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 19th and 20th 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 (3rd edition).Routledge(2003)London
.
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