the home. The discourse of femininity therefore determines the power and spatial relations between genders. Identity is the consequences of representation and the effect of discourse.
• Identity is based on the location within a system of relationships and discourses. Identity is thus socially produced. Closely related to the theme of identity in cultural status the question of agency. Agency - the capacity and power to determine one's actions and life - is also socially produced.An individual's ability to act is limited by the contexts in which s/he lives. For cultural studies this is a key debate. Who are the empowered agents in any culture. Who determines the limits of an individual's freedoms? What are the consequences of an individual's actions unanticipated culture. Proceeding from our discussion of identity and representation we are now in a position to explore the relations between these two and agency.
Representation is the generation of meaning and constitutes identity. Identity determines the degree of agency one possesses or does not possess. Agency is therefore the consequences of representation too. What follows from this is a crucial point. Discourses and representations determine an individual's identity, agency and actions. Discourses, as we have seen, are structurestof power they generate particular meanings/ identities. In any culture therefore, it is crucial to see which classes / groups control the discourses that have such powers of determining identities and agency. In other words, we need to analyze structures of power that influence images, representation and meaning because these structures finally determine individual lives and actions.
¤ Every day Life..........
Contemporary cultural studies takes everyday life very seriously. Everyday life, especially in metropolises - and, unfortunately, cultural studies seems to be interested mainly in metropolitan cultures - is a site that is multi - layered and contested. Everyday life is about the practices of the routine. It is about.....
• Life
• consumption
• Social interactions / relations
The ' culrural ' is constituted by and constitutes the ' social'. That is, the social realm - Society - is constituted by the ' cultural'artefacts used by the people, even as the cultural artefacts are themselves produced and consumed by society. Cultural artefacts in the social realm can be studied through the analysis of everyday life. What is crucial is that is that Cultural Studies analysing everyday life accounts for subjectivity in the people's responses, since experience is subjective. Sociological studies have often ignored the fact that people respond emotionally to things, and this is a central part of their identity.
A caution : Everyday life is specific to locations and cultures. Everyday life in Manhattan, Newyork, is not the same as everyday life in Bangalore or Guwahati. Think of the differences in basic structures of everyday life in the cities - massive public transport infrastructure, no power cuts, to mention just two - and you can see that we need to ask different kinds of questions about what kinds of clothes people need to wear or whether you can eat on the move on a public transport facility. Thus cultural artefacts /events of food or fashion are structured differently for different locations - and cultural studies is be conscious of this.
Experience is the cornerstone of everyday life. Experience is everyday life - how we experience traffic, clothing, food, social relations on public transport, the sense of community or entertainment constitute our everyday culture. Cultural studies foregrounds experience, but sees it as the means to analyse the relations that construct reality. In order to make this shift from experience to reality (by which cultural studies means the class, geography, community, ideologies and discourses that constitute our reality - see the chapter on Theories to understand how discourses construct reality) , cultural studies underscores the textual/ linguistic aspect of experience. Experience is expressed through language : how we express what we experience, how we speak with others and how we tell our stories. When we listen to others we decide their meanings, we mediate their experience through the language and cultural codes they and we share. Language and representation are therefore integral to the experience and construction to reality. If experience and everyday life are central to culture, then it is important to see how these experiences of the everyday become languages, images and representations.
Cultural studies interest in everyday life proceeds from what Raymond Williams (1981) called ' lived cultures ' ,where culture is produced through everyday living : the food people eat, the fashions they adopt, the entertainment they prefer or the festivals they celebrate. Cultural studies thus believes that people leading their everyday lives produce culture. Culture is not some distinct realm produced elsewhere to be consumed by the people. It is in the everyday that culture is made. Cultural Studies investigates this process of making culture. This process, it believes, is linked to relationships of power. Everyday life is a place where the individual becomes central. The individual's subjectivity is therefore a crucial element of the cultural studies of everyday life. What is important, as we shall see, is that the individual in contemporary globalized culture is an active agent. The individuals are very aware of their appropriation of global cultures, often transforming the global in their own,native contexts.
Cultural studies brings to everyday life the same tools of analysis one finds in literary study. Advertisements, popular songs, television shows, journalism, gaming - all can be analyzed from a variety of critical perspectives. That is the case because they are imaginative artifacts that bear meaning. They are constructed using techniques similar to those used in film and literature such as narrative, metaphor, irony, framing, and composition. Everyday life today is a hybrid of the local and the global. No pure local culture exists in metropolises any more : even where local ethnic chic is marketed it is part of a global consumer market. Hence everyday life gives us multiple identities, a melange. Everyday life is a site of struggle over meaning. It generates multiple identities. If the local was homogeneous, the global is heterogeneous. Contemporary everyday life is a mix of the two, where it is difficult to see where the local culture /value ends and the global one begins. Thus both homogenization and heterogenization are central to metropolitan everyday lives today. This mix of the local and the global has been termed the ' golcal'. Everyday life in cultural studies is a fragmented, multiple space where meanings are hybridized and contested. That is,cities and identities that were once more or less homogeneous in terms of ethnic identities and patterns of consumption are now completely hybrid.
Thus, what cultural studies reminds is a very simple truth : we cannot say that everyday life is dominated or taken over by global cultures. Everyday life is fiercely contested where the meanings of global cultural artefacts are re- invented, re- inscribed by native cultures. The consumer is not a passive recipient of global cultural iconstor artefacts. S/ he modifies what S/he receives to suit her/his own purposes and engages with the global cultures in a native way, often productively re -doing the global to fit in with an Indian cultural system.
Thank you.........................
Sem :2
Batch : 2018-20
Roll no :07
Email-ID : Vaghela.divya230@gmail.com
Paper no :08
Subject : The cultural studies
Topic : 1) Identity
2) Everyday
Words : 1857
Introduction :
# what is cultural studies?
Cultural studies is one of the more controversial intellectual formations of the 1990s and the first decade of the third millennium. It has experienced a period of rapid growth in the academy, appearing at many universities in a variety of forms and locations (although rarely as degree-granting departments). At the same time, it has been broadly attacked both from inside the university and outside academia.Because the word " culture " itself is so difficult to pin down," cultural studies " is hard to define. As was also the case in chapter -8 with Elaine Showalter's " cultural " model of feminine differences, " cultural studies " is not do much a discrete approach at all, but rather a set of practices. As Patrick Brantlinger has pointed out, cultural studies is not " a tightly coherent, unified movement with a fixed agenda, " but a " loosely coherent group of tendencies, issues and questions ". The discipline of psychology has also entered the field of cultural studies. For example, Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious structured as a language promoted emphasis upon language and power as symbolic systems. From Michael Foucault came the notion that power is a whole complex of forces; it is that which produces what happens.
Over the last thirty years, cultural studies has developed into a diverse and lively international intellectual field. As Stuart Hall, one of its founders, has put it: " Today, cultural studies programmes exist everywhere, especially in the United States..... Where they have come to provide a focal point for interdisciplinary studies and research, and for the development of critical theory. The institutional success of cultural studies is demonstrated by a number of major international journals, global and national associations, increasing numbers of international conferences, academic programmes and publishers catalogues advertising new and essential publications in the field. As a field of study, cultural studies has had important effects on the study of literature. It has challenged the idea of canonical literature, and affected the way literary texts are theorized and read. It has introduced cross and interdisciplinary perspectives. It has sought to theorized the role of literature in society in new ways and to look at literary texts in relation to cultural institutions, cultural history and other cultural texts, forms and Practies. It has further focused attention on the circuit of literary production.
So, now let's talk about Identity..............
~ Identity :
• The identity of a person is, for cultural studies, dependent upon the roles played by that per person, the signs that designates that person. Identity is constituted through experience and representation is a significant part of experience.Experience includes the consumption of signs, the making of meaning from signs and the knowledge of meaning. However, cultural studies believes that experience also masks the connections between different structures in society. We do not always understand that we are not in control of our lives, and that we are subject to ideogical control. That is, experience often makes us believe that we are free agents, when we are in reality victims of discursive and ideological regimes that treat us as consumers alone. We do not always have the power of choice - that is in itself an illusion generated through representation. As we have seen, these signs are part of a discourse. Therefore, it follows that girls assimilate qualities of the ' feminine ' because they are brought up within the discourse of femininity. The culture's values inculcate notions of ' femininity'and ' masculinity ' in the children, where the roles they will play are clearly demarcated from childhood ( care, nature, home for girls, to continue with the above example). As adults the relation between the genders is therefore already set : women will be in charge of the home. The discourse of femininity therefore determines the power and spatial relations between genders. Identity is the consequences of representation and the effect of discourse.
• Identity is based on the location within a system of relationships and discourses. Identity is thus socially produced. Closely related to the theme of identity in cultural status the question of agency. Agency - the capacity and power to determine one's actions and life - is also socially produced.An individual's ability to act is limited by the contexts in which s/he lives. For cultural studies this is a key debate. Who are the empowered agents in any culture. Who determines the limits of an individual's freedoms? What are the consequences of an individual's actions unanticipated culture. Proceeding from our discussion of identity and representation we are now in a position to explore the relations between these two and agency.
Representation is the generation of meaning and constitutes identity. Identity determines the degree of agency one possesses or does not possess. Agency is therefore the consequences of representation too. What follows from this is a crucial point. Discourses and representations determine an individual's identity, agency and actions. Discourses, as we have seen, are structurestof power they generate particular meanings/ identities. In any culture therefore, it is crucial to see which classes / groups control the discourses that have such powers of determining identities and agency. In other words, we need to analyze structures of power that influence images, representation and meaning because these structures finally determine individual lives and actions.
¤ Every day Life..........
Contemporary cultural studies takes everyday life very seriously. Everyday life, especially in metropolises - and, unfortunately, cultural studies seems to be interested mainly in metropolitan cultures - is a site that is multi - layered and contested. Everyday life is about the practices of the routine. It is about.....
• Life
• consumption
• Social interactions / relations
The ' culrural ' is constituted by and constitutes the ' social'. That is, the social realm - Society - is constituted by the ' cultural'artefacts used by the people, even as the cultural artefacts are themselves produced and consumed by society. Cultural artefacts in the social realm can be studied through the analysis of everyday life. What is crucial is that is that Cultural Studies analysing everyday life accounts for subjectivity in the people's responses, since experience is subjective. Sociological studies have often ignored the fact that people respond emotionally to things, and this is a central part of their identity.
A caution : Everyday life is specific to locations and cultures. Everyday life in Manhattan, Newyork, is not the same as everyday life in Bangalore or Guwahati. Think of the differences in basic structures of everyday life in the cities - massive public transport infrastructure, no power cuts, to mention just two - and you can see that we need to ask different kinds of questions about what kinds of clothes people need to wear or whether you can eat on the move on a public transport facility. Thus cultural artefacts /events of food or fashion are structured differently for different locations - and cultural studies is be conscious of this.
Experience is the cornerstone of everyday life. Experience is everyday life - how we experience traffic, clothing, food, social relations on public transport, the sense of community or entertainment constitute our everyday culture. Cultural studies foregrounds experience, but sees it as the means to analyse the relations that construct reality. In order to make this shift from experience to reality (by which cultural studies means the class, geography, community, ideologies and discourses that constitute our reality - see the chapter on Theories to understand how discourses construct reality) , cultural studies underscores the textual/ linguistic aspect of experience. Experience is expressed through language : how we express what we experience, how we speak with others and how we tell our stories. When we listen to others we decide their meanings, we mediate their experience through the language and cultural codes they and we share. Language and representation are therefore integral to the experience and construction to reality. If experience and everyday life are central to culture, then it is important to see how these experiences of the everyday become languages, images and representations.
Cultural studies interest in everyday life proceeds from what Raymond Williams (1981) called ' lived cultures ' ,where culture is produced through everyday living : the food people eat, the fashions they adopt, the entertainment they prefer or the festivals they celebrate. Cultural studies thus believes that people leading their everyday lives produce culture. Culture is not some distinct realm produced elsewhere to be consumed by the people. It is in the everyday that culture is made. Cultural Studies investigates this process of making culture. This process, it believes, is linked to relationships of power. Everyday life is a place where the individual becomes central. The individual's subjectivity is therefore a crucial element of the cultural studies of everyday life. What is important, as we shall see, is that the individual in contemporary globalized culture is an active agent. The individuals are very aware of their appropriation of global cultures, often transforming the global in their own,native contexts.
Cultural studies brings to everyday life the same tools of analysis one finds in literary study. Advertisements, popular songs, television shows, journalism, gaming - all can be analyzed from a variety of critical perspectives. That is the case because they are imaginative artifacts that bear meaning. They are constructed using techniques similar to those used in film and literature such as narrative, metaphor, irony, framing, and composition. Everyday life today is a hybrid of the local and the global. No pure local culture exists in metropolises any more : even where local ethnic chic is marketed it is part of a global consumer market. Hence everyday life gives us multiple identities, a melange. Everyday life is a site of struggle over meaning. It generates multiple identities. If the local was homogeneous, the global is heterogeneous. Contemporary everyday life is a mix of the two, where it is difficult to see where the local culture /value ends and the global one begins. Thus both homogenization and heterogenization are central to metropolitan everyday lives today. This mix of the local and the global has been termed the ' golcal'. Everyday life in cultural studies is a fragmented, multiple space where meanings are hybridized and contested. That is,cities and identities that were once more or less homogeneous in terms of ethnic identities and patterns of consumption are now completely hybrid.
Thus, what cultural studies reminds is a very simple truth : we cannot say that everyday life is dominated or taken over by global cultures. Everyday life is fiercely contested where the meanings of global cultural artefacts are re- invented, re- inscribed by native cultures. The consumer is not a passive recipient of global cultural iconstor artefacts. S/ he modifies what S/he receives to suit her/his own purposes and engages with the global cultures in a native way, often productively re -doing the global to fit in with an Indian cultural system.
Thank you.........................
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