02.13.01
Today:
- Divide up into 4 groups
by essay (all a's meet; all b's; etc.)
- Discuss your essay
with an eye to understanding it well enough to return to your small groups
and "teach" it to your peers (about 20 minutes)
- Return to small groups;
spend another 20 minutes outlining the major concepts of each essay and discussing
the following questions:
- Based on reading/discussing
these four essays, what do you now think Cultural Studies is?
- What does Cultural
Studies adopt from Marxism, as we've studied it to this point?
- How does it depart
from or alter Marxism?
- Each group should be
prepared to contribute answers to the large class discussion.
What is Cultural Studies?
- Examines ways in which
social being determines consciousness; looking at ideology through a cultural
lens rather than a purely economic one
- "Culture is the
sum of the available descriptions through which societies make sense of and
reflect their common experiences" (Hall 59; quoting Williams) -- cultural
studies is the study of those available descriptions in order to determine
what the consciousness of those common experiences is
- is there a problem
with "societies" here? How do "societies" make sense of
common experience? How are ideologies materialized through practice?
- perhaps through political
and economic systems? All systems? (see ISAs -- examining all institutions
society establishes for itself)
- cultural studies as
the happy middle ground between culturalism and structuralism
- applied cultural studies
is the critique of the hegemony of consciousness and the means of production
of that hegemony
What does it adopt from
Marxism?
- Idea that consciousness
is determined by material circumstances
- No overarching ideal
controlling things; all referenced by context
- Educational system
perpetuates the current ideology
- Ideology is determined
by the dominant/oppressors
- Ways the dominant class
incorporates what has been successful for others (appropriation)
- Ideological determinism
-- ideas have a way of coalescing from various dialectics of the past
- Process of hegemony
What does it revise
or delete?
- Redefinition of determinism:
not linear causality, but rather an influence in setting limits
- As much emphasis placed
on other things as on the economic; interested in the "totality"
- Reprivileging of superstructure
in terms of its influence on the base
- Adding the notion of
race as a social construct
- Emphasis on process
of ideology formation in hegemony
For next time:
Baudrillard's The Mirror
of Production -- read at a minimum the preface and introduction, the first chapter,
and the fifth chapter. Preferably, you should read the whole thing. Bring to
class next time a one-to-two page piece of writing on the theoretical concept
of your choice, both defining the concept and beginning to outline how different
writers deal with it.