Cultural Studies

The Basics

Jeff Lewis, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781412922302, 9781412922296
• eBook ISBN: 9781473903500
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Praise for the first edition:

"This is a great introduction and contribution to the subject. It is unusually wide-ranging, covering the historical development of cultural theory and deftly highlighting key problems that just won?t go away."
- Matthew Hills, Cardiff University

"To say that the scope of the book?s coverage is wide-ranging would be an under-statement. Few texts come to mind that have attempted such a thorough overview of the central tenets of cultural studies."
- Stuart Allan, Bournemouth University

This fully revised edition of the best selling introduction to cultural studies offers students an authoritative, comprehensive guide to cultural studies. Clearly written and accessibly organized the book provides a major resource for lecturers and students.

Each chapter has been extensively revised and new material covers globalization, the post 9/11 world and the new language wars. The emphasis upon demonstrating the philosophical and sociological roots of cultural studies has been retained along with boxed entries on key concepts and issues. Particular attention is paid to demonstrating how cultural studies clarifies issues in media and communication studies, and there are chapters on the global mediasphere and new media cultures.

This is a tried and tested book which has been widely used wherever cultural studies is taught. It is an indispensable undergraduate text and one that will appeal to postgraduates seeking a ?refresher? which they can dip into.

Part One

Forming Culture/Informing Cultural Theory

1

Contemporary Culture, Cultural Studies and the Global Mediasphere

INTRODUCTION: THE CONTEMPORARY SETTING

In 1997 Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales, was killed in a car accident in Paris. The driver was well over the legal alcohol limit and was travelling at speeds in excess of 200 kilometres an hour. While we might condemn the recklessness of the group, a global audience of around 2.5 billion people watched the laying to rest of the ‘People’s Princess’, making it the most watched event in all human history. Also in 1997 the highest grossing movie of all time, Titanic, was released; over the following decade the film earned around $US600m and reached audiences in 120 countries. Around the same year the annual earnings of the North American pop singer Celine Dion were $US55.5 million, although this figure is well short of the Rolling Stones’ tour earnings in 2005 which reached $US135m. In 2006 the annual earnings of movie director Steven Spielberg had topped $US360 million, which was about the same as the annual profit of global news broadcaster CNN. All of these figures, however, seem modest when measured against the annual earnings of the Fox Entertainment Group, which generates annual revenues of $US10 billion and holds around $US24 billion in media assets worldwide.

Such immense sums have been generated through the expansion of major media corporations and the absorption of media audiences into global networked communication systems. Satellite, cable and wireless digital technologies have allowed media organizations to distribute their products across most areas of the world, from affluent urban centres to provincial villages in Suluwesi, Nigeria and the Amazon Delta. But these technologies are not, of themselves, a reason for the extraordinary growth in global media that has occurred over the past two to three decades. Media texts – music, TV, film, print, Internet – meet their audiences in a complex intersection of systems and personal imaginings. To this end, the transformation of the world into a global media sphere is the result of a dynamic interaction between macro processes (history, economy, technology, politics and modes of social organization) and the profoundly intimate and intricate microcosms of a person’s life – the realm of the individual subject. Culture, in a very profound sense, is formed through these processes: an assemblage of dynamic engagements that reverberate through and within individual subjects and the systems of meaning-making of which they are an integral part.

In this way, the collective ‘audience’ and each individual viewing subject contribute significantly to the formation and representation of events like the Diana funeral. Viewers of the funeral, like the audiences of the Twin Towers attack in 2001 or the World Cup Football of 2006, were participants in the dynamic of culture and the transformation of global spaces into the new media sphere. Significantly, many people continue to speculate that Diana’s death was caused by the media, both literally and metaphorically. At the time of the accident, Diana and her companions were attempting to escape the intrusions of the rogue celebrity press, the paparazzi. Of course, Diana was also part of a broader public interest and imagining. She had appeared often in the major, mainstream media, and her life and personal struggles had become a significant part of the everyday lives and experiences of ‘ordinary’ people. To this extent, Diana was a media and cultural product like any other ‘text’ or celebrity. However partially or impermanently, the characters, events, celebrities and texts that are constituted through the media are a fundamental part of our culture.

Warfare, tragedy, love, desire, struggle, relationships – all are mediated for us and implicated in our everyday experiences. The Rolling Stones, Tom Cruise, the attack on the Twin Towers in New York and the Columbine High School killings become real for us – emotionally and cognitively present in our daily contemplations, conversations, pleasures, imaginings and pains. They provide a resource for the management of our own problems, relationships, actions, politics, judgements and processes of persuasion. They become part of who we are and how we understand the world around us. They become our reality.

Thus, the media is not just a conduit for the transfer of meanings from the central corporation to audiences; the media are part of a generalized context and interplay of meaning-making. The media do not exist ‘out there’, but are immersed in the everyday practices and meaning-making of individuals and communities across the globe: they are a significant resource in the formation and construction of contemporary culture(s).

Yet culture is shaped through two quite contrary impulses: one toward the greater congregation of shared meanings (values, practices, texts, beliefs); the other toward change and greater dispersal. While we will speak a little more about dispersal below, we can establish here that the media is profoundly implicated in the process of meaning aggregation, a process that is essential through all gradients of cultural formation. All societies, that is, must communicate and commune through the formation of overlapping or contiguous social imaginings – the sense of participating in ‘the group’ through the mutual and interdependent construction of meaning. Thus, culture is that shared (imagined-meaning) space where the media and audiences interact. Figure 1.1 gives us some sense of how this interaction takes place.

Figure 1.1 Culture, the media and meaning-making.

Source: Lewis 2005, p. 6.

Each apex in Figure 1.1 is interacting with all other elements. This is a dynamic and ceaseless inter-flow of parts, moving through various social gradients in order to generate meaning –

• Media producers include all those people, institutions, regulations and processes who/which contribute to the formation of texts. Text producers may be professional and corporate, or non-professional individuals and communities who create texts online, photographs, home videos, art, poems and so on. Producers draw on the vast ‘library’ of meanings that already exist in culture, including their own professional judgement, to create their texts.
• Texts include every form of mediation in language, sound, smell and image. Media texts may include handycam home videos, garage music, blockbuster movies, websites, books, Internet downloads, TV news, and so on. These texts may be broadcast distribution (including global), or narrowcast (including person to person).
• Audiences include any form of text consumer at any level of production or reception. Audiences are not passive receivers of messages, as early media theory imagined (see Chapter 8). Rather, they are active creators of meaning, drawing on their own personal store of pre-existing experiences and meanings, as well as specific texts and the vast ‘library’ of imaginings and meanings that are held within culture itself. To this end, an audience body may be formed across broad social gradients from huge, global constituencies, to highly localized and specialist consuming communities.

As will be outlined below, this pre-existing library of meanings that are held within culture might equally be understood as the invisible ‘knowledge’ which shapes, and is shaped by, the individual and collective consciousness of a given social group. This consciousness is itself shaped in terms of this exterior ‘semiotic’ (meaning-based) architecture, as well as more ineffable states of the human mind – those that operate at the liminal and subliminal levels. Thus, while consciousness refers to knowledge and meanings which can be explicated and articulated in some form of language and text, the liminal and subliminal levels of human cognition generally cannot. There are many words used to describe this ‘pre-lingual’ dimension of the human mind – intuition, the sub-conscious, the ‘unconscious’, sensations, emotions, spirit, imagination, ‘gut feeling’ and so on. While this dimension of culture, meaning-making and knowing will be discussed in later chapters, the concept of ‘imagining’ is offered here as a way of describing the confluence of consciousness, the liminal and subliminal levels of human cognition and meaning-making.

At this point of the discussion, it is also worth noting that these meanings, and indeed audiences themselves, are engaged in complex processes of social and political organization, which in the contemporary capitalist-economic context are generally hierarchical. Thus, different groups have greater and lesser access to the resources of text construction and distribution. To this end, a particular group’s preferred meanings may be privileged over others. Quite obviously, major media corporations like the Fox Network have the power to create and distribute their version of the world (e.g., the Iraq War) more than smaller companies, community broadcasters or individuals. Particular meanings, therefore, may carry the interests and ideologies of dominant social and economic groups.

Thus, the death of one woman, Princess Diana, has carried an extraordinary density of meanings because it appears consonant with the interests and ideologies of dominant social elites and the broader cultural values of vast numbers of ‘ordinary’ people. Similarly, the reporting of 9/11 was largely shaped by the perspective of the US administration and meanings that are deeply embedded in American culture; these meanings were privileged over alternative meanings, such as the criticisms of American foreign policy and economic exploitation of the Middle East.

• Culture, therefore, is constructed out of consonant and aggregating meanings that are shaped in relation to a given social group’s values, ethics, interests and ideologies. Culture may become evident in the material text (speech, image, sound, words) and in practices (human actions, audience behaviours, and so on). However, as we have also said, culture is also dynamic and replete with disputes over meaning and various claims for meaning primacy. New meanings are shaped in terms of the ceaseless interaction of humans and their diverse communicational forms. As we will discuss below, this dynamic contributes to the transfer, implosion, creation and re-creation of meaning.
• Governments and government regulations are a significant sub-category of culture, since they are able to exert considerable influence over the regulatory environment in which the media operate. For example, the expansion in global corporate media during the 1980s and 1990s was facilitated by the deregulation of the US media industry, allowing corporations to grow exponentially and absorb larger markets.

The contemporary cultural setting, which blends mediated with politically inscribed meanings, needs to be understood as a new public sphere. Historically, the modern European nation-state was constructed around an ideal of free expression and the participation of citizens in government. This free expression took place in the public sphere – initially the public square and other public forums, and eventually through the medium of print. Mass societies have now come to rely on the electronic broadcast media as the centrifugal force of democracy. This new public sphere can be regarded as the mediasphere – a critical ‘culturescape’ in which meanings flow through various channels of human and technologically enhanced modes of communication (Lewis, 2005; Lewis and Lewis, 2006). The mediasphere is the compound of the media and the public sphere, the conflux of macro and micro processes of communication and social engagement.

Global Capital, Cultural Value and the New Televisual Reality

The ‘media’, therefore, is best understood as a set of dynamic communicative and culturally constituted relationships, rather than simply as a particular industry or conglomerate of corporate organizations. While they are not the same thing, mediation is embedded in culture and culture is embedded in mediation. This more inclusive conception of the media is clearly critical for our understanding of contemporary, televisual culture and its various permutations across modernizing and globalizing human societies. Most recent social theorists, in fact, recognize that communication and culture are central contingencies in the current phase of globalization, noting that the new transnational economy has been largely constructed around the instantaneous transfer of information (see Castells, 1997; Sklair, 2002; Roseman, 2003; Urry, 2003; Nairn and James, 2005). Most commentators also agree that this compression of time and space constitutes a new historical epoch of ‘contiguous distance’ by which the immediate transfer of finance, news or entertainment can draw people from their distant cultural and physical spaces into the virtual world of mediation – and its distinctive culture of televisualization. Thus, while capitalism has always carried its products across spatial and cultural borders, the new economy concentrates value into forms that can be instantaneously transacted across vast distances in an instant.

Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1984, 1990; see also Baudrillard, 1981) argues that the foundation for this new form of symbolic exchange was established around the beginning of the twentieth century. According to Bourdieu, the meanings and social values attached to capitalist products transmogrified, as the basic needs of modern societies were largely satisfied. As Karl Marx had noted, capitalism depended for its survival on constant and unconstrained growth: that is, the capacity to invent new products to meet new markets and new demand. With the need for basic food, clothing and housing satisfied by the early twentieth century, capitalism became reincarnated as ‘consumer capitalism’, whereby individuals and families became concentrated into the consuming ‘household’. But this was not simply an economic or social reorganization. Media, culture and communications were at the centre of these transformations; from the 1920s until the emergence of television, the wireless radio was the ‘magical voice’ of electricity and all the wonderful new products that a modern home could possess. Marketing, branding and advertising strategies contributed to the shaping of a new cultural and social consciousness which enabled communities, families and individuals to re-imagine themselves in terms of a new collective order, that is, as a ‘society’ that had a shared ideology and national trajectory. Thus, the communities that had been so severely strained and fragmented during the period of urbanization and industrialization were being re-welded through a sense of national belonging and the communal practice of capitalist consumerism. Pleasure, therefore, became the solder which bound political ideology to a new sense of community and shared culture.

To this end, capitalist products not only supported the economic sustainability of the developed societies; they also provided for society a new fabric of values and meanings, a raison d’être (reason for being) which gave direction and focus for the new consuming household. In a highly competitive and hierarchical society, where the distribution of wealth is often unjustly meted, it is largely this ideal and aspiration of pleasure that enables the overall system to sustain itself. According to Bourdieu, elite social groups have become particularly adept at ‘reading’ the values and meanings that are inscribed over particular capitalist products and practices. Thus, the products themselves are not politically neutral since their consumption reinforces the distinctions that are implied in the capitalist production process.

The concept of ‘taste’ becomes a rubric for social distinctions that are constituted around income, education, social refinement and class. In this way, a consumer or group of consumers will shape their own consciousness and identity around the ascribed value of particular products and services. At its simplest level, an individual distinguishes him/herself by driving a BMW to work, while another rides a Vespa. More subtly, an individual purchases department store clothing in the hope that it will pass as expensive designer wear. The social background of another individual is exposed when the etiquette of dining and utensil use is transgressed.

Of course, there has always been a level of symbolic value attached to products, but these were constrained by the limited incomes and purchasing power of the majority of the population. The continued expansion of the middle class and the proliferation of consumable products in developed societies stimulated an exponential growth in symbolic exchange value. From the early part of the twentieth century the household became increasingly populated by furniture, fashion, decor, trinkets, cutlery, washing products and a vast array of comfort products that enhanced the lifestyle of the new bourgeoisie. Different social groups actually came to recognize one another through the exercise of product preference and the presentation of their ‘style’. A number of cultural commentators have suggested that the expression of style is not simply about power differentials, but about differentiation or fragmentation more generally: thus, different social groups or ‘sub-cultures’ adopt a particular style of dress or consumption practice in order to identify themselves within the great morass of contemporary society (Stuart, 1984; Muggleton, 2002).

Jean Baudrillard (esp. 1981, 1984a) is somewhat critical of Bourdieu’s reading of symbols and social distinction, arguing that contemporary sign systems cannot be so simply correlated with forms of social power. For Baudrillard, the symbolic force of a BMW is created less through the discrimination of consumption and class, and more through its ability to ‘arouse’ consumers. Beginning from a very different theoretical base from Bourdieu, Baudrillard argues that contemporary culture is a deluge of signs, symbols and images. These ‘signs’ are proliferating through the volumes of media and informational processes that now distinguish and create contemporary culture. Yet, while other theorists believe that these signs are conduits of meaning, Baudrillard regards the meanings themselves as vacuous because there is no social agreement about their value and durability. In this sense, they are merely simulacra or imitations of imitations which dissolve before they are even comprehended by media audiences. The Princess Di phenomenon, the killings at Columbine High School, the sexual adventures of Paris Hilton are all constituted through a new, televisual culture – a new reality or hyperreality. This hyperreality creates new forms of stimulation, new forms of arousal and demand, new forms of erratic consumption. The product becomes intensely exalted...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables, Figures and Plates
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part One Forming Culture/Informing Cultural Theory
• Part Two Cultural Locations
• 7 Postmodernism and Beyond
• 8 Popular Consumption and Youth Culture
• 9 The Body
• 10 Globalization and Global Spaces: Local Transformations
• 11 New Media Cultures
• 12 Global Terror and the New Language Wars
• Glossary of Key Terms
• References
• Index