Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

Born in Sardinia (Italy), 1891, he is one of few great Marxists from a working class background. He Imprisoned under Mussolini, wrote Prison Notebooks

Marx/Engels fall into traps when trying to establish inflexible laws for all historyThe other side of Marxism is the human shaping of a collective will which is a movement of people in solidarity only possible when people share a vision of the world.This vision leads them to come together, to act. Gramsci thus explores what those visions are, how we get them. He emphasizes that ideology, politics are central to capitalism, not just appendages of economic structure. Where Marx/Engels thought class struggle inevitable because of exploitative structure of capitalist economy, Gramsci said no: state actively forges class compromise to defuse revolution. Capitalism is based on force and consent. Force is carried out by state on behalf of capitalism and consent is achieved through institutions of civil society (church, unions, schools, and media) which are connected to state by “a thousand threads”.

Intellectuals “are the dominant group’s ‘deputies’. They work to secure:“1. The ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is ‘historically’ caused by the prestige… which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production. 2. The apparatus of state coercive power which ‘legally’ enforces discipline on those groups who do not ‘consent’ either actively or passively.” (p. 12)

HegemonyConstellation of ideologies (not one idea) that represent interests of dominant group presented as interests of all. Hegemonic ideology appears to be “common sense,” is internalized by most people as “the only way of running society”. This is the terrain of struggle; it doesn’t make sense to talk about a revolution if people don’t even want to revolt. We can’t step outside hegemonic ways of understanding the world, can only reorganize them, and reconfigure them in interests of working class (counter hegemony)So how do we contest “common sense” if people think that’s all that’s possible?Gramsci says there is a Key role for intellectuals/education/schooling because they help shape ideas. There are two kinds of intellectuals:Traditional intellectuals (appear neutral of any class base, but in fact keep system in place by reproducing its ideas)Organic intellectuals (tied to their class)The challenge was for working class to develop own organic intellectuals, and for some previously traditional intellectuals to side with the working class and convince people that other ways were possible

What is Cultural Studies?______________________

• Study of culture (rather than society)

• Progressive, radical, and omnipresent in arts, humanities, social sciences, science & technology

What is Culture?______________________

• Social behavior; material culture; cultural texts and practices; shared fantasies

Tylor (1871): Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.______________________ Mead (1960s): Culture is a learned behavior of a society or a subgroup.

Williams (1970s): Culture includes the organization of production, the structure of the family, the structure of institutions which express or govern social relationships, the characteristic forms through which members of the society communicate.

Geertz (1980s): Culture is simply the ensemble of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

What is the Subject of Cultural Studies?______________________

• Subject area not clearly defined; all-inclusive notion of culture and study of a range of practices

• Principles, theories and methods are eclectic

• Distinct history of cultural studiesWhat is the Subject of Cultural Studies?______________________

• Principles, theories and methods from social sciences disciplines, the humanities and the arts adapted to the purposes of cultural analysis

• Methodologies diverse: textual analysis, ethnography, psychoanalysis, survey research, etc.

Discipline or

Anti-discipline?______________________

• Cultural studies impossible to define: collective term for diverse and contentious intellectual endeavors; many theoretical and political positions

• Includes established and radical disciplines, political activism and modes of inquiry (critical theory)

• Anti-discipline; not institutionalizedHistorical background______________________

• Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) est. 1964

• Working Papers in Cultural Studies (1972)

• Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, Stuart Hall

• Working-class background; role of popular culture in class-based society in England

R. Hoggart & R. Williams______________________

• Working class intellectuals

• The culture of common people (working class culture) seen as more authentic than middle- and upper-class culture; derives from experience

• Against canonical élitism (high culture)

• Interest in active appropriation of cultural forms & class struggle in the cultural arena

• Mass culture seen as ‘colonizing’ working class culture; packaged for passive absorption by the cultural industry producers

R. Hoggart______________________

• Founder of CCCS

• The Uses of Literacy (1957) programmatic work; parts of it written as a manifesto

• Problem: working classes excluded from participation and dissemination of their cultural forms and practices

• Cultural struggle over legitimacy and cultural status of forms and practices

• Critical reading of art needs to reveal the ‘felt quality of life’ of a society; art captures the experience of the everyday as the unique

R. Williams______________________

• Marxist tradition

• Culture is an expression of the coherence of organic communities resisting determinism in its various forms

• Culture: material, intellectual and spiritual (base and superstructure)

• Centrality of the culture of everyday life (texts that capture “the structure of feeling” of everyday life, the sense of an époque) - not only validates such culture and its study but validates its production and gives it a status of insight into the dynamics of society’s struggle

Goals of Cultural Studies______________________

1. Examine cultural practices in their relationship to power; how power shapes these practices.

2. Culture is studied in the social and political context in which its forms manifest themselves.

3. Culture is both object of study and vehicle for changing political consciousness through this understanding (scholarly & pragmatic).

4. Reconcile division between tacit / universal knowledge; validation of experience (local knowledge) in addition to generally shared forms of knowledge.

5. Moral evaluation of modern society and means for radical action.What is Cultural Studies?

• Study of relations between social relations and meanings (how social divisions are made meaningful)

• Culture is terrain on which ideological representations of class, gender, race are enforced, and contested by social groups validating their experience

• Hegemony• operates in the realm of representations and consciousness

• implies power inequality in different segments of society• naturalizes a class ideology and renders it in the form of common sense• exercised through ‘authority,’ not physical force• operates through institutions (educational system, media and the family)

• Cultural studies focus on analysis of cultural forms and their meaning in the context of power relations in society

Culture as Site of Class Struggle ______________________ • Gramsci (1891-1937)

• Hegemony: how society is bound together without the use of force under the moral and intellectual leadership of the ruling classes

Hegemony ______________________ • Hegemony relies on negotiation & consent

• Intellectuals forge consent in the interest of the ruling class

• Competing classes achieve a ‘compromise equilibrium’

• Culture as key site of struggle of competing interests

• Popular culture is an arena of resistance but also of enforcing hegemony

• Paradoxically, the sphere of culture perceived as non-political although it is a conduit for hegemonic representations

Theories and Theorists in Cultural Studies______________________

• Culture and civilisation (Matthew Arnold; Leavisism) canon

• Culturalism (Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall) authenticity

• Structuralism (Ferdinand de Saussure,Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes) signs; unconscious foundations; signification

• Post-Structuralism; Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Edward Said) meaning is process

• Marxism (Classical; the Frankfurt School, Althusserian; neo-Gramscian; Bakhtin) cultural texts reflect how society is organized

• Feminism (Janice Radway) constructing identity through consumption

• Post-modernism (Jameson, Baudrillard) revolt against modernism

Roland Barthes – Myth Today – Summary, Review and AnalysisThe second section of Roland Barthes' "Mythologies", titled "Myth Today", is a theoretical discussion of Barthes' program for myth analysis which is demonstrated in the first section of Mythologies. What Barthes terms as "myth" is in fact the manner in which a culture signifies and grants meaning to the world around it. According to Barthes, anything can be a myth, and he follows this approach throughout the examples in Mythologies.

Barthes' concept of myth seems similar or at least draws on the concept of ideology as formulated by Marxin The German Ideology. Ideology according to Barthes' version in "Myth Today" is not entirely concealed and is subject for scrutiny through its cultural manifestations. These manifestations, mythologies according to Barthes, present themselves as being "natural" and are therefore transparent. What Barthes is after in his analysis of mythologies is to reveal the ideological nature of culture's underling myth.

At the beginning of "Myth Today" Barthes defines myth a speech. Myth is speech in that that it is part of a system of communication in which it bears meaning. By this definition Barthes expands on Levi-Strauss' perception of myth to include every symbol which conveys meaning (be it a spoken or written text, and image, a design etc. and even human actions such as sunbathing). For Barthes every cultural product had meaning, and this meaning is conditioned by ideology, i.e. myth, and therefore any cultural product can be the subject of mythological analysis and review.

According to Barthes, myth is a form of signification. However myth is different from ordinary speech and language. Barthes follows de-Saussure's discussion regarding the nature of the linguistic sign and he characterizes myth a second class of signification. What was the sign in the first order of language (for example the signifier "cigarette" and the signified of an object made of paper and tobacco) turns into a signifier in the second order (signifying lung cancer). In other words, myth for Barthes is a realm of second class signification which could be seen as a cultural association, to distinguish from denotation. Barthes, in his Rhetoric of the Image, elaborated on the difference between denotation of the sign and its connotation and its use in cultural analysis