Lecture 1

Culture: A Contested Concept

📌
Culture is never monolithic

Elite vs Mass culture Core concepts

Global vs Local culture Culture

Mainstream vs Subcultures Class

Ideology

Why does culture matter?

It shapes how we think and how we react

Ex.: Personal space

Global exchanges are reshaping the outlines of our culture(s)

It allows us to understand political friction

→ The Different Cultural Significances of a Swastika around the Globe

Originally “Conducive to well-being” in Sanskrit

In the Western world mainly associated with nazis

Culture - A Contested Concept

Culture is “one of two or three most complicated words in the English language”
(Williams)

Noun for growing crops

Expanded → cultivating the mind

Lecture 1 1
 Culture as “lived experience”

Instead of a definition, look for its impact

Two possible definitions of culture

High Culture: culture is the best of what a society produces

Ballet, classical music etc.

Literature

Culture is the ‘high point of civilization’ and ‘the concern of an educated minority’
(Leavis)

Ordinary culture: culture is a society’s way of life

Everyday lived experience of a group or community

Traditions and habits of a group

Raymond Williams see

Two aspects of culture

Both traditional and creative

📌 Cultural materialism

Cultural materialism promotes the idea that infrastructure, consisting of

“material realities” such as technological, economic and reproductive
(demographic) factors mold and influence the other two aspects of
culture.

Three levels of culture:

Lived culture

Recorded culture

Culture of the selective tradition

Lecture 1 2
 Lecture 2
Culture and Ideology:
The relationship between Culture and Economics according to
Marx
You need to analyze culture in relation to politics (Marx)

Cultural studies appreciates the political/economic relation to culture but rejects

the determinism

Reminder: Raymond Williams (1921-1988)

Culture is determined by material condition

Ex.: Sculpture → material? What is available?

📌 Cultural materialism: how and why cultural meaning is produced and

organized. It involves the exploration of signification in the context of the
means and conditions of its production. Cultural materialism is concerned
with the connections between cultural practice and political economy.

Three levels of culture

The lived culture of a particular time and place

The recorded culture, of every kind, from art to the most everyday facts

The culture of the selective tradition: the factor connecting lived and
recorded culture

Why call this cultural materialism?

Culture is a part of an expressive totality of social relations:

Lecture 2 1
 You cannot isolate culture from material conditions, economic possibilities,
social position of who creates this culture

We can use culture to understand social relations

Culture must be understood through the representations and practices of everyday

life in the context of the material conditions of their production

Cultural materialism urges you to study all of culture’s

components:
Institutions - what institutions are involved in creating a culture?

Formations - what schools, movements and factions do we discern?

Modes of production - what material conditions can we identify in the production of

culture?

Identifications - how do people identify with a cultural practice?

Reproduction - how is this culture reproduced, remembered, archived, etc.?

Organization - how is that archive and remembrance organized?

Marx’s Heritage and its critique of Marx

Marxist concepts to which cultural studies responds were:

Ideolofy

Historical Materialism

Hegemony

Historical materialism (Marxism): is a theory that attempts to relate the production

and reproduction of culture to the organization of the material conditions of life

Marxist definition of culture:

Culture is a corporeal force tied

into the socially organized
production of material conditions
of existence

Lecture 2 2
 The concept of culture refers to
the forms assumed by social
existence under determinate
historical conditions (base -
superstructure)

Relations of Production?
The totality of the relations of production constitutes

the economic structure of society

Which is:

the real foundation, on which legal and political superstructures arise

and to which definite forms of consciousness correspond

Karl Marx, Grundrisse

Example: Declaring oneself sovereign

Forces of production: Technologies of production + Workers

For Marxism, Culture is Political because

It is expressive of social relations of class power

Lecture 2 3
 “The ideas of the ruling class are, in every age, the ruling ideas,
i.e., the class, which is the dominant material force in society is
at the same time its dominant intellectual force.”
As a result, culture

Naturalizes the social order as an inevitable fact (it makes you believe
capitalism is the natural order of things)

Obscures the underlying relations of exploitation

Criticism from Cultural Studies

Marxism holds on to the idea that the profit motive and class relations directly
and completely determine the form and meaning of cultural production

But is it always that simple?

No → Culture is a site of tension and conflict, it’s too simple to argue that it’s
ruled by the dominant class alone

Revisions of Marxism
Louis Althusser

Economy is only determining in the ‘last instance’

Stuart Hall

“We must think a society or social formation as ever and always

constituted by a set of complex practices; each with its own
specificity, its own modes of articulation.”

Culture has its own mode of articulation

What is a social formation? (Althusser - Hall)

A social formation is not a totality of which culture is just an expression

A social formation is a complex structure of different instances (levels or practices)

that are ‘structured in dominance’

Lecture 2 4
 Different instances of politics, economics, and ideology are articulated together to
form a unity

The social formation is not the result of a single one-way base-superstructure

determination

The economic level is determinant only in the last instance (relative autonomy)

→ General definition of Ideology within Cultural Studies

The binding and justifying ideas of any social group. It is commonly used to
designate the attempt to fix meanings and worldviews in support of the powerful.

Here, Ideology is said to be constituted by maps of meaning that, while they

purport to be universal truths, are historically specific understandings, which
obscure and maintain the power of social groups (eg. class, gender, race).

→ General definition of Ideology by Karl Marx

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is directly interwoven

with the material activity of men. If in all ideology men and their circumstances
appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much
from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from
the physical life-process

Lecture 2 5
 Lecture 3
The Linguistic Turn in Cultural Studies
Neutral language?
Language is the privileged medium in which cultural
meanings are formed and communicated

Language is the medium through which we form knowledge about ourselves and
the world

Language is constitutive of...

Values

Meanings

Knowledges

Language gives meaning to...

Material objects

Social practices

That is to say:

Language brings those objects and practices into view

Such objects and practices are made intelligible to us through language

Structuralism #1: Semiotics and de Saussure

The Founding Father of Semiotics and Structuralism: Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-
1913)

Key claims:

We need a general theory of the sign, i.e. semiotics;

Lecture 3 1
 Language does not reflect a pre-existent and independent reality of
independent objects;

Sign systems construct meaning through a series of conceptual and phonic

differences.

Langue: the abstract sign system and rules of language or sign systems

Parole: individual speech acts and the everyday usage of language by real
speakers (with infinite variations).

Saussure was interested in langue because he thought it could give systemic

insight in the production of meaning

📌 Structuralism is a body of thought that is concerned with the structures of

signs that allow linguistic performance to be possible. A structuralist
understanding of culture is concerned with the system of relations of an
underlying structure that forms the grammar which makes meaning possible
(rather than actual performance in its infinite variation).

Semiotics: what and why?

Semiotics is the study of signs and the general theory of how a sign works.

Language is a sign system that gives meaning to the world.

Sign:

Lecture 3 2
 → Arbitrariness of the sign

Because it is arbitrary, the sign is totally subject to history and the

combination at the particular moment of a given signifier and
signified is a contingent result of the historical process.
- Jonathan Culler, literary critic

Cultural Codes
The relation between signifier and signified is determined by our cultural
codes.

Cultural conventions can change over time…

… or between different groups within a culture

This extends to non-linguistic sign systems, for instance: color

Roland Barthes (1915-1980): Denotation & Connotation

French critic and semiotician

Took De Saussure’s scientific approach to langue and extends it

to popular culture

Note: several phases can be discerned in Barthes’ thinking; pay

attention to ‘which Barthes’ you are dealing with when reading his work

Presuppositions

Cultural objects and practices make use of signs

They become ‘texts’ to be read and interpreted

A system of signs can be inferred from this (structuralism)

Denotation: First level signification – Descriptive, literal level of meaning shared by

virtually
all members in a culture.

Connotation: Second level signification – Meanings generated by connecting

signifiers to wider

Lecture 3 3
 cultural ideas, creating meaning by association of
signs with other cultural codes of meaning

Concrete example of myth

Signifier: “On the cover, a young [N-
word] in a French uniform is saluting, with
his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a fold
of the tricolor. All this is the meaning of
the picture.”

Signified: “France is a great empire, and

… all her sons, without any color
discrimination, faithfully serve under her
flag, and … there is no better answer to
the detractors of an alleged colonialism
than the zeal shown by this [N-word] in
serving his so-called oppressors.”
(Barthes, 1957)

The very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature

In the case of the soldier-[N-word], what is got rid of is certainly not French
imperiality (on the contrary, since what must be actualized is its presence); it is the
contingent, historical, in one word: fabricated, quality of colonialism.

Lecture 3 4
 Lecture 4
From Structuralism to Poststructuralism
Structuralism: Roland Barthes (1915-1980) and the Myth
Drawing on Saussure, Barthes analyzed cultural myths

Mythologies (1957): a collection of essays → Cultural sign-system

“The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of

impatience at the sight of the ‘naturalness’ with which newspapers,
art and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even
though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by
history.”

Presupposition:

Cultural objects and practices make use of signs

They become ‘texts’ to be read and interpreted

A system of signs can be inferred from this (structuralism)

New Distinction: Denotation - Connotation

Denotation: First level signification Connotation: Second level signification –

– Descriptive, literal level of Meanings generated by connecting signifiers to
meaning shared by virtually all wider
members in a culture. cultural ideas, creating meaning by association
of
signs with other cultural codes of meaning

Post-structuralism & Focault

Lecture 4 1
 Poststructuralism accepts and absorbs aspects of structuralism while subjecting it to
critique.

It builds on the foundation of structuralism, but rejects the presupposition of a

structured and fixed system of meaning production.

There can be no denotative meaning which is fixed and stable

It absorbs these ideas of structuralism It rejects:

Emphasis on the relational character The idea of a stable structure that

of language underlies all
process of signification
The production of significance
through difference The idea of binary pairs that can
easily be kept apart (for example: it
rejects the easy distinction between
langue and parole)

The idea of stable meaning (instead:

meaning is
always deferred, in process, and
intertextual)

The search for origins, stable

meaning universal
truth and a ‘direction’ in history.

Focused on the idea that signs are polysemic

Signs do not have singular, fixed meanings, but are polysemic: they carry many
potential meanings

Texts (or signs) can be interpreted in many different ways

Reader fixes meaning of text temporarily, within own background and

knowledge of codes

Differences arise based on gender, class, nationality, age, etc.

Signification changes as social conventions and social struggles seek to fix

meaning

Lecture 4 2
 Meaning cannot be guaranteed; it is not pure but always ambivalent and
ambiguous.

Roland Barthes’s poststructuralist phase: The Death of the Author

(1967)
The author is dead

It is not the author but the reader who puts meaning in a text

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author

Emphasis shifts from encoding (by the author) to decoding (by the reader)

“A text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning

(the
‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in
which a variety
of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a
tissue of
quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”
(Barthes)

Michel Focault: Discourse

Focault

French Philosopher

Asks questions such as: what kind of knowledge do the humanities give us?
How is this knowledge constructed?

Develops the concept of discourse to explain how knowledge is constructed.

Later work: focuses on the technologies of the self and sexualities (we will
return to this)

Discourse refers to the production of knowledge through language which gives

bounded meanings to material objects and social practices.

Lecture 4 3
 Discourse constructs, defines and produces the objects of knowledge in a regulated
and intelligible way while excluding other forms of reasoning as unintelligible.

Historical nature of discourses and knowledge

“Mendel produced true statements but he wasn’t involved ‘within

the true’ of the biological discourse of his time”

Subjects are constructed through disciplinary discourses:

The sciences: constitute the subject as an object of inquiry

Technologies of the self: individuals turning themselves into subjects

Dividing practices: separate the sane from the insane, the law-abiding citizen from
the criminal, friends from enemies etc. These disciplinary discourses can and must
be studied historically, giving us an understanding of the ‘regimes of self’ in a
specific historical era

Archeology (Focault)

The method of archeology that Foucault develops:

Analyzes the specific and determinate historical conditions under which

statements are combined and regulated to form and define distinct fields of
knowledge.

Tries to identify the formation or regulated ways of speaking about objects.

Geneology (Focault)

A genealogical analysis for Foucault:

Traces the historical continuities and discontinuities of discourse

Emphasizes the material and institutional conditions of discourse and the operations
of power

Examines the way in which discourse develops and is brought into play under
specific and irreducible historical conditions through the operation of power

How does Cultural Studies understand ‘hegemony’?

Lecture 4 4
 Culture is comprised of a multiplicity of streams of meaning and encompasses a
range of ideologies and cultural forms. However, there is one strand of meaning that
can be called ascendant (or dominant). The process of making, maintaining and
reproducing these authoritative sets of meanings and practices is what we call
“hegemony”.

Lecture 4 5
 Lecture 5
Television, Text and Audience
Television
The development and
institutionalization of cultural studies
has long been intertwined with those
of media studies.

Available everywhere in the world:

billions of people have access

A source of popular knowledge

Brings us into contact with ways

of living other than our own

Part of the selective construction

of social knowledge

How to study television?

We need to pay attention to:

Text, i.e. programs: how are they constructed?

Relationship between text and audience: how do people understand television?

Political economy: how is the industry organized?

Patterns of cultural meaning: how do they create meaning?

How television constructs reality

Lecture 5 1
 Television is implicated in ‘the provision and the selective
construction of social knowledge, of social imagery, through which
we perceive the “worlds”, the “lived realities” of others, and
imaginarily reconstruct their lives and ours into some intelligible
“world-of-the-whole”’
Stuart Hall (1977)

News is not an unmediated ‘window-on-the-world’

News is a selected and constructed representation constitutive of ‘reality’

Process of Selection:

Politics

The economy

Foreign affairs

Domestic Affairs

Sport

Occasional Stories

How does the news construct social and political reality?

(1) selection of topics: (2) Selection of the constitution of the
topics:
Politics
Reference to elite nations
Economy
Reference to elite persons
Foreign affairs
Personalization
Sport
Negativity
Occasional stories

Models for understanding television

The manipulative model The pluralist model The hegemonic
model

Lecture 5 2
 Media reflect class- Societies consist of a More flexible
dominated society variety of different form of the
ideological viewpoints manipulative
The media are
and interpretations model
completely
controlled by the Multiplicity of Multiple
‘establishment’/government perspectives and strands of
multiplicity of audiences meaning in any
Ideology is
culture,
introduced and Audiences create
enforced by media market demands that but one
controllers media respond to; more
media are not in control dominant
Example:
of what audiences (want than
propaganda of
to) consume others:
Nazi oppressors
dominant
Audiences can choose
Criticism ideology
to ignore media they do
Audiences are not like / agree with → Cultural
not that opinions are not formed hegemony:
gullible, they by the media, but process of
will question instead determine which making,
stories and media are used maintaining
create their and
Criticism
own meanings reproducing
(see later => Journalists might be these
encoding – (quite) free in their authoritative
decoding) actions, but are still sets of
constrained by the meanings and
It is almost
dominant ideology practices (see
impossible to
they live and think Gramsci)
completely
in;
control the No direct
media and Stories need to fit influence
intercept into the predefined of/manipulation
alternative and shared view of by
news reports the world in order to ‘establishment’,
but indirect

Lecture 5 3
 Oppression make sense for the through
often ends in audience prevalent
revolt ideology =>
It implies that all
remember
people have equal
Foucault’s
access to all media,
discourse
which is clearly not
true

Example: Oklahoma bomber

Bomb went off in office block (biggest destructive act of terrorism in US before 9/11)

This fact needed a narrative in reporting => embedding of the story in prevalent
world view

Journalists speculated about meaning of event => Arab terrorist bomb

Only after FBI investigation the story changed: act by ultra right-wing American
militia group

Early reports:

"The betting here is on Middle East terrorists," CBS News' Jim Stewart (hours after
event)

"It has every single earmark of the Islamic car-bombers of the Middle East,"
Chicago Tribune’s columnist Georgie Anne (two days after event)

"Whatever we are doing to destroy Middle east terrorism, the chief terrorist threat
against Americans, has not been working," New York Times' A.M. Rosenthal (two

Lecture 5 4
 days after event)

From encoding to decoding (Stuart Hall)

We should think of the process of
television encoding as the articulation
of linked but distinct moments in a
circuit of meaning.

Each of the moments in this circuit

has its specific practices which are
necessary for the circuit but which do
not guarantee the next moment.
Production: You make a show
Although meaning is embedded in
(always within a cultural context)
each level, it is not necessarily taken
up at Distribution: You need to circulate
the next level. The production of the show (distribution channels)
meaning on the production level
Circulation: Viewers interpret it in
(encoding) does not ensure the
their own way (from within their own
consumption that meaning
cultural context)
(decoding).
Reproduction: Viewers ‘use’ it to

📌 → In today’s media

Challenge: we’re always in

make sense of their own lives (it has
impact on how people think of
themselves, the world, etc.)
a feedback loop where the
circulation (how it’s
received) influences the
reproduction.

There is always:
1. The dominant-hegemonic encoding/decoding which accepts the ‘preferred
meaning’

Lecture 5 5
 2. A negotiated code which acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic in
the abstract but makes its own rules and adaptations under particular
circumstances

3. An oppositional code where people understand the preferred encoding but

reject it and decode in contrary ways.

Active audience paradigm

Audience is not passively taking in meaning fixed by the producers of TV, but is
creating meanings

Cultural ‘texts’, like TV programmes, are polysemic

Meaning is directly related to context of audience: gender, age, race, nationality,

level of education etc.

Encoding of meaning does not ensure corresponding decoding;

audience might accept intended meaning, but might also
construct opposite meaning

The Globalization of Television

Television can be considered global in the following respects:

The various configurations of public and commercial television, which are

regulated, funded and viewed within the boundaries of nation-states and/or
language communities

The technology, ownership, program distribution and audience of

television, which operates across boundaries of nation states across the world.

The circulation by television of similar narrative forms and discourses

around the world.

→ While the narrative forms and formats that television produces can be called
global (eg. soap opera) these formats and narrative forms also create ample
opportunities for television to connect to the local

Lecture 5 6
 Lecture 6
Subcultures
The Explosion of global and popular culture after World War II
The beginning of processes of decolonization around the world

The emergence of a global (mass) communication network: radio, television.

The explosive rise of birth rates (especially in the West) that would lead to a
generation of young people coming of age in the 1960s

The emergence of popular culture: music, fashion style, leisure activities, dances
and languages

→ Youth is not a universal category of biology but a changing social and cultural
construct that appeared at a particular moment in time under definitive
conditions.

How does society act upon the constructed category of ‘youth’?

Although social sciences and cultural studies acknowledge and even emphasize the
cultural and social construction of youth as a category, society nevertheless acts upon a
set of assumptions:

Youth is a unitary category

Youth is an especially formative stage of development

The transition from childhood dependence to adult autonomy involves a ‘rebellious

phase’

Young people in modern societies experience difficulties in making the transition

Subculture

Lecture 6 1
 The starting point were studies in criminology on youth delinquency. But there is an
important difference:

The book sees youth as a construction

It does not focus on delinquency

Instead focuses on the cultural aspects of youth

Focuses on the creative capacity in youth culture

Example: Provo - Netherlands

PROVO, 1965-1967
The Amsterdam-based counterculture movement, Provo, first
emerged in the city’s Spui square in 1965 where artist and magician
Robert Jasper Grootveld held his ritualistic “happenings” in, as
https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=14072

📌 A subculture refers to a group or person who share distinct values and

norms which are
held to be at variance with dominant or mainstream society. Subcultures offer
maps of
meaning which make the world intelligible to its members.

Defining attribute of a subculture?

“The defining attribute of a subculture lies with the way the accent is
put on the distinction
between a particular cultural/social group and the larger
culture/society. The emphasis is on variance from a larger
collectivity who are invariably, but not unproblematically, positioned
as normal, average and dominant. -
Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media, and
Subcultural Capital (1995)

Lecture 6 2
 Subterranean Values?
Subcultures have been understood as spaces for deviant cultures to renegotiate
their position or to win space for themselves

For this reason, cultural studies places a lot of emphasis on how ‘resistance to
dominant
culture’ plays a role within subcultures.

Can you explain how Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony ties in with this
definition of subculture?

Subculture as counter-hegemony.

For Gramsci, hegemony implies a situation in which an ‘historical bloc’ of ruling-

class factions exercises social authority and leadership over the subordinate
classes through a combination of force and consent. It is the process of making,
maintaining and reproducing the governing set of meanings of a given culture

The Cultural Studies definition of ‘hegemony’:

Culture is comprised of a multiplicity of streams of meaning and encompasses
a range of ideologies and cultural forms. However, there is one strand of meaning
that can be called ascendant (or dominant). The process of making, maintaining
and reproducing these authoritative sets of meanings and practices is what we call
“hegemony”.

In this context: a subculture understands itself as a form of culture that is not

hegemonic.
It will explicitly or implicitly oppose itself against the hegemonic culture, resisting it.

Cultural Studies & Juvenile Delinquency Studies

Understanding young people’s troublesome social behaviour not as individual but
as
socially determined by age and structurally imposed problems of class:

A rejection and inversion of middle-class values of work, success and money

enacted by working class young people to cope with perceived deficiencies

Enactment and emphasis on subterranean working-class values, especially

those of leisure.

Lecture 6 3
 Attempt to enact values of success, wealth and power and/or leisure and
hedonism via alternative routes.

The subculture as solution to social problems:

Providing magical solutions to socio-economic structural problems

Offering a form of collective identity that is different from that of school and work

Winning space for the alternative experiences and scripts of reality.

Supplying sets of meaningful leisure activities in contrast to school and work

Furnishing solutions to the existential dilemmas of identity

Homological analysis
A homological analysis of subculture is “concerned with how far, in their
structure and content, particular items parallel and reflect the structure, style,
typical concerns, attitudes and feelings of the social group. … it is the
continuous play between the group and a particular item which produces
specific styles, meanings, contents and forms of consciousness.”

+ Bricolage

Bricolage is the ‘reordering and recontextualization of objects to

communicate fresh meanings.’

Objects that already carry sedimented symbolic meanings are re-signified in

relation to other artefacts in a new context.

The double articulation of youth

Cultural studies analyzes youth cultures as stylized forms of resistance to
hegemonic culture. Youth is constituted through a ‘double articulation’ to parent
working-class culture and the dominant culture.

Punk subculture as a dramatization of the social situation in

Britain and elsewhere?
According to Dick Hebdige, punk appropriated the media language of crisis and
recycled it in corporeal visual terms.

Lecture 6 4
Lecture 6 5
 Lecture 7
Subjectivity and Identity
Histories of identity and subjectivity
A central theme in cultural studies since its inception.

Increasing importance since 1990s: tightly linked to fields such as feminist studies,
queer studies, critical race studies, postcolonial studies.

While ‘self-awareness’ appears to be a universal phenomenon among primates,

subjectivity and identity are shaped by culture.

Subjectivity and identity: overlap and difference

Subjectivity Identity

The condition of being a person, Self-identity: the conceptions we

the process by which we become a hold about ourselves.
person, how we are constructed as
Social identity: and the way others
subject.
see us and form expectations of
Key question: and opinions about us.

Who counts as a subject and Key Question:

why?
How do we see ourselves and
how do others see us?

Political Subject versus social identity

Subject and identity are never completely independent from one another:

We can fight for political rights and thus the right to be recognized as a political
subject.

Lecture 7 1
 But for it to be conceivable that we have the right to be a political subject, we must
be recognized socially for our identity.

You will often see that even though certain groups are seen as having equal rights
(political subjects), they are not always treated equally in everyday life (social
discrimination, based on identity).

→ Combahee River Collective: “Statement on black feminism” in which “identity

politics” is introduced as a concept (1977)

“There have always been Black women activists—some known, like

Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B.
Wells Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell, and thousands upon
thousands unknown—who have had a shared awareness of how
their sexual identity combined with their racial identity to make
their whole life situation and the focus of their political
struggles unique. Contemporary Black feminism is the outgrowth
of countless generations of personal sacrifice, militancy, and work
by our mothers and sisters.”

“We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical
politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to
working to end somebody else's oppression.”

Essentialism versus Anti-Essentialism

Essentialism Anti-essentialism

For a particular entity (e.g. a Any particular entity is

person, object, concept, word constructed; there are no
etc.) there exists a set of universally present attributes, but
attributes which are necessarily the entity only becomes fixed
and definitely present and temporarily within the context
define/fix this entity.

Lecture 7 2
 Ex.: Genetical sex is an essential trait of human beings →← gender is constructed (both
culturally, through clothes etc, and biological, through sex operations)

The cultural studies approach to identity and subjectivity

It’s social and cultural all the way down:

Subjectivity and identity are contingent, culturally specific productions: identities

are a wholly social construction and cannot exist outside cultural
representations.

Identity as a social construction

Identity is formed within a society and language (or indeed, discourse) that predates
us, through social relationships with others

Characteristic markers of identity only obtain meaning through contrast: i.e. racial
identity is only meaningful in contrast to other races

Stuart Hall A critical analysis of western conceptions of identity.

Assumptions:

We have a true self

We possess an identity that can become known to us

Identity is expressed through forms of representation (cf. subcultures)

Identity is recognizable by ourselves and by others

The self works as a sign, in which otherness and sameness are essential
elements of creating meaning

This sense of self is thought to have developed in the Age of

Reason/Enlightenment (Eurocentric view!); individualism is a specific
marker of
modern (Western) societies.

The Enlightenment Subject…

“… was based on a conception of the human person as a fully
centred, unified

Lecture 7 3
 individual, endowed with the capacity of reason, consciousness and
action,
whose ‘centre’ consisted of an inner core … The essential centre of
the self was
a person’s identity.” (Stuart Hall)

Descartes
Descartes’ radical skepticism

I think, therefore I am – Cogito, ergo sum

Cartesian dualism; consciousness and self resides in mind, not body

The Sociological Subject The Postmodern

Still notion of ‘inner core’ of the subject, but Subject
formed through interaction with others, not Subject is fragmented and
autonomous shifting, possessing
multiple (sometimes
Shaped firstly by family members, then peers,
contradictory) identities.
colleagues etc., always through
interaction Different situations
highlight different identities
Interaction with others is essential in many
of our person
theories about the self as subject by e.g.
Freud, Lacan, Foucault

Five major shifts - Leading to the decentered subject

Marxism: our agency and interests are determined by class

Psychoanalysis: our agency and interests are determined by subconscious drives

Feminism: our agency and interests are determined by gender

Language: our agency and interests are determined by discourse

Foucault and the docile body: our agency and interests are shaped by
disciplinary technologies.

Lecture 7 4
 Masters of Suspicion
During the late 19th and early 19th century the basis for the decentered subject was
laid through theories by

Karl Marx (1818-1883): class

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): body

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939): psyche

Freud / Feminism / Foucault

Relevance of Psychoanalysis

The psychoanalytic view of personhood fractures the cartesian subject by

splitting it into three levels: ego, superego and unconscious

Psychoanalysis explains how the ‘inside’ identity links up to the outside

discourse of power

Psychoanalysis rejects the fixed nature of the subject and sexuality

Psychoanalysis points to the psychic and emotional identity of subjectivity

through
identification

Feminism and our understanding of decentered subjectivity

Challenges the distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ through the statement
‘the personal is political’

Inner notions of identity, particularly gender, are therefore influenced by outside

interactions.

Michel Foucault and the Decentered Subject: Discourse and Disciplinary

Technologies

The subject is entirely the product of history/power

Subjectivity is a discursive production: You do not actively and autonomously

form your own identity (‘the great myth of the interior’), you can only discursively
produce it from existing subject positions

Lecture 7 5
 Disciplinary technologies produce ‘docile bodies’ which can be subjected,
transformed and improved

Lecture 7 6
 Lecture 8
Issues of gender, race and nation
Feminism and its relation to cultural studies
Not all feminism belongs to the realm of cultural studies

But the two share important interests

Connections to non-academic movements

Suspicion and challenge to types of discursive knowledge

Inclusion of marginal groups in knowledge and power production

Feminism

There is no one feminism

Liberal, difference, socialist, post-structuralist, black, post-colonial,

postfeminism

Feminism asserts that sex is a fundamental and irreducible axis of social

organization

📌 Patriarchy: structural subordination of women in society

Three waves
First wave: Suffragettes - fighting for equal rights / the right to vote

UK and US suffragettes, late 19th, early 20th century: women’s movement for
right to vote (suffrage)

Fights for equal rights between men and women (voting, work, reproduction)

Strictly about political inequalities

Lecture 8 1
 Still grounded in binary division between men and women

Second Wave: Gender as construction / the personal is political

Beauvoir: The second sex (1949)

“One is not born, but rather becomes, woman”

Existentialist: women have a choice to conform to what men expect from

them

There is no essence to being a woman

1960s to 1980s

Cultural and political gender roles are linked

Personal life became seen as politicized: “the personal is political” (Carol

Hanisch, 1970)

Awareness of the cultural (one might say: discursive) construction of gender

More about cultural and social inequalities (instead of judicial or political)

Third Wave: anti-essentialist, queering, no universal claims about women

1990s anti-essentialist reaction to second-wave essentialism

Criticized second wave for being too white, privileged

Poststructuralist view on gender and sex, as not being binary and universal

No global, universal claims about women, but context-specific; ‘woman’ is not a

singular term

“This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the

concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound
and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own
identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's
oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly
repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary
concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political
movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy

Lecture 8 2
 of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood,
and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human,
levelly human, is enough.”

Fourth wave? Up for discussion (cf. seminars)

Breaking down the binaries: Queer Theory

Common assumptions about sex and
gender
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v
Sex is binary =87XvVdLaWT8

Sex determines gender

Sex determines behavior

Sex determines sexual

preferences

→ Recent advances in the science of sex shows that, even at the biological level,
a surprising number of people do not fit neatly into the category of ‘female’ or
‘male’.

Judith Butler → Gender Trouble

Questions why we have distinguished between sex and gender: why do we

mirror our understanding of gender to that of sex?

Questions of the second-wave assumption that there is a universal idea of

womanhood: historically and culturally specific performance or enactment that
changes over time, space and culture

Lecture 8 3
 “If identity is asserted
through a process of 📌 Focault - Discourse

The production of knowledge through

signification, if identity language which gives bounded
is always already meanings to material objects and
signified, and yet social practices

continues to signify Constructs, defines and produces

as it circulates within the objects of knowledge in a
regulated and
various interlocking
intelligible way while excluding
discourses, then the other forms of reasoning as
question of agency is unintelligible.
not to be answered
through recourse to
an “I” that preexists
signification.”

Where does the modern concept of race come from?

“The concept of race bears the traces of its origins in the discourses
of social Darwinism
that stress ‘lines of descent’ and ‘types of people’.

Here the concept of race refers to alleged biological and physical

characteristics, the most obvious of which is skin pigmentation.

These attributes, often linked to ‘intelligence’ and ‘capabilities’, are

used to rank ‘racialized’ groups in a hierarchy of social and material
superiority and subordination. These classifications are at the root
and heart of modern racism.”

Lecture 8 4
 Racialization
The idea of ‘racialization’ or ‘race formation’ is founded on the argument that race is
a
social construction and not a universal or essential category of biology.

Race does not exist outside its representation: it is formed in and by symbolization
in a
process of social and political power struggle. (Stuart Hall)

“Such a term [Black] “functions like a language.” Indeed it does -

language, in fact, since the formations in which I place it, based on
my own experience, both in the Caribbean and in Britain, do not
correspond exactly to the American situation. It is only at the
‘chaotic’ level of language in general that they are the same. In fact
what we find are differences, specificities, within different, even if
related, histories.”

→ Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

Imagined Communities
Benedict Anderson: The Nation as Imagined Community

Anderson’s Claim: “All communities Anderson’s Question:

larger than primordial villages of face-to- What discursive and imaginative activities
face contact (and perhaps even these) bring particular nationalisms into
are imagined.” They are imagined being and give them their distinctive
communities. form?

The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them encompassing
perhaps a billion living beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries beyond which lie
other nations…

The nation is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in
which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely
ordered, hierarchical dynastic realm.

Lecture 8 5
 [The nation] is imagined as a community because, regardless of the
actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the
nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship

Horizontal relations

In the ‘old’ empires and kingdoms:

Each subject relates to the sovereign (king).

In nation-states:

Each subject relates to the other ‘horizontally.’

Print-Nationalism: How the Nation was Imagined

The rise of print: led to standardization of vernacular languages. “Print language is
what invents nationalism, not a particular language per se.” (Anderson, Barker 254).

Bildung:

Reading played a central role in the ‘bildung’ (formation) of young people

Literature has a ‘civilizing’ function

Media and the Nation: The Newspaper

The collective ritual of reading a newspaper at breakfast introduces a notion of a
simultaneity that creates a national community. We feel ‘horizontally’ connected to
others who read the same newspaper at (roughly) the same moment.

One could argue that the nation is is “based upon a conception of the ‘meanwhile’:
we feel connected to others who do something similar at this very moment.

Lecture 8 6
 Lecture 9
Culture, Power, Knowledge
Posthumanism

💡 Posthumanism challenges the notion of an essential human self or identity;

it displaces
the idea of the whole person being the most significant level of analysis and
understanding.

Examples of posthumanism: structuralism, poststructuralism, Foucault’s discourse

and biopower

Increasingly, we are making use of technologies that ‘enhance’ or body, moving

toward a symbiosis between body and technology - there no longer is such a thing
as the pure body.

Examples: contact lenses, pacemakers, medicines (eg. antidepressants), nutritional

pills,

Or in a more extended way: ChatGPT

Donna Haraway and the Cyborg Manifesto

Cyborgs blur the boundary between organism and machine, as well as between
human and other animals

This implies that the classic, male enlightenment subject/human can no longer be
sustained

Also a possibility for feminism to rethink its position!

Posthumanism, Michel Foucault, and the Question of Agency

Lecture 9 1
 💡
Michel Foucault and the Decentered Subject
(Discourse) Discourse refers to
The subject is entirely the product of the production of
history/power. knowledge through
language which
Subjectivity is a discursive production: You gives bounded
do not actively and autonomously form your meanings to
own identity (‘the great myth of the interior’), material objects and
you can only discursively produce it from social practices.
existing subject positions.

Disciplinary technologies produce ‘docile

Discourse constructs, defines,
bodies’ which can be subjected, transformed
and produces the objects of
and
knowledge in a regulated and
improved.
intelligible way while excluding
other forms of reasoning as
unintelligible.

Power is productive and decentered (a network)

Power does not repress (eg. desires) but produces (eg. desires) and organizes our
subjectivity

Power is a network: not one or two central institutions, but a complex network of
schools, prisons, hospitals, asylums, family, city structures, etc.

VS: Ideology (Cf. Karl Marx & Versus Ideological State

Friedrich Engels): Apparatuses (Louis
Althusser):
The production of ideas, of Centralized and repressive
conceptions, of consciousness, is
For Louis Althusser ideology
… directly interwoven with existed in its apparatus and its
the material activity of men. If in all associated practices. He
ideology men and their identified a limited set of so-

Lecture 9 2
 circumstances appear called Ideological State
Apparatuses (ISA):
upside-down as in a camera
obscura, this phenomenon arises The family

just as much from their The educational system

historical life-process as the The church

inversion of objects on the retina The mass media
does from their physical
life-process. - Marx & Engels, The
German Ideology

The sciences: constitute the subject as an object of inquiry

Sociology studies social behaviour

Psychology studies psychic behaviour

Economics studies how people interact in markets, etc.

Technologies of the self: individuals turning themselves into subjects

How to dress properly

How to speak and act properly

Dividing practices: separate the sane from the insane, the law-abiding citizen from
the criminal,
friends from enemies etc.

Institutions like the prison & mental institutions are read historically by Foucault:
how did these
institutions emerge and what kind of behavior, forms of punishment and/or
treatment and
surveillance did they introduce?

These disciplinary discourses can and must be studied historically, giving us an

idea of the ‘regimes of self’ in a specific historical era.

The problem of agency

Lecture 9 3
 Foucauldian discourses – discursive knowledge and power – explain how subjects
come
into being, but leave us with problem of agency:

How do we take up particular subject positions?

How do we resist power?

How can ‘docile bodies’ have agency?

→ Techniques of the self

Reintroduces agency, because subjects are ‘led to focus attention on themselves as

subjects of desire’ (Foucault, 1987)

Subject’s focus on itself takes place through questions of ethics ‘the government of
others and the government of oneself’

Discourses do not just produce and control subjects, they also allow for agency, in
particular discourses of ethics (or mindfulness or self-help etc.)

Disciplinary Power and Biopower

Methodological approach: “Trace the transformation not at the level of political
theory, but rather at the level of the mechanisms, techniques, and technologies of
power.”

Foucault → “Society must be defended”

Historical analysis: two phases in the development of power

17th and 18th century: disciplinary techniques centered in the individual body;
with the ultimate aim of making that body more productive (rationalization)

19th century: introduction of biopower as the power over life and the population
(statistical approach so to speak)

Important to remember: these two (disciplinary and biopower) do not exclude each
other, they bleed into one another during the nineteenth-century

Panopticon

Lecture 9 4
 Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was a French historian and
philosopher, associated with the structuralist and post-structuralist
movements. He has had strong influence not only in philosophy but also
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/

Biopower emerged in the 19th century

💡 Disciplinary power: “Discipline tries

to rule a multiplicity of men [sic] to
💡 Biopower: “The new
non-disciplinary power is
the applied not to man-as-
extent that their multiplicity can and body but
must be dissolved into individual to the living man, to man-
bodies as-living-being; ultimately,
that can be kept under surveillance, if you like, to
trained, used, and, if need be, man-as-species.”
punished.”

Biopower: consequences
Politics is no longer about the
surveillance and disciplining of the
individual

Politics is now about these

individuals taken together: the
population (statistics)

Politics is now about the reproduction

of the population: the family, which
connects individual and population

Surveillance today: both disciplinary power and biopower

Contemporary society employs techniques of surveillance and control

Lecture 9 5
 This creates docile bodies that ‘can be subjected, used transformed and improved’
(Foucault)

Lecture 9 6
 Lecture 10
New Media, Globalization and Convergence
Culture
Facebook Blackout: October 4 2021
For about 5 hours on October 4,
Meta’s services were down:
https://youtu.be/sjnvXn2IpWE?si=
The services were restored after 5Ucvax8K_oRpuzU
about 5 hours. What can happen in
the span of 5 hours? Minor
inconvenience or crucial breakdown?

A Digital Revolution?
“Contemporary (western) culture is now saturated with media that provide the social
knowledge and imagery by which we grasp our world.” (Jane & Barker)

Our use of social media “is situated and sustained within the routine activities of our
everyday lives.” (Jane and Barker)

This hypothesis holds true for all urban centers throughout the world

Lecture 10 1
 Lecture 11
Culture, Web Activism, and the Information
Society
Our world is saturated by media

Since the turn of the millennium we have witnessed a digital revolution that has
profoundly altered more traditional media (television, film, telephone, radio, print).

The internet is the fastest-growing medium ever.

This changes the way we understand and study culture

Digital revolution and cultural studies

What are the similarities between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media?

What big claims are made about the potential and dangers of digital media? Are
they true?

Can we apply traditional cultural studies theory to these new media?

How about the emergence of new theory that comes to terms with the internet?

Cyberspace & Cyberutopia/dystopia?

💡 Cyberspace = A spatial metaphor for the nowhere place in which electronic

activities of
networked computers, cable systems and other digital communications
technologies occur. The virtual space of electronic culture.

Thesis: There is a widespread perception that the internet is an inherently

democratic

Lecture 11 1
 technology.

Arguments:

1. Cyberspace will enhance existing conceptions and practices of democracy

2. The internet will transform and enlarge our very notion of what democracy
is as it
generates novel spaces in which fresh voices can be heard

Cyberdemocracy refers both to the idea that digital media could contribute to
democratic processes, through, for example, electronic voting, and to the
possibilities
that the internet and other digital media could be spheres of democratic participation
in
their own right.

Cyberutopia

Imagined as an utopian space above and beyond culture

The internet imagined as a transcendent democratic medium with a universal

language

Never forget that the internet requires a massive infrastructure - it’s material.

Digital dualism
Nowadays, cyberutopia is mostly used as a derogatory, used to discredit the views
of the opponent,

We must move away from the digital dualism that presents the cybersphere as
exclusively utopian or dystopian

The internet is a diverse space

It is never a neutral space

Cyberdemocracy and cyberactivism - “Twitter revolutions”

The Internet is hailed as a new social space that is not subject to control by any one
centre of power, rather the Net is held to be intrinsically open and democratic.

Limitations

Lecture 11 2
 The restricted ability of democratic forces to distribute information on the
Internet

The limited ability of the Internet to bring people of diverse backgrounds

together

The domination of the Internet by the commercial interests of global capitalism

“The Internet is a powerful medium for non-elites to contribute to a

more democratic
civil society and globalized cross-border activism.”

The internet offers a space in which people from different backgrounds can connect
to
each other.

But a space for interaction does not necessarily lead to more diverse political
discussion.

It can lead instead to fragmentation and the emergence of parallel,

disconnected voices

Information Society (or: information age)

💡 Information society is a concept used to designate a society in which

information is the
key commodity of a post-industrial economy where economic, social, military
and
cultural capabilities are information-based. The management of information
replaces the
manufacturing sector as the key economic driver. This is a global economy
driven by
digital technological revolution

The information economy

Increasing importance of information and applied knowledge in the economy

Lecture 11 3
 Within economy we see a shift from material production to information-processing
activities

A change from standardized mass production to flexible, customized production

The new economy is global in scale

Manuel Castells on the Network Society II → A network is a formal structure (see

Monge and Contractor, 2004).

It is a system of interconnected nodes. Nodes are, formally speaking, the points

where the curve
intersects itself. Networks are open structures that evolve by adding or removing
nodes
according to the changing requirements of the programs that assign performance
goals
to the networks.

Lecture 11 4
 Lecture 12
Culture, Globalization, and Urban Space

💡 Information Society (or: information age) :Information society is a concept

used to designate a society in which information is the key commodity of a
post-industrial economy where economic, social, military and cultural
capabilities are information-based. The management of information replaces
the manufacturing sector as the key economic driver. This is a global
economy driven by
digital technological revolution

Space and Place in Contemporary Theory

Claim: “Understanding human activity in space is fundamental to analysis of social
and
cultural life.”

Time-Geography Time-Space?

Interested in: Space is a social construct

a) tracing the routinized paths of The social is spatially constructed
individuals in timespace.
Social Space is not static but
b) Studying the dynamic
Physical Space is implicated in questions
Technological of power and symbolism

Economical Social space implies a

simultaneous multiplicity of
Social constraints on the
spaces: cross-cutting,
routinized paths of

Lecture 12 1
 individuals in time and intersecting, aligning with one
space. another or existing in relations of
paradox with one another
Claim: Society as a whole is
constituted by the unintended
consequences of the
repetitive acts of individuals

Space and Place

Space refers to an abstract idea: (empty or dead space)

Place refers to human experience, memory, desire, identity (shaped in space)

However: sociospatiality implies that space is an essential component of social

organization rather than simply an empty area

The Social Construction of Place

By what social processes is place constructed?

Social processes that shape place, o.a.:

Gender

Religion

Capital

Urban Space: Understanding the City as a Specific Kind of Space

💡 Claim: Space is a construction and material manifestation of social relations

which
reveal cultural assumptions and practices.

Urban space and modern sociology

Karl Marx (1818-1883) Emile Durkheim (1858- Max Weber (1864-1920)
1917)
City is a sign of City as cradle of
technological progress City as space for industrial democracy
creativity, progress

Lecture 12 2
 City is accumulation of City as space for Iron cage
poverty moral decay (bureaucracy)
(proletarization)

Global Cities
Global City theory allows one to analyze the restructuring of urban space:

The urban world and global economy are dominated by a relatively small
number of urban centres;

These act as control and command points for a dispersed set of economic
activities;

They are sites for accumulation, distribution and circulation of capital and nodal
points for information exchange and decision-making

O.a. London, New York, Tokyo, Seoul, Los Angeles, Frankfurt, Paris, Singapore

Note: it’s not about size!

What are the reasons for the emergence of global cities?

Growth in number and range of institutions of global capital

Geographical concentration of capital

Global reach through telecommunication

💡 Claim: Finance and banking have become the crucial facets of a city’s claim
to global
significance.

Example: Tokyo from microelectronic industry to global city

Tokyo’s global status arose from its research-led, government protected

microelectronic industry; afterwards the commercial centre arose

Globalization of capital drives the need for command, control and coordination
centres that

Lecture 12 3
 constitute the core of global cities.

Symbolic Economy of Cities

1. Relationships between representation and reading of social groups that
mark inclusion and exclusion

2. Economic redevelopment including the transformation of wharfs and

canals into shopping centres or areas of leisure activity

3. The role played by representation in the construction of place whereby

vibrant symbolic economy attracts investment

Example: Amsterdam, the city of tourism

Amsterdam has <900.000 Inhabitants

Amsterdam gets an average of 5.340.000 international visitors every year

(2010-2022)

The steep rise of AirB&B in Amsterdam was seen as a problem.

In 2020 Amsterdam decided to ban AIRBnB from certain districts in the city. In
addition: focus on a high end cultural tourism.

Creative Industries = ?
Promoting the use of culture as a way to generate economic growth

Part of the turn away from the production of material goods (post-industrial city)

City as creative hub

Privatizing public space

Main reasons for the privatization of public space:

Inability or unwillingness of city governments to fund and maintain public space

Increased levels of everyday fear surrounding perceptions of crime in public

spaces

The rise of leisure industries

The Postmodern City

Lecture 12 4
 💡 A postmodern urbanization process can be defined as a summative
depiction of the major changes that have been taking place in cities during
the last quarter of the century (Soja)

Aspects of a postmodern city

1. Fordist to Post-fordist urbanization: shift away from mass production and the
consumption of standardized goods

2. Globalization and the formation of Global Cities: importance of finance/trade

centre

3. Combination of decentralization and recentralization: no longer the concentric

rings of modern cities, but patchwork

4. New patterns of social fragmentation, segregation, polarization: increased

social,
cultural and economic inequality

5. Increasingly a carceral city: increasingly ungovernable, with walled-in estates

etc.

6. New modes of regulation, involving hyperreality: relation between image and

reality is disturbed new modes of surveillance

Carceral city
Besides the privatization of public space, there are:

Gated communities

The lack of public transportation in demographically less wealthy communities that

make it difficult for people to circulate or get to the center of the city etc.

Lecture 12 5