Hand Out Untuk Teori Kajian Budaya Kontemporer Program Magister Kajian Sastra dan Budaya
Fakultas Ilmu Budaya, Universitas Airlangga
Contemporary Culture Theory: Cultural Studies and Its Sites Oleh Diah Ariani Arimbi, Ph.D
The term "culture" is, of course, a contested term with multiple meanings in various contexts and discourses. In the context of semiotics, culture can be viewed as the sum of rule-governed, shared, learned and learnable, transmittable, symbolic activity used by a group in any given place and time. "Culture is the generator of structuredness... [and] the nonhereditary memory of the community" (Lotman).1 Meanings, values, significance circulate in second-order languages (symbols, values, images, stories, myths) that use both ordinary language (one's native language) and other sign-systems like visual images, mass media, and information technology. All these ways of transmitting shared and stored meanings involve a mediated content. To be in a culture means to be in preexisting but constantly changing sign-systems.
This includes Popular Culture: values that come from advertising, the entertainment industry, the media, and icons of style and are targeted to the ordinary people in society. These values are distinguished from those espoused by more traditional political, educational, or religious institutions.
Campbell’s Soup Can (1962) by American pop artist Andy Warhol is one of a number of virtually identical paintings done by the artist in the early 1960s. The cartoonlike image, flat and simplified, is characteristic of pop art.
Warhol selected his subject matter from amongst images already present in popular culture or advertising, thereby keeping his work intentionally impersonal.
In the 1980s and 1990s some anthropologists turned to an even more radical interpretive perspective on culture, known generally as postmodernism. Postmodernism questions whether an objective understanding of other cultures is at all possible. It developed as a reaction to modernism, which was the scientific and rational approach to understanding the world found in most ethnographies.
1 Juri Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. (Translated by Ann Shukman, introduction by Umberto Eco). London & New York: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 1990, p. xiii. See also, Lotman Jurij M.; Uspenskij B.A.; Ivanov, V.V.; Toporov, V.N. and Pjatigorskij, A.M. 1975. “Theses on the Semiotic Study of Cultures (as Applied to Slavic Texts)” in Sebeok Thomas A. (ed.), The Tell-Tale Sign: A Survey of Semiotics. Lisse (Netherlands): Peter de Ridder, 1975, pp. 57–84.
Postmodern anthropologists suggest that all people construct culture through an ongoing process that resembles the writing, reading, and interpretation of a text. From this view, people continually create and debate with each other about the meaning of all aspects of culture, such as words, rituals, and concepts. People in the United States, for instance, have long debated over cultural issues such as what constitutes a family, what women’s and men’s roles in society should be, and what functions the federal government should perform. Many anthropologists now study and write about these kinds of questions, even in their own societies.
Culture Theory
This term has been applied to diverse attempts to conceptualize and understand the dynamics of culture. Historically these have involved arguments about the relationship between culture and nature, culture and society (including material social processes), the split between high and low culture, and the interplay between cultural tradition and cultural difference and diversity.
Cultural theory has also been marked by an engagement with concepts which have often been taken to cover some of the same ground signified by the notion of culture itself. Prominent here have been the concepts of ideology and consciousness (particularly its collective forms).
The works of Raymond Williams (The Long Revolution, 1961) and E. P. Thompson (The Making of the English Working Class, 1963) have been particularly influential in the development of post-war British cultural theory. Williams's emphasis on culture as a ‘whole way of life’ and Thompson's emphasis on culture as the way in which groups ‘handle’ the raw material of social and material existence opened up new ways of thinking about culture—in particular uncoupling the concept from a narrow literary and aesthetic reference. Both Williams and Thompson studied the lived dimension of culture and the active and collective
process of fashioning meaningful ways of life.
The so-called culturalist reading of the term developed by both Thompson and Williams was subsequently challenged by other more obviously structuralist interpretations. These emphasized the external symbolic structures of culture, as embodied in cultural languages and codes, rather than its lived forms. In this formulation culture could be read as a signifying system through which the social world was mapped. The structuralist version of cultural theory was also strongly informed by Louis Althusser's version of Marxism. Althusser offered a reworking of Marxist theories of ideology which gave greater scope to the efficacy of the ideological realm. In particular he emphasized the relative autonomy of the ideological or cultural domain whilst holding on to the principle of the ultimately determining character of
economic relations and processes.
The concern to recognize the efficacy of cultural practices in Althusser's writings was further developed within cultural theory by the appropriation of the ideas of Antonio Gramsci.
Gramsci's work opened up new ways of conceptualizing the role of culture and cultural practices in class formations and class alliances and, in particular, gave great weight to the role of culture in securing forms of political and moral leadership and authority (hegemony). The influence of Gramsci's ideas was particularly important in helping cultural theory move beyond the impasse created by the tensions between competing culturalist and structuralist
perspectives in the 1970s.2
As Gramsci's importance has waned within cultural theory, so that of Michel Foucault has increased. A central thrust of Foucault's influence has been to shape a more discursive understanding of cultural languages and of the interconnection between power and representation.3 Foucault's influence has also been obvious in arguments about the historically specific character of culture and its development as both an object and instrument of
2 See, for example, Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, 1978.
3 See Sean Nixon, Hard Looks, 1996
government.4
The interplay between race, ethnicity, and culture has also emerged as a central concern of contemporary cultural theory. This has often been via a critique of the forms of ethnicity assumed within the tradition of British cultural theory associated with Williams and Thompson
—or what Paul Gilroy has termed the morbid fascination with Englishness.5 It has also challenged the incipient nationalism of conceptions of culture which link it to particular bounded national territories. In place of this, writers such as Gilroy have emphasized instead the transnational movement and mixing of cultures. Cilroy's notion of the ‘Black Atlantic’
represents an attempt to envisage cultural processes outside the restrictions imposed by nationally delimited conceptions of culture. In this sense, it has much in common with Edward Said's work on orientalism, which examines not only the internal dynamics but also the external determinants of cultures. In Said's Orientalism (1978), Western conceptions of culture and civilization are depicted as having been formed against a process of naming and
symbolically subordinating the Oriental.
Feminist arguments have also exerted an important influence on recent cultural theory.
Looming large here has been the interplay between feminism and psychoanalysis. This has led to much discussion about the ways in which gender identities are formed within cultural languages and through cultural practices. Recent work on memory, fantasy, and gender performance has been especially suggestive.6
One of the mainstays of contemporary cultural theory is the argument that the social is primarily shaped by culture. Culture, that is, not as a collection of artifacts or an archive of progress, but, rather, following the writings of Antonio Gramsci, as "an arena of consent and resistance" (Stuart Hall, "Deconstructing" 239)7 over the shape of the social. Contemporary cultural theory has extended the understanding of culture beyond universalist, and, therefore, supposedly elitist assumptions and normative hegemonic conclusions about culture and instead focused on culture as "the articulation and activation of meaning" (Storey xiii)8 on the grounds that it is primarily discourse that possesses "the power and the authority to define social reality" (xii). The meaning(s) in a culture that secure and contest the dominant social arrangements are thought to lie in what Michel de Certeau calls "secondary production" (xiii), the sphere of consumption, rather than the economic sphere of production. In these terms, it is the "consumer who in effect 'produces in use'" (xiii) the meaning(s) of the culture that determines social reality. So much has such a focus on the daily practices of consumption and identification been "central to the project of cultural studies" (xi) that some have simply argued that "cultural studies could be described ... perhaps more accurately as ideological studies"
(James Carey qtd. in Storey xii). The focus in cultural theory on the constitutive power of discourse to define social reality has shifted the attention of cultural studies from the wider social relations of production which shape ideology and consumption and in fact determine the social real, toward a market theory of culture which valorizes the excessive "uses" and
"resignifications" of cultural commodities and in doing so transforms the subject of labor into the subject of consumption who, far from intervening into global capital, supports it through
"resistant" desires and "rebellious" acts of consumption.
Cultural theory, in other words, rests on the assumption that consumption determines production rather than the other way around. People's "lifestyles" (which is another way of referring to the commodities they consume and how they consume them) are thus assumed to be more significant, in these terms, than the labor relations they must enter into as a necessary precondition of consumption. Such an assumption concludes that the markers and beliefs that
4 See Laurence Grossberg et al. (eds.), Cultural Studies, 1992
5 See Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, 1987.
6 See P. Adams and and E. Cowie, The Women in Question, 1993; and Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter, 1993
7 Hall, Stuart. "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular'." People's History and Socialist Theory. Ed. Raphael Samuel. London: Routledge, 1981.
8 Storey, John. Cultural Theory And Popular Culture: A Reader. Atlanta: U of Georgia P, 1998.
position individuals in culture as men and women, black, latino, gay,… are more important factors signifying their identities.
The assumption that consumption is more important than production which has steadily shaped cultural theory since the 60s, has then become the common-sense of both cultural theory and daily culture itself. Rapid changes in technology in the last several decades have changed the nature of culture and cultural exchange. People around the world can make economic transactions and transmit information to each other almost instantaneously through the use of computers and satellite communications. Governments and corporations have gained vast amounts of political power through military might and economic influence. Corporations have also created a form of global culture based on worldwide commercial markets.
Local culture and social structure are now shaped by large and powerful commercial interests in ways that earlier anthropologists could not have imagined. Early anthropologists thought of societies and their cultures as fully independent systems. But today, many nations are multicultural societies, composed of numerous smaller subcultures. Cultures also cross national boundaries. For instance, people around the world now know a variety of English words and have contact with American cultural exports such as brand-name clothing and technological products, films and music, and mass-produced foods.
Many anthropologists have become interested in how dominant societies can shape the culture of less powerful societies, a process some researchers call cultural hegemony. Today, many anthropologists openly oppose efforts by dominant world powers, such as the U.S. government and large corporations, to make unique smaller societies adopt Western commercial culture.
Culture Industry
Horkheimer and Adorno (1976) argued that the very idea of culture has developed into a viable industry, which develops in congruence with economic trends. Specifically, they observe that mass production of goods is a means of needs satisfaction which consequently allows centralized powers control and manipulation of the individual. The multiplicity of preferences available to consumers cultivates a belief that each and every need can be satisfied by a specific product, creating a reliance of the consumer on the producer to recognize and tend to personal needs through their product. This places the producer, or rather the corporation, in a position of influence over the consumer. Mass production of products translates into mass production of ideas, making culture merely an industry which promotes the ideologies of those in command of it. Horkheimer and Adorner (1976) describe this branding of ideas through consumerism as the culture industry. The process by which this occurs is characterized by several factors, all of which reveal that the individual is not enabled, but rather striped of power, while the ruling few become more empowered.
The culture industry is foremost characterized as a monopoly; control over consumer preferences falls into the hands of a minor, centralized power. Economically, this power is identified as the corporate elite. The creation of meaning, ideas, and consciousness through product availability and product consumerism reflect the marketing interests of corporations.
In reference to technology as a means by which the culture industry expands itself, Horkheimer and Adorno (1976) stated, "the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest."9 The creation and expansion of the culture industry is determined by the economically powerful. In addition to access, the available products are also determined by a select few. Holzer (2006)10 argued that the consumer believes himself to be in a position of influence over the market’s available
9 Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (1976). The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception (J. Cumming, Trans.). In Dialectic of enlightenment (p. 120-167). New York: Continuum International Publishing Group.
10 Holzer, B. (2006). Political consumerism between individual choice and collective action: Social movements, role mobilization and signaling. International Journal of Consumer Studies, 30, 405-415
products, but that this aura of reality is merely perpetuated by the politically powerful in order to maintain the illusion that the individual is in a position of influence. He stated, "consumers, after all, only have a ‘secondary relationship’ to the services and goods they buy. They depend on others to produce commodities for them – and thus on the choices made by those producers" (p. 405). The consumer is relatively powerless position when compared with those who actually create the products.
Secondly, the culture industry is characterized by production of commodities, which serve as an expression or representation of realities for the consumer. Individuals become connoisseurs of wine or opera or contemporary art not because these items alone enrich and broaden their taste and intellect, but rather interest in the culture validates a specific lifestyle which is viewed as desirable. Horkheim and Adorno (1976) expand on this point:
What might be called use value in the reception of cultural commodities is replaced by exchange value; in place of enjoyment there are gallery-visiting and factual knowledge: the prestige seeker replaces the connoisseur. The consumer becomes the ideology of the pleasure industry, whose institutions he cannot escape. Culture and consumerism become wedded into a process, whereby the commodities hold value only to the extent that they validate the consumer’s desired status. Popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods to manipulate the masses into passivity; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture make people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances. Adorno and Horkheimer saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries may cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, or genuine happiness.
Individuals are presented with the illusion that culture and consumer preferences are wedded into an inseparable unity and therefore consumerism represents the opportunity to exercise true individualism. This reality is observed in nearly all situations where a product exists. Google exemplifies how individual preferences can create an aura of individuality while still upholding the centralized power of the corporation. And while advertisement attempts to validate cultural identity it can be scarcely suspected of promoting fascist agendas.
Cultural Studies
In the "Cultural Studies" model, "culture" is a field of conflicting and competing forces resulting from structured asymmetries in power, capital, and value.
Cultural Studies as an academic field has been accused of dematerializing or leveling media content in order to objectify ideological and political messages for analysis. The approach is often further characterized as an "effects" model of analysis that focuses on capitalist and corporate mechanisms of control and usually omits the agency and activity of individuals, groups, and subcultures who are the receivers and users of media.
Stuart Hall's "cultural marxism" approach builds out a more complex model based on extending the theory of hegemony, the social-economic processes for "manufacturing consent"
among the lower classes (the "have-nots" or "have-lesses") to buy-in to the view promoted by ownership classes ("the haves").
In this view of cultural studies, mass media and communications typically encode (implicitly presuppose as a context for meaning) a dominant ideology which finds mass acceptance.
Media is thus ideologically encoded to maximize the willing consentof the consumer and
"have-nots" to "keep with the program" and perpetuate the status quo of power and wealth distribution.
Hegemony of ideologies that protect the governing and ownership class is not a matter of force, coercion, or obvious deliberate manipulation. It functions so well because it relies on the willing consent of those with less power and wealth to accept a dominant ideology, to see the world and act according the view of those above.
Examples of mainstream ideologies that circulate in the media and protect hegemonic power:
Free speech (as a belief, when few have power in what they voice)
Individuality (great for marketing, since consumerism requires the simultaneous presentation of unique personal choices and identities and the need to look and buy like everyone else in an identity group)
Freedom of choice (part of our individuality beliefs, also the main assumption in consumer culture and marketing: the ideology of the shopping mall)
In this view of hegemony and culture, social behavior is overdetermined by multiple identity factors like race, social class, sex and gender, and nationality, which are encoded in hierarchies of power, significance, and economic value.
But Hall and others like Dick Hebidge show that people have many strategies for dealing with media contents: operate in the dominant code, use a negotiable code (accepts but modifies the meaning based on the viewer's and viewer communities position), or substitute an oppositional code (using critical awareness, demystification, irony, subversion, play, parody, like DJ sampling). In this way, many subcultures are formed around group uses of media, images, and music that create identities and differentiations from mainstream or dominant culture.
Possible sites for Cultural Studies/Popular Culture/Urban Culture:
1. Subcultures 2. Styles
3. Fashion Cultures 4. Shopping Cultures
5. Fandom and Celebrity Cultures 6. Cyborgism and Cyber Cultures 7. Culture and Technology 8. Youth Cultures
The more difficult something is to reproduce, the more is it fetishized and sustained. As culture is used by capitalism to control the individual consciousness, so too does it become
"industrialized" and commodified. Where art was once also a commodity, in a capitalism it is to all extents a commodity, and is often successful through the evocation and manipulation of desires.
Works Cited
1. P. Adams and and E. Cowie, The Women in Question, Cambridge, USA, MIT Press, 1993.
2. Butler, Bodies that Matter: On The Discursive Limits of Sex, New York, Routledge, 1993.
3. Gilroy, Paul, Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1987.
4. Laurence Grossberg et al. (eds.), Cultural Studies, New York, Routledge, 1992
5. Hall, Stuart. "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular'." People's History and Socialist Theory. Ed. Raphael Samuel. London: Routledge, 1981.
6. Hall Stuart et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order, London, McMillan, 1978.
7. Holzer, B. International Journal of Consumer Studies, 30, 405-415, 2006.
8. Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception (J. Cumming, Trans.). In Dialectic of enlightenment (p. 120-167). New York:
Continuum International Publishing Group, 1976.
9. Lotman, Juri, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. (Translated by Ann Shukman, introduction by Umberto Eco). London & New York: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 1990.
10. Lotman Jurij M.; Uspenskij B.A.; Ivanov, V.V.; Toporov, V.N. and Pjatigorskij, A.M.
1975. “Theses on the Semiotic Study of Cultures (as Applied to Slavic Texts)” in Sebeok Thomas A. (ed.), The Tell-Tale Sign: A Survey of Semiotics. Lisse (Netherlands): Peter de Ridder, 1975.
11. Nixon, Sean, Hard Looks: Masculinities, Spectatorship and contemporary Consumption, London, UCL Press, 1996.
12. Storey, John. Cultural Theory And Popular Culture: A Reader. Atlanta: U of Georgia P, 1998.
