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1/24/2013
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Culture is everywhere, all around us; does not necessarily imply that culture is
everything
Raymond Williams: page 90
o Summary: independent or abstract noun
o Noun that describes a process of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic
development
o It can be understood as a particular way of life (a people, period, humanity
in general)
o Describes the works and practices of intellectualbut especiallyartistic
ability
o Multiple ways that culture is way, and thus multiple ways that it derives
its meaning
Culture Alive (Spivak)
o People who define culture, are doing so from their own culture
o Culture is something we cant look at/explain, but something that were
always existing with in, coming frommultidimensional, layered
o Culture is always moving; never static
When speaking from a certain place, explaining something: your
ground is always shifting, as is the very thing you are trying to
explain
Lecture
1/31
No Class Next Thursday (see assignment on bSpace)
Thursday: Watch Beyond Beats and Rhymes (Byron Hurt) on your own (streaming
through oskicat or in the MRC in Moffitt
Representation
The ways these concepts pertain not only to sex and gender, but to race,
culture, and ethnicity
Images, words that are attached to concepts, but what are these concepts to
begin with?
Lecture: 2/5
Film: Color Adjustment (Marlon Riggs)
In Color Adjustment, Marlon Riggs (the filmmaker) repeatedly asks us to question
the very idea of a "positive" or a "negative" image, and this is an important
question for Cultural Studies. Many Cultural Studies scholars argue that to label
any representation "good" or "bad" is beside the point; rather, the analysis must
consider the social/historical conditions under which it was produced, what kinds of
audiences it is meant for, and the conventions of representation that enable the
representation to "make sense."
Lecture: 2/12
Representation is the production of meaning through language (Hall, The Work
of Representation, 28).
Signs
o Signifier: a material form (ex. A sound or a visual mark)
o Signified: the meaning of the signifier which exists in your mind, the
concept which it refers to, but also another signifier
o Road sign: actual signifier
o Thought this road sign constructs, its conceptual meaning: signified
Representation which elicits specific mental meaning or
interpretation
o Signifier + signified = sign
Marlboro + images of rough and tough cowboy masculinity =
Marlboro masculinity
2 fuse as one: moment you see Marlboro, you think
masculinity
Signifieds link to other signifiers
o Backpack as a signifier
o What signified does it refer to
Web of meanings activated
Other signifiers which come to mind: school, students, homework,
books, backpacker
System of associations primed when you mention signifier,
based upon developed cultural meanings (formed from
personal memories, histories, experiences)
Pasta in Net picture
Net: tradition, sea, authenticity, fishing, market
Red, white, green: Italian flag
Signifying: Market, freshness, Italian, authentic Italian
culture (signified signifier elements in picturenet,
tomato, etc)
Different ideas and associations formed based upon
individual viewer experiences with Italian food, market,
etc
Khalua Signifiers: How do the signs (signifiers and signifieds)
come together to create a meaning?
Snow, fairies, goggles, gear, alcohol, night, recipe, tongue,
hat
Signs with individual meanings congregated in one place,
in one specific combination
o Conceptual meanings: fantasy, Russia, night
Fantasy experience, magical through
Khalua; associating alcohol with pleasure
Lecture: 2/14
Signs: words
o Literal meaning: what the word references
o Always attached to this are connotations
o I.e. Rose:
Literal meaning: particular species of flower
Layers of other meanings associated with that particular kind of
flower: love, romance, affections, passion
*Use of this flower to communicate meaning that is
beyond the meaning itself
*Use of different color roses to culturally connote different
things
o Signs can have multiple meanings
Bell Hooks: as a viewer, we have a lot of power to engage critically and
oppositionally with images/cultural products
o Explains the experience of what its like to be a black woman watching
films where youre constantly and consistently demeaned (according to
Hollywood tropes, the ideal female figure is the white woman)
Black women, historically in Hollywood film, have actually
supported the narrative of white men and women
o The Help: whose story was it really?
Problematic in that the person writing the stories was a white
journalisther narrative
o The oppositional gaze lets the spectator have a certain amount of agency
The meaning of any sign, regardless of how complicated it is, is
ultimately made in its viewing/interpretation
The meaning products have is not created by its producers, but by
those who digest and interpret it (regardless of the meaning
intended by the producers)
Reading against the grain: depends upon being cognizant of what
is behind any particular sign
Cosby Show was problematic BUT nonetheless, opened up the
space for different kinds of representations of African Americans
Imani Perry: prompts readers to take a critical/oppositional stance with regards
to pervasive sexism in Hip Hop culture
o Hip Hop is blatantly sexist: repetitive images of African American and
Latina females bodies as scantily-clad, lacking agency, existing solely for
male pleasure/gaze
o Argues that there are deeper ways to look at what goes on in Hip Hop
culture (similar to Byron Hurt)what is it saying about black masculinity,
racism, gendered racism in the United States, now
o Focusing on the ways that visual images in video and lyrics are sometimes
contradictory
Relationship between images and words in these cultural forms
What kinds of gender and race politics are going on here
o Lady Marmalade video: telling the story of the prostitute whilst also
becoming the prostitute
Much more female subjectivity in the traditional LaBelle version,
than is even possible in the recent version
Language of sexiness is also the language of sexism in our
culture
Intersection of sexism with race in video renders it all the more
complicated
What kinds of cultural work is being done in this video?
o Also arguing that there is a double jeopardy for black women
Dualism of racism and sexism: heightened effects
Particularly hard for women of color to perform/be in public in
ways that doesnt suggest overt sexual availability
Images that we see now are drawing on a long history of images:
what you see on TV is drawing on what has beenthere are
representational conventions
o Can we separate sexual liberation from sexism at all, ever, in any kind of
representation?
Can and will artists express sexuality in a way that pushes back
against racism and sexismis it possible? (especially if the way
youre shown on screen shows a lot of skin?)
Is it possible for people to read/perform Lady Marmalade
against the grain?
o Pays attention to the ways the music industry, itself, is exerting the
greatest force of power over what we see
Notes that, overall, the music industry is dominated by a small
group of white [rich] men making decisions
o Perry argues for getting more female producers
Hooks also follows this path of argument
Should there be more female producers, perhaps the situation
would be different
But, are not women themselves still working under the
same capitalistic constraints as other producers?
Nonetheless, perhaps the possibility of exerting more
authorial power over cultural images and products
Lecture: 2/19
Queen Latifah got to where she did without showing her skin or monopolizing off
of her sexualitybut different reality once she got there
o Explicitly political representation in her music video protesting the
Apartheid
o *The artists dont have any say: questions of selling out and of
authenticity complicated by these techniques
o Where the forms/styles of artistic expression cross the line from subculture
into something which is hegemonic (repeating the power relations they
once had the ability to contest)
Deindustrialization: Kelley (Looking to Get Paid) talks about the deindustrialized
city
o Shift in the patterns of employmentmanufacturing and manual labor
jobs move out of city centers to suburbs
Large-scale exodus out of urban centers, and thus little access to
decently-paid, unionized jobs requiring little education
Deterioration of the inner-cities (ghettoization), as moderately
well-off made mass exodus out (concentration of poverty in new
poverty-tracts)
Individuals seek to interact within this space and create counterculture to engage that environment and express life in such
circumstances
o Question of authenticity: graffiti artists
Incredible skill to paint such artwork on moving target without
getting caught
Idea of selling out in distributing work to display in public
arenas, selling it, etc.
What is ideology?
o Set of agreed upon values and principles, not necessarily conscious
o Lens through which one sees the world
o Reinforces power relations and myths
o Set of values and ideas propagated by overall consent, as garnered through
a process of naturalization
o Inversion of central reality that inhibits revolution
o *A shared set of values and beliefs that exist within a given
society/culture, through which people live out their relations to social
institutions and structures
o *Ideology refers to the ways that certain concepts and values are made
to seem like natural, inevitable aspects of everyday life (operate upon a
level of common sense)
Ideologies are culturally and historically specific
o *Dominant ideologies reproduce social relationships and inequalities
o Ideologies are often naturalized and understood as truth
so social inequalities often come to seem natural
o Workers are enmeshed in the dominant organizations and ideologies of
society, as reigned over by the ruling class
False consciousness: you think you know what is best for you
and your family, that you understand your existenceif such
understandings are not constructed in conjunction with class
struggle, then it is a false consciousness
Our perceptions of who we are, who we want to be, are the product
of ideology
Gramsci: ideology in terms of hegemony
o Dominant ideologies are not actually set in stone
o There are dominant, powerful ideologies, but they are always in flux
(always under some kind of contestation by other ideas and values)
o Hegemony depends upon consent of governed or ruled (not a coercive
type of power)
o Maintains the status quoruling class is invested in producing what is
o Way of packaging and disseminating ideology in a way which prompts the
governed to permissively accept and act upon thempackaged under the
pretense of being in governed individuals best interest, when it is, in
reality, only in the best interests of the governing elite
o The power and dominance that one social group holds over others[it] is
more than social power itself; it is a method of gaining and maintaining
power (James Lull, 61)
o A situation in which a provisional alliance of certain social groups can
exert total social authority; over other subordinate groups, not simply by
coercion or by the direct imposition of ruling ideas, but by winning and
shaping consent so that the power of the dominant classes appears both
legitimate and natural (Hebidge, 15-16)
Hebdige: study of the working class in 1970s England struggling with the values
and ideologies of their parents generation; huge economic downturn; immigration
from former colonies (i.e. Jamaica)
o Youth subcultures (like punk in the 1970s) challenge hegemonic power by
resisting the dominant values that are being taught
o Resisting the injustices built into working class life in 1970s England
Lecture: 2/21
Michel Foucault
Lecture 2/26
Ideas to be addressed today: Ideas of subject, discourse, and truth
March 5, 2013
Lecture
Binary differences: concepts, words, etc. come to mean something through their
opposition with the other
o Definitional significance by that which something is not
o I.e. Difference between black and white
No inherit meaning in the concept/word black
Gains meaning by being different than whiteto be black
is not to be white, etc.
o Meaning made by contrasting it against something else that is its opposite
basic meanings are made in this contrast
o Binary configurations common ways of understanding and classifying the
worldbut still very reductionist
What if you cant be seen as clearly classifiable on one side or the
other?not an accurate categorization/way of looking at the
world: world is much more complicated than these neat categories
Lecture
3/7/2013
Lecture
3/12/2013
Publics and Counterpublics, Michael Warner
Lecture
3/14/2013
Lecture: 3/18/2013
Donna Haraway
Orientalism
o Through gaze and institutionalization of the gaze, some people have been
relegated to the lower ranks of the other, inferior to a superior us
Publics/Public Sphere
o For Habermas:
Bourgeois public sphere transformed (threatened) by private
interests, especially corporations (able to manipulate media and
state)
Citizens become consumers, less concerned with public
good (?)
Public sphere has become threatened by private interests
(especially media and corporations)
This thus means that those private citizens who convene in
public sphere to discuss ideas/concerns become less
citizens as much as consumers
o For Warner:
A space of discourse
Counterpublic: conflictual with dominant discourse
Less concerned about deteriorated quality of the public sphere; for
him public is merely formed upon the circulation of discourse
Particularly interested in the ways that particular kinds of publics
become organized (self-organized) and why
Organize to coagulate into the public
Mr. Spectator: aiming to form the public
o Representing himself as every mannormal
spectator walking around London seeing what I/you
see, judging itas all would based upon similar
systems of morality, comportment, behavior,
ideology
o Tries to show himself as the public
Public are self-organized, but Warner interested in the ways
certain kinds of discourse get to circulate as representative
of the public
o Whereas, other forms of discourse seem so far off,
so beyond the pail (i.e. She Romps) that they
actually embody that which we dont want in our
public
o Placed in the behavior as form of public shame
invites readers to regard disgraceful behavior
Warner trying to show us that there are ways in which some
discourses are so subconsciously counter to the dominant
discourses/ideas of publics, that they can only really be
understood as counter-publics
How is it that when we live in a nation, we have little connection to the people of
the nationmillions of people we will never have contact withbut are still so
attached to it? And so much so that many of us are willing to kill and die for it.
o How did this happen, how is this the case?
o Nation is like a community (in which members have deep kin and
connections with others in the community)and imagined community
because we dont actually have deep kin and connections with the
majority of our nation
o In our minds lives a sentiment that we are all linked/share an investment in
shaping the future, formed from the same past and history
o All happens through shared culture
Lecture
4/2/2013
Lecture
4/5/2013
PAPER PROMPT: Explore how, under what conditions a public you feel you are a
part of, is madewho is the public?
Find text and identify public, or vice versa
Easier to work with something visual, than that is written (MWexemplary of
analysis of written texts
Draw on Michael Warner to define why, under what conditions something is
public, how you see yourself as part of public
Dates: between original syllabus dates and one extraneous from syllabus
Explore publics and the way it is made through (popular) culture
Specific argument about publiceffects, who are members, counterpublic? (to
what?), when/where does it have meaning?
Nation: broad public, but produced and reproduced all the time (i.e. through
photographs)
W.E. Dubois exhibit at Paris Exposition: attempts to stretch the limits of the
nationwho is allowed to participate
o Called attention to tension persisting between African American identity
and inclusion in the American public
o Images/representations always drawing on former representations
particular ways of representing people, taking photographs, grounded in
history
Dubois: utilizes historical photographic method of eugenics
portraitsphotographic method of physically categorizing
individuals by recorded physical difference (visible, codified
scientific evidence of difference)
Lecture: 4/9
Paper:
Define and engage with near-indefinable concept of publics
Self-forming, but also depends upon something that already exists
Explore concept of public, publics, public sphere
o Come up with sense of what it means, in conversation with the
readings
o How you see publics taking shape in your example, in this time/place,
what is its relevance
Smith, Kozol, Sturken: how do camera images capture the perfect essence of events, as
they happened
Photograph: implies that event occurred exactly as it is represented
o Myth of photographic truth: camera images assumedvery broadlyto
present some definitive truth of an event
o Mode of capture matters: graininess of Zapruder film implies truth, and an
upmost accuracy of the event
Cameras bear incredible nation-making ability/quality
o Ability to evoke memory, to create historythis is what happened to us
o Images of national tragedies become emblems of ones past and what it
means to be part of that nation; markers of what we shared
If community/nation is imaginednation/communities are created
by these moments of catastrophe: they become markers of what we
share, our common history
Take on layers of national meaningimage represents something
that is shared in the national community
o Images of plane crashing into Towers: interpreted as image of something
that happened to us as a nation
o Many of our memories as a nation (our national memory), we often
imagine as occurring in camera images
Action actually occurred for us on television or in photographs
o Individuals start to replace memory of them being there with something
they see on television (such is the image that is repeated over and over and
over again)
Sturken: cultural memory
o The nation remembers through culture: these images are how we tell
stories about our past
o Images contain very specific elements/implications of what happened
o Sturken: screen memories in Freudian sensememory that gets
substituted for something that you dont want to recall/subconsciously
cannot deal with
Screen both blocks something out as you project something onto it
Camera images act as national screen memories because they tend
to blur the distinction between what is occurring in culture and
what actually took place/who was involved blur line between
cultural memory and history
Blur the line between your own personal memories/experiences
and cultural memories of the nation
o Ginsberg: screen memories (countered to Sturkens interpretation of the
concept)
Lecture: 4/18
Berlant:
Power of narrative/story
Terms of citizenshiphow are these laid out to us in popular culture?
Symbols of what it means to be Americanoften represented as child (why are
these the most hopeful symbols of national life circulating the public sphere?)
Infantile citizen:
o Naivet, hopeful idealism
o Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington: displacement of infantile patriotism
Lecture: 4/24
Faye Ginsburg
Use of aboriginal representations to indicate backwardness
Nannuck of the North: ethnographic film on aboriginal culture
Long history of production of these groups as others to be exoticized and placed
on display (~Coco Fuscko)
Historical trajectory of power through representation/the power to represent
44: Fact of their appearance on TV in Inuit terms challenges the traditional
hierarchy of image-making
o Native engagements with broadcasting technology ability to tell their
own stories on their own terms
o Allows public space for the formation of counter-public/counter-discourse
to counter the narratives of Canada/Australia which dont include Inuit
subjects as important components of the nation
Naomi Klein: No Logo
Lecture 4/25
Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism is an economic, political, and cultural philosophyor ideology
that privileges free market principles and individualism
According to Aiha Ong: the main elements of neoliberalism as a political
philosophy are a.) the claim that the market is better than the state at distributing
public resources and b.) a return to aform of individualismwhich is
competitive, possessive, and constructed often in terms of the doctrine of
consumer sovereignty (Neoliberalism as Exception, 11)
Some elements:
o Privatization (of public services and institutions)
o Individualism and personal responsibility: individuals expected to take
personal responsibility for their own success. People displaced though
neoliberal policies dealt with through law and order, or not at all
o Freedom and market fundamentalism (free market equated to individual
freedom and choice)
o Extremely limited state
Kleins critique based upon graph demonstrating that US corporations have begun
to make drastically higher profits despite paying lower taxes
o Tax base has been eroding people want the state out
o Demonstrated need to bring corporate influencessuch as channel1into
domains that should traditionally be funded by public funds
o Services/elements of society whichat one moment were seen as publicly
fundedin jeopardy as tax base has become eroded
i.e. public education: cost of tax base being taken away pushed
onto students though tuition hikes and fees
Vs. once-persisting notions of public education as a public
good, to be shared and subsidized by all for mutual good
(degradation of social contract mentality)
o Disruption of the kinds of discussions we can have in public spaces
Over the decades, the public sphere has been eroded by
privatization
o Everything comes to be mediated trough private institutions/brands
relationships/perceptions of the states, of others
Public space so deeply brandedshapes our relationship with each
other, our sense of the public/commons how does it shape not
just what can be though/said and what relationships we can
imagine, but also who can circulate in the public/move around?
Lecture 5/2