TOPIC 3

INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES

Introduction to Cultural Studies. History and cultural studies. Individual and
culture. Identity and culture. Pop culture. Aesthetics. Culture and its institutions.
Discourse and textuality. Analysis and translation of concepts, metaphors and
grammatical structures. Search of Lithuanian equivalents. Translation of texts on
the history of culture.

Definition

Cultural studies is an academic field of critical theory and literary criticism

initially introduced by British academics in 1964 and subsequently adopted by
allied academics throughout the world.

Culture and cultural studies

http://www.sagepub.com/upmdata/45137_Barker.pdfhttp://www.sagepub.com/upm-
data/45137_Barker.pdf

1. Read the text about cultural studies, emergence of the field and its
development. Find the meaning of underlined words.

The language-game of cultural studies

Further, this book tends to gloss over differences within western cultural studies,
despite doubts about whether theory developed in one context (e.g. Britain) can be
workable in another (e.g. Australia) (Ang and Stratton, 1996; Turner, 1992).
Nevertheless, I want to justify this degree of generalization about cultural studies. I
maintain that the term ‘cultural studies’ has no referent to which we can point. Rather,
cultural studies is constituted by the language-game of cultural studies. The
theoretical terms developed and deployed by persons calling their work cultural
studies are what cultural studies ‘is’. I stress the language of cultural studies as
constitutive of cultural studies and draw attention at the start of each chapter to what I
take to be important terms.
These are concepts that have been deployed in the various geographical sites of
cultural studies. For, as Grossberg et al. have argued, though cultural studies has
stressed conjunctural analysis, ‘which is embedded, descriptive, and historically and
contextually specific’, there are some concepts in cultural studies across the globe
which form ‘a history of real achievements that is now part of the cultural studies
tradition’, and to do without which would be ‘to willingly accept real incapacitation’
(Grossberg et al., 1992: 8). Concepts are tools for thinking and acting in the world.

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Cultural studies as politics
It remains difficult of cultural studies as a coherent, unified, academic discipline with
clear-cut substantive topics, concepts and methods that differentiate it from other
disciplines. Cultural studies has always been a multi- or post-disciplinary field of
enquiry which blurs the boundaries between itself and other ‘subjects’. Yet cultural
studies cannot be said to be anything. It is not physics, it is not sociology and it is not
linguistics, though it draws upon these subject areas. Indeed, there must be, as Hall
(1992a) argues, something at stake in cultural studies that differentiates it from other
subject areas.
For Hall, what is at stake is the connection that cultural studies seeks to make to
matters of power and cultural politics. That is, to an exploration of representations of
and ‘for’ marginalized social groups and the need for cultural change. Hence, cultural
studies is a body of theory generated by thinkers who regard the production of
theoretical knowledge as a political practice. Here, knowledge is never a neutral or
objective phenomenon but a matter of positionality, that is, of the place from which
one speaks, to whom, and for what purposes.
The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
Cultural studies has been reluctant to accept institutional legitimation. Nevertheless,
the formation of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham
University (UK) in the 1960s was a decisive organizational instance. Since that time,
cultural studies has extended its intellectual base and geographic scope. There are
self-defined cultural studies practitioners in the USA, Australia, Africa, Asia, Latin
America and Europe, with each ‘formation’ of cultural studies working in different
ways. While I am not privileging British cultural studies per se, I am pointing to the
formation of cultural studies at Birmingham as an institutionally significant moment.
Since its emergence, cultural studies has acquired a multitude of institutional bases,
courses, textbooks and students as it has become something to be taught. As
McGuigan (1997a) comments, it is difficult to see how it could be otherwise, despite
the concern that professionalized and institutionalized cultural studies may ‘formalize
out of existence the critical questions of power, history and politics’ (Hall, 1992a:
286). Cultural studies’ main location has always been institutions of higher education
and the bookshop. Consequently, one way of ‘defining’ cultural studies is to look at
what university courses offer to students. This necessarily involves ‘disciplining’
cultural studies.
Disciplining cultural studies
Many cultural studies practitioners oppose forging disciplinary boundaries for the
field. However, it is hard to see how this can be resisted if cultural studies wants to
survive by attracting degree students and funding (as opposed to being only a
postgraduate research activity). In that context, Bennett (1998) offers his ‘element of a
definition’ of cultural studies.
Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field in which perspectives from different
disciplines can be selectively drawn on to examine the relations of culture and power.
‘Cultural studies is concerned with all those practices, institutions and systems of
classification through which there are inculcated in a population particular values,
beliefs, competencies, routines of life and habitual forms of conduct’ (Bennett, 1998:
28).
The forms of power that cultural studies explores are diverse and include gender, race,
class, colonialism, etc. Cultural studies seeks to explore the connections between
these forms of power and to develop ways of thinking about culture and power that
can be utilized by agents in the pursuit of change.

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The prime institutional sites for cultural studies are those of higher education, and as
such, cultural studies is like other academic disciplines. Nevertheless, it tries to forge
connections outside of the academy with social and political movements, workers in
cultural institutions, and cultural management.
With this in mind, we may consider the kinds of concepts and concerns that regulate
cultural studies as a discursive formation or language-game. Each of the concepts
introduced here is developed at greater length throughout the book and can also be
referred to in the Glossary.

KEY CONCEPTS IN CULTURAL STUDIES

Culture and signifying practices
Cultural studies would not warrant its name without a focus on culture. As Hall puts
it, ‘By culture, here I mean the actual grounded terrain of practices, representations,
languages and customs of any specific society. I also mean the contradictory forms of
common sense which have taken root in and helped to shape popular life’ (Hall,
1996c:
439). Culture is concerned with questions of shared social meanings, that is, the
various ways we make sense of the world. However, meanings are not simply floating
‘out there’; rather, they are generated through signs, most notably those of language.
Cultural studies has argued that language is not a neutral medium for the formation of
meanings and knowledge about an independent object world ‘existing’ outside of
language.
Rather, it is constitutive of those very meanings and knowledge. That is, language
gives meaning to material objects and social practices that are brought into view by
language and made intelligible to us in terms that language delimits. These processes
of meaning production are signifying practices. In order to understand culture, we
need to explore how meaning is produced symbolically in language as a ‘signifying
system’.
Representation
A good deal of cultural studies is centred on questions of representation; that is, on
how the world is socially constructed and represented to and by us in meaningful
ways. Indeed, the central strand of cultural studies can be understood as the study of
culture as the signifying practices of representation. This requires us to explore the
textual generation of meaning. It also demands investigation of the modes by which
meaning is produced in a variety of contexts. Further, cultural representations and
meanings have a certain materiality. That is, they are embedded in sounds,
inscriptions, objects, images, books, magazines and television programmes. They are
produced, enacted, used and understood in specific social contexts.

2. Draw a table and put the terms and their Lithuanian equivalents. In the
third column write down any addtitional comments or explanations
related to the word(s).

English word(s) Lithuanian word(s) Explanation

3. Compare your table with a partner. Add any important explanation or

comment.

4. Find as many as possible collocations with the word ‘social’.

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 5. Make collocations of nouns in B with verbs in A.

Verbs Nouns
1. Deploy a) meaning
2. Justify b) legitimation
3. Generate c) theory
4. Forge d) connections
5. Accept e) generalization
6. Develop f) theories
7. explore g) concepts

6. Find the sentences with the linking words. What is the meaning of each
linker?
7. Translate these sentences.

PART II.

1. Read the second part of the text about cultural studies and find the
relationship between culture and power, culture and language and get
familiarized with the key concepts of the field.

Power
Cultural studies writers generally agree on the centrality of the concept of power to
the discipline. For most cultural studies writers, power is regarded as pervading every
level of social relationships. Power is not simply the glue that holds the social
together, or the coercive force which subordinates one set of people to another,
though it certainly is this.
It is also understood in terms of the processes that generate and enable any form of
social action, relationship or order. In this sense, power, while certainly constraining,
is also enabling. Having said that, cultural studies has shown a specific concern with
subordinated groups, at first with class, and later with races, genders, nations, age
groups, etc.
Popular culture
Subordination is a matter not just of coercion but also of consent. Cultural studies has
commonly understood popular culture to be the ground on which this consent is won
or lost. As a way of grasping the interplay of power and consent, two related concepts
were repeatedly deployed in cultural studies’ earlier texts, though they are less
prevalent these days – namely, ideology and hegemony.
By ideology is commonly meant maps of meaning that, while they purport to be
universal truths, are historically specific understandings that obscure and maintain
power.
For example, television news produces understandings of the world that continually
explain it in terms of nations, perceived as ‘naturally’ occurring objects. This may
have the consequence of obscuring both the class divisions of social formations and
the constructed character of nationality.
Representations of gender in advertising, which depict women as housewives or sexy
bodies alone, reduce them to those categories. As such, they deny women their place
as full human beings and citizens. The process of making, maintaining and
reproducing ascendant meanings and practices has been called hegemony. Hegemony

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implies a situation where a ‘historical bloc’ of powerful groups exercises social
authority and leadership over subordinate groups through the winning of consent.
Texts and readers
The production of consent implies popular identification with the cultural meanings
generated by the signifying practices of hegemonic texts. The concept of text suggests
not simply the written word, though this is one of its senses, but also all practices that
signify. This includes the generation of meaning through images, sounds, objects
(such as clothes) and activities (like dance and sport). Since images, sounds, objects
and practices are sign systems, which signify with the same mechanism as a language,
we may refer to them as cultural texts.
However, the meanings that critics read into cultural texts are not necessarily the same
as those produced by active audiences or readers. Indeed, readers will not necessarily
share all the same meanings with each other. Critics, in other words, are simply a
particular breed of reader. Further, texts, as forms of representation, are polysemic.
That is, they contain the possibility of a number of different meanings that have to be
realized by actual readers who give life to words and images. We can examine the
ways in which texts work, but we cannot simply ‘read-off ’ audiences’ meaning
production from textual analysis. At the very least, meaning is produced in the
interplay between text and reader.
Consequently, the moment of consumption is also a moment of meaningful
production.
Subjectivity and identity
The moment of consumption marks one of the processes by which we are formed as
persons. What it is to be a person, viz. subjectivity, and how we describe ourselves to
each other, viz. identity, became central areas of concern in cultural studies during the
1990s.
In other words, cultural studies explores:
 how we come to be the kinds of people we are;
 how we are produced as subjects;
 how we identify with (or emotionally invest in) descriptions of ourselves as
male or female, black or white, young or old.
The argument, known as anti-essentialism, is that identities are not things that exist;
they have no essential or universal qualities. Rather, they are discursive constructions,
the product of discourses or regulated ways of speaking about the world. In other
words, identities are constituted, made rather than found, by representations, notably
language.
Overall, some of the key concepts that constitute the discursive formation of cultural
studies are:
KEY CONCEPTS

Active audiences Politics

Anti-essentialism Polysemy
Articulation Popular culture
Cultural materialism Positionality
Culture Power
Discourse Representation
Discursive formation Signifying practices
Hegemony (the) Social
Identity Social formation
Ideology Subjectivity

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 Language-game Texts
Political economy

 Cultural studies writers differ about how to deploy these concepts and about
which are the most significant.

Structuralism
Culturalism takes meaning to be its central category and casts it as the product of
active human agents. By contrast, structuralism speaks of signifying practices that
generate meaning as an outcome of structures or predictable regularities that lie
outside of any given person.
Structuralism searches for the constraining patterns of culture and social life which lie
outside of any given person. Individual acts are explained as the product of social
structures. As such, structuralism is anti-humanist in its decentring of human agents
from the heart of enquiry. Instead it favours a form of analysis in which phenomena
have meaning only in relation to other phenomena within a systematic structure of
which no particular person is the source. A structuralist understanding of culture is
concerned with the ‘systems of relations’ of an underlying structure (usually
language) and the grammar that makes meaning possible.

Deep structures of language

Structuralism in cultural studies takes signification or meaning production to be the
effect of deep structures of language that are manifested in specific cultural
phenomena or human speakers. However, meaning is the outcome not of the
intentions of actors per se but of the language itself. Thus, structuralism is concerned
with how cultural meaning is generated, understanding culture to be analogous to (or
structured like) a language.
The work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1960) was critical in the development of
structuralism. He argued that meaning is generated through a system of structured
differences in language. That is, significance is the outcome of the rules and
conventions that organize language (langue) rather than the specific uses and
utterances which individuals deploy in everyday life (parole).
According to Saussure, meaning is produced through a process of selection and com-
bination of signs along two axes, namely:
1. the syntagmatic (linear – e.g. a sentence);
2. the paradigmatic (a field of signs – e.g. synonyms).
The organization of signs along these axes forms a signifying system. Signs,
constituted by signifiers (medium) and signifieds (meaning), do not make sense by
virtue of reference to entities in an independent object world; rather, they generate
meaning by reference to each other. Meaning is a social convention organized through
the relations between signs.
In short, Saussure, and structuralism in general, are concerned more with the
structures of language which allow linguistic performance to be possible than with
actual performance in its infinite variations. Structuralism proceeds through the
analysis of binaries: for example the contrast between langue and parole or between
pairs of signs so that ‘black’ only has meaning in relation to ‘white’, and vice versa.

KEY THINKERS

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Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913)

Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose posthumously published work laid the basis for
structural linguistics or semiotics, the ‘science’ of signs. Saussure’s influence on
cultural studies comes indirectly through the work of other thinkers, like Roland
Barthes, who were influenced by him. The central tenet of Saussure’s argument is that
language is to be understood as a sign system constituted by interrelated terms
without positive values (i.e. meaning is relational).
Langue, or the formal structure of signs, is said to be the proper subject of linguistics.
Cultural studies commonly explores culture as a grammar of signs.

Reading: Saussure, F. de (1960) Course in General Linguistics. London: Peter Owen.

Culture as ‘like a language’

Structuralism extends its reach from ‘words’ to the language of cultural signs in
general.
Thus human relations, material objects and images are all analysed through the
structures of signs. In Lévi-Strauss (see Leach, 1974), we find structuralist principles
at work when he describes kinship systems as ‘like a language’ – that is, family
relations are held to be structured by the internal organization of binaries. For
example, kinship patterns are structured around the incest taboo that divides people
into the marriageable and the prohibited.
Typical of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism is his approach to food, which, he declares, is
not so much good to eat, as good to think with. That is, food is a signifier of symbolic
meanings. Cultural conventions tell us what constitutes food and what does not, the
circumstances of their eating and the meanings attached to them. Lévi-Strauss tends
towards the structuralist trope of binaries: the raw and the cooked, the edible and the
inedible, nature and culture, each of which has meaning only in relation to its
opposite.
Cooking transforms nature into culture and the raw into the cooked.
The edible and the inedible are marked not by questions of nutrition but by cultural
meanings. An example of this would be the Jewish prohibition against pork and the
necessity to prepare food in culturally specific ways (kosher food). Here, binary
oppositions of the edible–inedible mark another binary, insiders and outsiders, and
hence the boundaries of the culture or social order. Later, Barthes was to extend the
structuralist account of culture to the practices of popular culture and their naturalized
meanings or myths. He was to argue that the meanings of texts are to be grasped not
in terms of the intentions of specific human beings but as a set of signifying practices.
In sum:
 Culturalism focuses on meaning production by human actors in a historical
context.
 Structuralism points to culture as an expression of deep structures of language
that lie outside of the intentions of actors and constrain them.
 Culturalism stresses history.
 Structuralism is synchronic in approach, analysing the structures of relations
in a snapshot of a particular moment. As such, it asserts the specificity of
culture and its irreducibility to any other phenomena.
 Culturalism focuses on interpretation as a way of understanding meaning.
 Structuralism has asserted the possibility of a science of signs and thus of
objective knowledge.

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Structuralism is best approached as a method of analysis rather than an all-embracing
philosophy. However, the notion of stability of meaning, upon which the binaries of
structuralism and its pretensions to surety of knowledge are based, is the subject of
attack by poststructuralism. That is, poststructuralism deconstructs the very notion of
the stable structures of language.

2. Decide if the statements are true (T) or false (F). Correct false statements.
1. Cultural studies investigates such aspects of social life as class, races, genders,
nations, age groups, etc.
2. Cultural texts, besides the written word, involve sounds, images, objects and
practices, which generate meanings.
3. Readers are just consumers in meaning making proces.
4. The issue of subjectivity has not been so important as the issue of identity.
5. Structuralism is concerned about the systemic relationships between and among
phenomena of culture.
6. Structuralism is concerned with how cultural meaning is generated, focusing on
language as representation of culture.
7. Saussure is concerned more with the structures of language.
8. According to Saussure, meaning is a social convention organized through the
relations between signs.
9. Lévi-Strauss, another scholar follows Saussure in the analysis of language and
signs.
10. In his study of food Lévi-Strauss explores the same system of binaries, as for
example, raw or cooked.
11. Poststructuralism continues to utilise the structuralistic approach in meaning
investigation.

3. Find English equivalents in the text.

1. vykdyti
2. veislė, giminė
3. prievarta
4. sutikimas, pritarimas
5. reikšti
6. polisemija
7. konvencija, sąlygiškumas
8. giminystė
9. teigti
10. kalba, pasakymas, išreiškimas
11. nuoroda
12. subjektas
13. įvaizdis
14. sąvoka
15. suvaržyti

4. Find collocations with the words from ex. 3 in the text above.
e.g. kinship systems

5. Translate the following sentences into Lithuanian. Pay special attention at

underlined words or phrases.

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1. Having said that, cultural studies has shown a specific concern with
subordinated groups, at first with class, and later with races, genders, nations,
age groups, etc.
2. By ideology is commonly meant maps of meaning that, while they purport to
be universal truths, are historically specific understandings that obscure and
maintain power
3. Hegemony implies a situation where a ‘historical bloc’ of powerful groups
exercises social authority and leadership over subordinate groups through the
winning of consent.
4. Since images, sounds, objects and practices are sign systems, which signify
with the same mechanism as a language, we may refer to them as cultural
texts.
5. At the very least, meaning is produced in the interplay between text and
reader.
6. Consequently, the moment of consumption is also a moment of meaningful
production.
7. What it is to be a person, viz. subjectivity , and how we describe ourselves to
each other, viz. identity, became central areas of concern in cultural studies
during the 1990s.
8. Structuralism is synchronic in approach, analysing the structures of relations
in a snapshot of a particular moment.
9. As such, it asserts the specificity of culture and its irreducibility to any other
phenomena.
10. Structuralism is best approached as a method of analysis rather than an all-
embracing philosophy.