NITHYA A ASSIGNMENT 1

                                 

 NITHYA A  ASSIGNMENT 1

                                                  BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

                     Cultural studies have always had distinctive ways of working, but it has lacked a developed methodological discourse and debates. Cultural studies in its narrower sense have developed mainly within the Anglophone academy, while the profile of the cultural sciences in other national and regional intellectual formations has often been very different. England for example is almost unique in the virtual absence of folklore studies or ethnology within its academy. There is, there for, a real danger not only of a disciplinary closure around cultural studies but also a national one that would lead a failure to grasp the globalization as well as the transdisciplnary of the study of culture today.

   The British cultural studies has very specific roots in postwar Britain and the revival of capitalist industrial production the establishment of the welfare state and the western power ,unity in opposition to Russian communism were all inflected in to a representation of a new Britain . The development of British cultural studies starting with the founding of the University of Birmingham Centre for contemporary cultural studies in 1963/64 by Hoggart and Stuart Hall   , shared many key perspective with the Frankfurt school. During this period, the Centre developed   a variety of critical approaches for the analysis, interpretation and criticism of cultural facts.

     The classical period of British cultural studies from the 1960s to the early 1980s continued to adopt a Marxian approach to the study of culture, one especially influenced by Althusser and Gramsci. British cultural studies observed the integration of the working class and its decline of revolutionary consciousness and studied the conditions of this catastrophe for the Marxian project of revolution.

              Culture was playing an important role in integrating the working class in to existing capitalist societies and that a new consumer and media culture was forming a new mode of capitalist hegemony.

     

     British cultural studies insists that culture must be studied within the social relations and system through which culture is produced  and consumed and thus study of culture is intimately bound up with the study of society, politics and economics. The Gramsci an concept of hegemony led British cultural studies to investigate how media culture articulates a set of dominant values, political ideologies and cultural programs into a hegemonic projects that incorporates individuals in to a shared consensus, as individuals became integrated in to the consumer society.

    The British cultural studies stressed the importance of a trans disciplinary approach to the study of culture that analyzed its political economy, process of production and distribution, textual products and reception by the audience. For instance, the classical programmatic article, Encoding /Decoding Stuart Hall began his analysis by using Marx’s as a model to trace the articulations of continuous circuit, encompassing production, distribution, consumption, production. Hall focuses on how media institutions produce meanings how they circulate and how audiences use or decode the texts to produce meanings.  Hall famous distinction between encoding and decoding suggests some of the ways that political economy structures both the encoding and decoding of media artifacts.

The encoding of media artifacts is deeply influenced by system of production so that study of the texts of television, film, or popular music for instance, is enhanced by studying the ways that media artifacts are actually produced within the structure and organization of the culture industries.

       Raymond Williams published culture and society in 1958 he was able to prove that at English Marxist critics as essentially irrelevant to any wider community of ideas and it also a revolutionary body of theory. So many European theorists such as Lukacs, Benjamin, Goldman and Sartre was extended through English translation of their work in the mid-1960s. William follows a thread in English thought and writing through the 19^th and 20^th centuries in order to establish the cultural grounding of ideas and their representation. Most of the cultural studies constitutive theoretical positions, from structuralism, from critical Marxism, from semiotics. His view of culture cannot be entirely contained within this tradition, he focusing four meanings of word culture that are culture as a whole way of life, material .intellectual and spiritual. He is rejecting the notion of mass culture and give important fact.

     He discovered a body of Marxist thought and challenged traditional Marxism division of society into the base and the super structure. He concludes the discussion of this issue in Marxism and literature by says that it is not the base or the super structure it should be examining, but rather the process that integrate them and this process through which history and culture are determined.

The aesthetic or moral value of literature, music or art that is supposed to make them worth studying not primarily their complexity in powerful inclusions and exclusions. This way of thinking about culture held sway in traditional humanities discipline until quite recently and continues to be powerfully defended outside the academy. Structuralism has asked how meanings are constructed by means of the conventions and codes of languages in the broadest sense, signs, myths or symbols.  

Cultural Studies is a selective tradition that is interested in culture as a source of power, difference, and emancipation, closely connected with social movements and cultural critique.

                                            

                                                BIBLIOGRAPHY

* Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real. Rout ledge (2005). London

* Hepworth, Mike. The British Journal of Sociology, vol: 44, No: 2(Jun.1993), PP 350-351

* Johnson, Richard. Chambers, Deborah. Raghu ram, Parvati. Tincknell, Estella. The Practice of Cultural     Studies. New Delhi. Sage publication (2004)

* Kellener, Douglas. The Frankfurt school and British Cultural Studies: The Missed Articulation (http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellener//kellener.html)

* Steele, Tom. Critical Theory and British Cultural Studies, Counterpoints, vol: 168, Critical Theory and the Human Condition: Founders and Praxis (2003), pp. 222-237

* Turner, Graeme. British Cultural Studies (3^rd edition).Routledge(2003)London

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         SISITHA KV – ASSIGNMENT-1

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

British Cultural Studies represents an ambitious attempt to assess the impact of both long term trends decolonization, industrial decline, and globalization, and recent political developments on contemporary British culture. Early in the history of cultural studies in Britain Richard Huggart (1969) stressed that cultural studies had no stable disciplinary base. The methodology of cultural studies provides an equal uneasy markes for cultural studies. It has no distinct methodology, no unique statistical, ethnomethodological or textual analysis to call its own. Its methodology, amboguos from the beginning could best be seen as a bricolage. Different scholars have endorsed different definitions of as a problematic, but most claim that cultural studies enables them to examine cultural object and practices from the point of view of their interaction with and within relations of power.

British cultural studies emerged from the work done at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) an interdisciplinary research centre Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall established at the University of Birmingham in 1964. Interest in British popular culture came from other quarters as well as in the early 1950s the Independence group was examining the visual arts, architecture, graphic design and pop art and establishing itself at the institute of the contemporary arts in London. Whatever the merits of this particular suggestion, the national cultural context for adopting a body of thought generated in a different national context should be thoroughly explored. The emergence and influence of British cultural studies is a case in point.

In Britain, the cultural studies academic has been consistently figured as something like an organic intellectual that is, as a representative member of an oppressed or relatively powerless group. The dominant themes in Cultural Studies developed in Britain.  The stated purpose of Graeme Turner's introduction to cultural studies is to provide a student guide to the basic principles and categories within the field.  As the title suggests his book concentrates on work carried out in Britain and his central focus is on those substantive researches which have become accepted as classics in the history of British cultural sociology. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the legacy of the Centre For Contemporary Cultural Studies features from the 1960s onward, Stuart Hall's pioneering work, along with that of his colleagues and postgraduate students including Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, David Morley, Charlotte Brunsdon, John Clarke, Richard Dyer, Judith Williamson, Richard Johnson, Iain Chambers, Dorothy Hobson, Chris Weedon, Tony Jefferson, Michael Green and Angela McRobbie, created an international intellectual movement.

Raymond Williams is one of the contributors of British cultural studies who rejected the notion that literary language contains this kind of ethical capital and turned attention away from literature to culture. In Culture and Society (1958) he analysed the history in which .culture had long been imagined as a transcendent bulwark against modern society, commercialization and democratization. The problem with Culture and Society is that Williams himself was unable to jettison culture as defined in the conservative movement after Burke because he shared its negative views of the organization of modern society. Culture and Society ends by arguing that we need an expanded notion of culture as .a whole way of life, a phrase coined by T.S. Eliot, now given a radical twist, that would be developed further by Williams in his next book, The Long Revolution, but also, misguidedly as it turned out, that working-class solidarity might create its own democratic variation of high culture against capitalist, market-orientated modernity. Williams is at once the foremost British cultural theorist, yet curiously them ost neglected. Famously relegated to the historical sidelines by Anderson and attacked by Eagleton during the 1980s for his attachment to a socialist humanism, Williams nevertheless persisted with a series of works like The Country and the City (1973), Television, Technology and Cultural Form (1974), and Problems in Materialism and Culture (1980) to work across the boundaries of literary criticism, history, sociology, and political economy.

In his book Culture and Society which was published in 1958, Raymond Williams exploring how the notion of culture developed in the west, especially Great Britain, from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries.

Turner sets out to clarify the central principles of cultural studies: language and culture; Marxism and ideology; individualism and subjectivity texts, contexts, and discourses within the framework of British sociological and textual analysis.

Stuart Hall is another theorist who contributes in British cultural studies. While recognizing that cultural studies has many histories and legacies he has particular difficulty with the “Britishness” of “British cultural studies”, Hall insists that, the field emerges out of the 1950s disintegration of classical Marxism in its Eurocentrism and its thesis that the economic base has a determining effect on the cultural superstructure. Hall acknowledges that cultural studies has been, and must be, formed in interruptions to its trajectories and perceived mission – notably, early on, by feminism and anti racism. he argues, what is stable in cultural studies is a Gramscian understanding of “conjunctural knowledge” knowledge situated in, and applicable to, specific and immediate political or historical circumstances; as well as an awareness that the structure of representations which form culture’s alphabet and grammar are instruments of social power, requiring critical and activist examination.

Douglas Kellner, who makes an interesting, though ultimately flawed, case for the missed articulation of Frankfurt Critical Theory and British Cultural Studies

In his seminal critique of British culture," Components of the National Culture, Paerry Anderson denied outright any intellectual weight to indigenous British intellectual life. Implicitly, he relegated the achievement of two of the founders of New Left Review, Raymond Williams and Edward Thompson, to the intellectual backwaters of European thought.

Bibliography

§  During, S. (1999). The Cultural Studies Reader (2nd Edition ed.). London: Routledge.

§  Hepworth, M. (1993). The British Journal of Sociology. Wiley on behalf of The London School of Economics and Political Science , 350-351.

§  Steele, T. (2003). CRITICAL THEORY AND BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES. Critical Theory and the Human Condition: FOUNDERS AND , 222-237.

§  Turner, G. (1990). British Cultural Studies An introduction. London: Routledge.

§  Williams, R. (1958). Culture and Society. Chatto and Windus.

SREYA. K. T - BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

Culture is an umbrella term which covers the area such as literary text, film, media studies, sociology, politics, geography, women’s studies, and study of different racial-ethnic groups and so on. Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field which do research on how culture creates and transforms individual’s everyday life, social relations and power. Culture is defined as distinctive ways of everyday life. What is culture is itself a problematic question. Culture differs from different people.  

The beginning of British Cultural Studies can be traced back to 1950s. Richard Hoggart, E. P Thomson and Raymond Williams are considered as the founding fathers of British Cultural Studies. They are left-wing academics in British Universities.  They tried to explore the history and culture of working class people. In 1964 Hoggart founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University, to encounter the development, which was undergoing in middle class traditions and culture. At that point of time, mass media and culture industry were under the process of Americanization.

British cultural studies begin with the texts of Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society, and Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy. In which the culture is subjected to daily lives, what we hear, wear, watch and eat, the how we see relations with each other, the everyday activities such as cooking or shopping. In 1960s British Marxist thoughts were underwent some changes. There is a break from traditional Marxism and have believed in complex or critical Marxism. According to traditional Marxism there is no value for culture; culture is a part of superstructure of society and a product of economic base. Althusser said that there are conflict between economic, political and culture; in order to sustain a complex unity of society. During the period of 1960s and 1970s, the CCCS had a powerful influence on British academics and cultural life. A number of continental critics were influenced by the worth noting the text, which were produced by the CCCS. They were also influenced by the works of Barthes’ and Michel Foucault and Marxist critical theory. In 1960s, British Cultural Studies started to explore the issues of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity. It is a kind of social response with a broad mind. After that they started to intertwine the problems such as women rights, gay liberation, post colonial politics and racial equality. There after cultural studies became an academic discipline, courses, journals and criticism. It appeared in the countries such as the America, Asia, Africa, Europe and Australia. The literature students are interested in connecting literary text to other forms of cultural art and production in relation to the question of politics and power.

The major figures in British Cultural Studies are Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart; both of them were coming from working class. Williams’s famous work Culture and Society published in the year 1958 is about the literary history, which focused on literary texts and its relationship to an idea. In this book, Williams discovers culture is a key category, and it connects literary analysis and social inquiry. He said that Eliot’s conclusion of culture as ‘a whole way of life’ is critical and about Leavis he rejects the text based approach to media and popular culture. He argues that we cannot criticize the institutions such as popular press, advertising and cinema without the reference of life.

Raymond Williams another work is Marxism and Literature. In the first chapter Williams says about culture. According to social scientist culture is civilization of human faculty. The society, culture and economics are interdisciplinary terms. Society is active fellowship or common doing. Economy is related to the system of production, distribution and exchange. Culture is established before these two and it is the growth of human faculties. According to Raymond Williams, culture is a constitutive process, and different ‘ways of life’. Here he breaks the traditional notion of Marxist theory and he foreground culture. One of the striking points in this text is that his final outline view of ideology.

Another important personality is E. P Thompson; he is less equivocal of this tradition. His famous work is entitled as The Making of the English Working Class(1978). Thompson created his theoretical views on culture from Marxist theory. He resisted the traditional Marxist idea of base and superstructure to regain the significance of culture. He maintained a basic humanism instead of lived culture and subjective experience. For Williams and Thompson, the culture is everyday life, within that the individual subject is fore grounded.

            Stuart Hall’s seminal work is Encoding and Decoding in Television Discourse’. In this article, Hall argues that communication is a loop of direct line from sender to receiver. In communication, every moment is important. When a message has been sent, there is no guarantee that it will arrive. So that in communication, every moment became very important. From the point of composing of the message to receiving the message has its own importance of existence. Our society is heterogeneous in nature. It is created out of different groups and interests. The television audience receives a single meaning in different ways. At that time, a context makes meaning everything. And the meaning production is also closely related to each individual’s perceptions. It will lead to the misunderstanding of the message.

            In the study of cultural studies we are actually dealing with the ways we live in and make knowledge out of it. Now a days, British Cultural Studies started textual analysis of the representations, which is exactly like an academic practice. Catherine Belsey in her text ‘From Cultural Studies to Cultural Criticism’ actually says about the academic discipline of it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ø  Turner, Graeme. British Cultural Studies An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2009.

Ø  Ziauddin Sardar and Borin Van Loon. Cultural Studies. Malta: Guttenberg, 1997.

Nihara R - Assignment 1

                                BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

The discipline of cultural studies does not have any clearly defined subject area. Like the word ‘culture’, cultural studies also has an all-inclusive nature. It is a study of all cultural practices. The discipline is really interdisciplinary. It has connections to other social sciences and branches of humanities and arts. The discipline of cultural studies has its origin in Britain and later it migrated to America, Canada, France, Australia and South Asia.

            The name ‘cultural studies’ derives from the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, established in 1964. The first issue of Working Papers in Cultural Studies was published by the University in 1972. The founding fathers of the discipline were associated with CCCS at various times. So this centre is important in the development of cultural studies.

            The industrialization has done a lot with the rise of the discipline in England. In fact, it has a crucial role as it caused the rise of a new group of people called working class who became richer by the industrialization. The scholars from working class background started to be the part of adult education system. Here the word ‘culture’ got more attention and it appears as problematic. The rise of cultural studies in England is closely associated with the New left movement which proliferated through the writings of working class intellectuals like Raymond Williams who considered Marxism as a problem than a theory. They revised the traditional Marxism and the notion about culture was re-written.

             Richard Hoggart (b.1918), Raymond Williams (1921-88), E P Thompson (1924-93), Stuart Hall (b.1932), etc. were the founding fathers of British cultural studies. Most of them came from working class background.  The question of culture in the caste-based English society was the starting point of cultural studies. They took the task of placing common man’s culture against the so called ‘high culture’. They celebrated the popular culture of the working class. They were concerned with how a particular culture is created, practiced/practicing and how the struggle for cultural domination takes place.

            Richard Hoggart, who started his career as a tutor in adult education system, founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. The work The Uses of Literacy (1957) written by Hoggart shaped cultural studies for the first time. The book explained about media and popular culture. Hoggart argued that the critical reading of art could reveal “the felt quality of life” of a society.

            Raymond Williams also started his academic career as an adult education tutor. His book Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961) are two important books which are important in the history of British Cultural studies. For Williams, culture is the “whole way of life, material, intellectual and spiritual”. He traced the evolution of culture through its various historical conditions. In his work Marxism and Literature (1977), the traditional Marxist notion of culture is challenged by Williams. Williams broadened the concept of culture in Marxism. According to traditional Marxists, culture lies in the superstructure which is determined by the economic base.  This was a kind of reductionism for Williams and his followers. Culture cannot be reduced into something determined by the economic base. There are other factors which can decide the culture of a particular community and culture can also determine many other things. The definition given by Williams enabled the critical practices in cultural studies.

            E P Thompson is another key figure in British cultural studies. He was the president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). In his work, The Making of the English Working Class (1978), he sought to demonstrate the coming- into-being of the working class in England in a specific time period and how the popular culture of the working class was ignored by the dominant tradition of conventional history. According to him, ‘class is a historical phenomenon that cannot be understood as a structure or category’. To understand class, it should be seen ‘as a social and cultural formation arising from processes which can only be studied as they work themselves out over a considerable historical period”. He was a radical historian in the sense that he brought out an idea that history should consider everything. It cannot be reduced into the history of the dominant or a particular group.

Stuart Hall is a major figure in cultural studies who was born in Jamaica and later (1960s and 70s) became a member of Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Birmingham. He believes that cultural studies need to hold both theoretical and political questions “in an ever irresolvable, but permanent tension”. Hall always insisted that cultural studies can actually have a practical impact on reality. He made seminal studies in media and culture. By the work Encoding,decoding, he gives theoretical account of how messages are produced and disseminated in television  by suggesting four relatively autonomous stages. That is, production, circulation, use (distribution/consumption) and reproduction. He demonstrates that how institutional power relations influences all these stages of message production. He explains how the communication circuit is reproducing the pattern of domination.

Catherine Belsey is a contemporary figure in British cultural studies who is arguing for a transfer from Cultural Studies to Cultural Criticism. She describes how lack of fluidity arouses from the institutionalization, and populism becomes a threat to the discipline of cultural studies. She also criticizes the lack of consideration of history in the practices of the discipline of cultural studies.

British Cultural Studies is distinguished by the remarkable diversity and originality of the topics that have been studied. Along with the studies on youth subculture and television news programmes, British Cultural Studies focused on images of women, masculinity and the history of sexuality. It has revealed the politics of sports, gender and many social constructions. British Cultural Studies has its own political dimensions. It gives importance to the politically engaged intellectual work. The relationship between power and culture is well analyzed. The Althusserian concept of ideology contributed a lot to the revived idea of culture according to the Marxism.  Althusserian analysis was absorbed by British cultural studies in the 1970’s. After this the ideological instruments like law, religion, education, family etc. were considered as important as economical condition in determining the culture. The ideas of Antonio Gramsci and the theory of Hegemony also contributed to the British cultural studies.

            British Cultural Studies was criticized for its Anglo centrism as it gives more importance to class rather than race and gender. The urban culture was celebrated in British cultural studies. When cultural studies was hailed for its consideration of all kind of marginalized cultures a kind of euro centrism and affinity towards western culture and civilization prevailed in the British cultural studies. Marxism has influenced British cultural studies in two specific ways. According to Marxism, the society is unequally divided with class and other categories such as caste and gender. This division is established in culture and cultural resistance.  The materialist notion of history in Marxism is also vital in cultural studies. Cultural studies attempts to analyze social structures in terms of how cultural forces have given them a historic form. The culture is crucial in shaping history.

             During the period of Thatcher (1979-90) cultural studies started its migration to other lands. According to the region, the treatment of the discipline and its methodologies got differed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lewis, jeff. Cultural Studies. London: Sage Publications Ltd, 2008.

Loon, Z. S. (1997). Introducing Cultural Studies. Australia: Allen and Unwin Pty. Ltd.

Nayar, Pramod K. An Introduction to Cultural Studies. New Delhi: Viva Books Pvt Ltd, 2008.

Shank, Barry. "The Continuing Embarrassment of Culture: From the Culture Concept to Culture Studies." American Studies (1997): 95-116.

Anagha E - Assignment 1

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

The term Cultural Studies is nowadays very popular as the title for an important set of theories and practices within the Humanities circle. Cultural Studies was always present. Critics were aware of this area since the time of Plato. Basically Plato talked about the introduction of stories, the introduction of literature and other kind of arts, the ideal citizen, etc. and all these are part of the existing culture.  So the Cultural Studies in an abstract way was always there. It emerged as a discipline in Britain after World War II. Post war Britain was different from the earlier in many cases. After war, capitalism started to involve in the industrial production of the country. A Welfare state established and as a result, a new culture formed which is marked by modernity. British cultural studies appeared in this background. The “Birmingham School,” The centre for contemporary cultural studies was founded in 1964 with Richard Hoggart as the first chairman. The Center was established to provide an institutional structure to the study of culture much more broadly defined than traditional culture. There is a tradition in Britain going back to the publication of Matthew Arnold’s “Culture and Anarchy” in 1869, recognizing the importance of culture for maintaining political order in modern society. Arnold was aware of the consequence of the spread of the urban culture, which was advancing with the extension of democracy and literacy. He worried that the new culture formed as a result of industrialization would fail to equip its people for their political and social roles in the society. In the first part of the twentieth century, the famous literary critic and formalist F.R. Leavis talked about the cultural capital of the ‘Great tradition.’ He was actually dismissing almost all the works which were experimented with style, genre etc, saying that it did not add to the cultural capital. He criticized writers like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, etc. for giving too much importance to the individual psyche instead of a great culture. He believed that a work should actually develop the moral sensibility of the reader. In his opinion, if the literature does not educate its readers, it cannot be considered as a ‘great’ literature. The inheritance of Matthew Arnold’s idea about culture can be seen in the works of F.R. Leavis. Both were concerned with the great culture and civilization tradition. Leavis studied the canonical literature through his journal ‘Scrutiny’ and books like ‘Great Tradition.’ Their understanding of culture limited to the great canonical tradition.

In the late 1950s, people like Richard Hoggart in his book ‘The Uses of Literacy,’(1957) and Raymond Williams in his book ‘Culture and Society’(1958) pointed out the limitations of analysis of the canonical literature for addressing the complexity of modern British life. In books like the ‘Culture and Society’ and ‘The Long Revolution’ (1961) Raymond Williams articulated a theory of culture that was entirely different from the prevailing dominant cultural theory in British and American literary studies. Hoggart’s work ‘The Uses of Literacy’ is written from his personal experience. According to Graeme Turner, the most important achievement of this book “is the demonstration of the interconnections among various aspects of public culture…and the structures of an individual’s private, everyday life.” He says that Hoggart was successful in applying analytical protocols of literary studies to a wider range of cultural products including music, magazines and popular fiction. Hoggart in this book also talks about the working class life in the prewar period in which private practices and public values are intertwined. According to Turner, Hoggart became a visible contributor to public arguments about the popular culture and media after the publication of The Uses of Literacy.

 The publication of Raymond William’s Culture and Society in 1958 influenced the development of cultural studies. In this book, William used an English way of thought and writing in order to represent the ideas within a proper cultural background. The Long Revolution reflects the intensity of contemporary debates on the cultural impacts of the media.

In Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams was trying to connect Marxist theory with the modern society. He was attempting to revive and understand Marxist theory in order to explain the culture today. In other words Williams challenges the conventional theory of Marxism. In his opinion, Marxism is a vibrant theory and therefore it should revive itself and encompass more things.  According to the traditional Marxist belief, real life is happening in the economic base and culture is situated in the superstructure. The traditional notion was that the base actually shapes the superstructure and superstructure maintains the base. But Williams says that base is a dynamic process in fact; not a static one. There are many contradictions and fewer similarities between the two. Williams considers this as one of the limitations of Marxism. Raymond Williams sees literature as an expression of reality. Marxism considers literature as a cultural product. He tries to look at literary production as a practice, not as an artifact. In this particular work, we can see Williams urging for a revival in Marxism in order to apply the theory in contemporary culture.

            Apart from Raymond Williams and Hoggart, Stuart Hall and Catherine Belsey are the other two prominent figures in the field of British Cultural Studies. In his essay ‘Encoding and Decoding,’ Hall proposes a new theory of cultural form of production and reception. In the first part of the essay, he talks about the circuit of communication by explaining how media messages are produced, circulated and consumed. He also mentions how power relations are established through Tele- Visual communication. Hall challenges the media aesthetics by breaking the older notion of considering audience as passive. In his view, messages are not transparent as it contains some power with them. According to him, a message is systematically distorted. He says that the meaning is not simply fixed at the centre.

 The real meaning of a message lies somewhere in between the sender and receiver. The sender encodes a message and receiver decodes it by using his intellectual and imaginative skills. From the production stage, message goes to circulation, distribution and consumption. Each of these is a phase and these phases are called ‘moments’. The last moment, reproduction, was added by Stuart Hall. This ‘moment’ of reproduction is in the hands of the receiver. Each of the phases is autonomous, separate entity. Each stage is distinct in character and none of them can guarantee each other, at the same time they are interrelated. He says that there is a ‘lack of fit’ between encoding, and decoding.

Again, Hall sees tele-visual communication as combination of fact and aural/ visual sign. He describes three different hypothetical positions from which decoding can be build

(1) Dominant- hegemonic position,

 (2) Negotiated code

 (3) Oppositional code.

In the dominant- hegemonic code, the act of encoding can direct or limit the decoding process. In this, receiver decodes whatever that is sent by the sender as such. There is no chance of questioning. In negotiated code, both encoded and decoded meanings appear almost similar. In the oppositional code, the receiver decodes the opposite meaning of whatever sent by the sender. Stuart Hall considers messages as interpretive social events. The construction of the meaning of a message depends on the collective experiences of a society.

In From Cultural Studies to Cultural Criticism, Catherine Belsey speaks of the institutionalization and reception of the discipline of Cultural Studies. She criticizes the critics like Arnold and Eliot for prescribing the ‘high culture.’ All these people include Hoggart, Raymond Williams, Leavis, Belsey, Hall, etc. played a crucial role in developing Cultural Studies as a discipline.

Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) is generally known as the key institution in the history of the field. It was established in 1964. Of course it is not the only research centre devoted to cultural studies. There are some institutions which showed interest in media and popular culture including ‘The Centre for Television Research’(1966 at Leeds), Centre for Mass Communication Research at the University of Leicester etc.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

·         Turner, Graeme. British Cultural Studies: An Introduction. Third. London: Routledge, 2003.

·         Nayar, Pramod K. An Introduction to Cultural Studies. New Delhi: Viva Books Pvt Ltd, 2008.

Meera Paul - Assignment 1

                                            

                                                  BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

Culture is not the polished romanticized notions but the basic material of life. It is a set of unresolved movements still going on. It is the whole way of life constituted by representations. Culture is human specific. The dominant structures of the society consolidate its own hegemony and it suspends all other inferior structures. In the earlier times ‘culture’ meant the cultivation and tending of crops, then its meaning changed into the habits, customs and tastes of the upper class. By the emergence of the bourgeois or the consumerist class its meaning changed again and got equated with the concept of civilization. It opened up the subjects like subjectivity, imagination and the individual. Culture is part of a signifying practice. It became a mode of generating meanings and ideas which are controlled by the power relations. Thus the elite component of culture gets more visibility and significance. For a long time, the term mass culture was used pejoratively and the popular culture was considered inferior.

According to Raymond Williams, Cultural Studies critically analyses the different societal relationships. The significance of Cultural Studies lies in the fact that that it has no distinct methodology, it is ambivalent, and its practice is self-reflective which enables us to decode what is going on around us. It dissipates the boundaries created by the dominant hegemony. Cultural Studies is a politically committed field. It is not just a theoretical practice but a bridge between the material culture and theory. It demonstrates the social difference a theory can make. It focuses on the generation of meanings and values in a society. Cultural Studies study culture as a product that is made, marketed and consumed.

Several factors contributed to the development of British Cultural Studies. British government promoted adult education as a means of reconstruction after Second World War. Second, American popular culture displaced traditional popular culture. Third, the ideas of French thinkers like Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault helped British intellectuals to problematize the concept of culture in new perspectives. Last, the attempts of the New Left to revive the Marxist critique of capitalism. The left thinking and labor politics in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s is the major contributing factor. By the arrival of modernity there was a conception that the working class has become indistinguishable from that of the middle class. Labor became deskilled, workers became affluent class and thus the consumerist culture emerged. Interesting studies on this new bourgeois and the emerging popular culture in Britain was done in the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. There occurred a change from objectivity too subjectivity.

E. P. Thompson, Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams are known as the trio of the British Cultural Studies. . In The Uses of Literacy (1957), Hoggart analyzes working class culture, describes the youth culture, the conveyed the working-class attitudes and in the second half, he engages contemporary "mass" culture of the 1950s. He perpetuates a dichotomy between the "good" culture of the past and the "bad" mass culture of the present.

Raymond William’s work, ‘Culture and Society 1780-1950’, published in 1958, was the landmark work in the field of Cultural Studies. In the work he conceptualizes history as a process whereby cultural forms shape and are shaped by the context of the time. He examines the words such as "democracy," "class," and "culture," analyzing how the terms were used and how the terms changed. He offers us a broad definition of the term considering the "high" culture as well as the "mass" culture, and says that there is a need of holistic approach to the study of culture. The Long Revolution (1961), is the follow-up book, in which he extends his thesis, offering more concrete ways for a revival.

E.P. Thompson was a radical historian who wrote The Making of the English Working Class (1963), which draws out the emergence of the British working-class. He argues that class is an historical phenomenon, and we cannot understand it as a structure.

It was the works of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall that helped culture to be considered into the academic agenda. Along with this, the founding of New Left Review in 1960, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham in 1964 and Hoggart being its founding director and Stuart Hall’s leadership of that institution from 1969 to 1979 ignited the academic discussions.

For Stuart Hall Marxism is a failure in addressing the key concerns of cultural studies: culture, ideology, language and the symbolic. He noted that Marxism and its derivatives remained decidedly Eurocentric. He turned from Althusser to Gramsci to produce a theoretical perspective; Gramsci’s theories provide the facility for the construction of and resistance to power. He expanded the scope of cultural studies to deal with race and gender.

The Birmingham school focused on the working class and dissident youth populations, television personalities and audiences. Here the students from the working class background interpreted their cultures and realized that they were alienated by the ‘high’ cultures. The BCCS’s approach to cultural studies was purely Marxist and it adapted theoretical insights from post structuralism. ‘Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms’, the 1980 essay by Stuart Hall interrogated the part that popular culture plays within our life. His early essay ‘Encoding/Decoding’, published in 1973, set the scene for Cultural Studies of the media.

During the Thatcher era, British Cultural Studies got fragmented and migrated to the U.S.A, Canada, Australia, France, and India. It became less political and more aesthetic in orientation. British Cultural Studies was the first in the English – speaking world to problematize the generation of meanings.

Catherine Belsey is a contemporary British literary critic who is concerned with the problem of institutionalization of Cultural Studies. According to her cultural studies has lost its radical nature. She says that it has now become the celebration of popular culture. She calls for a revival of cultural studies were a wider range of subjects are researched.

                                                 

 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lewis, jeff. Cultural Studies. London: Sage Publications Ltd, 2008.

Nayar, Pramod K. An Introduction to Cultural Studies. New Delhi: Viva Books Pvt Ltd, 2008.

Shank, Barry. "The Continuing Embarrassment of Culture: From the Culture Concept to Culture Studies." American Studies (1997): 95-116.