Intro to cultural studies

1. Sarah & Meg

2. What is cultural studies?
3. Stuart Hall: encoding/decoding
4. Script-writing exercise
CULTURAL STUDIES

Guiding questions:
• Whose voices, identities and
experiences most often get
communicated in mainstream media?
• Whose do not?
• Whose interests does this serve?
• How & why does this matter?
“Cultural studies is animated by subjectivity and
power; how human subjects are formed and how
they experience cultural and social space.”

“By looking at how culture is used and

transformed by “ordinary” and “marginal” social
groups, cultural studies sees people not simply
as consumers, but as potential producers of new
social values and cultural languages.”
“The processes that make us – as individuals, as
citizens, as members of a particular class, race
or gender – are cultural processes that work
precisely because they seem so natural, so
unexceptional, so irresistible.”

“Popular culture is a site where the construction

of everyday life may be examined. The point of
doing this is not only academic – that is, as an
attempt to understand a process or practice – it
is also political, to examine the power relations
that constitute this form of everyday life and
thus to reveal the configuration of interests its
construction serves.”
Britain in 1960’s and 1970’s

■ Disenfranchisement of working class & growing

sense that mainstream culture wasn’t for them 
PUNK
NYC in the 1980’s
■ Economic warfare against Black communities
TEXTS are a site of personal identity
formation and political struggle
What’s a text?
■ Anything that carries meaning

powerpoints - photographs - memes -

snapchats - movies - videogames -
websites - books – tweets – comics -
tv shows - posters – clothes – devices
- built environments - podcasts -
music - prepared food - events
 Political economy Cultural studies

Considers… Systems Practices

Analyzes… Labor Texts

(economic relations) (meanings)
Power happens Who owns what Media representations
through… (capital) (ideology)
Archvillain is…
 Stuart Hall
February 3, 1932 to February 10, 2014

One of the founders of cultural studies

Marx(ian) understanding of power +

linguistic understanding of language’s unfixed meanings
Marxist conceptual framework:
history = a struggle between those who own
the means of production (and also the media) vs
those who work for them

For Hall, this becomes a struggle over MEANING

Hall: texts and language mediate our
relationship to the world…
...there is power in representing the world a
certain way, but that power is not absolute

“representations of violence on the TV screen

are not violence but messages about violence...

but we have continued to research the question

of violence, for example, as if we were unable to
comprehend this epistemological distinction.”
(Hall, p. 166)
Critique of the then-dominant
paradigm of communication
research: “media effects” model
In between the “message” and its “effects”
is a whole series of layers:
- Prior experiences
- Our identity; who we are in the world
- Broader culture and ideology (the lenses
through which we examine the world)

E.g. INTERPRETATION.
SEMIOTICS
The study of symbols and their
relationship to the world
“The articulation of an arbitrary sign - whether
visual or verbal - with the concept of a referent
is the product not of nature but of convention”

“COW”
“Denotative” meaning:
Conventional meaning of the message.

“COW”
“Connative” meanings:
Implied meaning of the message

“COW?”
Bringing Marxism &
Semiotics together…
It is at the level of connotation that texts
enter into "the struggle over meanings"

Three modes of “decoding”:

• Dominant-hegemonic
• Negotiated
• Counter-hegemonic

How you will “decode” a message depends on

the extent to which you “buy in” to the
dominant ideology underlying that message.
Close reading
(attempt #1)
1. Identify the most salient
“systems of differentiation”
(power structures) in the
text (race, class, gender,
sexuality, ability)
2. State whether the text itself
is ”dominant” or “resistant”
with regards to the power
structure it portrays
3. What is your response to
this text – did it make you
anxious? Angry? Happy?
4. Explore what the text
reveals about your own
position in relation to that
power structure
Options:
Lyrics to “Shake it Off”
(http://genius.com/Taylor-swift-shake-it-off-lyrics)
Image of a fly-past from last year’s Superbowl
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/02/07/23/30FB1
38A00000578-3436191-image-m-97_14548893997
09.jpg
Johnson’s commercial for moms
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rDLwnJv4xM
News story about Facebook’s solar planes
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jul/2
1/facebook-solar-powered-internet-plane-test-flight
-aquila
Drone Racing League promotional video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlLbKClHDxE
Restoration Hardware’s kids’ teepee
https://www.rhbabyandchild.com/catalog/product/p
roduct.jsp?productId=rhbc_prod732145&categoryI
d=rhbc_cat353019