CCTP 797: Discourses of Culture / Cultural Theory
Professor Martin Irvine

Introduction and Orientation:
Contexts, Histories, Cultural Theory and the Self-Reflexive Method

What are we talking about when we are talking about
"cultural theory", "theory," "culture," "discourses of culture"?

• Multiplicity or Plurality of "Cultural Discourses" without a core or center: implications of studying or doing "theory" without an agreed upon starting point or center.
• Re-conceptualizing cultural theory at time when cultures are recognized as always already hybrid, multiple, global, involving mixed and unstable identities.
• First, the epistemological problem: what are we talking about when we say "culture"?
  • "Culture" has no stable referent, but a contested category having meaning only in a discourse or set of arguments about it.
  • And "cultural studies" or "cultural theory" presupposes that there is something out there, or constructible, corresponding to the term "culture" about which one can "theorize" or "study".
  • Multiple disciplines and ordinary, everyday usage creates a confusing entry point: we talk meaningfully about "corporate culture" (the set of practices, beliefs, and values followed by company or organization) as well as the circulation of codes and meanings in a global sub-culture ("the culture of hip-hop").
  • How do we narrow the field of application to begin a shared conversation?
  • "Culture" before "cultural studies" implied "high culture," or some qualitative difference from popular social practices, and a view of "universal" cultural values or truths.
  • Equally problematic is the key term "ideology" that is prominent in "cultural studies".

Introduction to the methodology of this seminar (or, Irvine's Rules): Theory must be

• 1. self-reflexive (open to internal self-critique and questioning the institutional positions in which it is embedded)
• 2. heuristic (concepts lead to new discoveries impossible without them), and
• 3. extensible (concepts can be applied outside the knowledge domain in which they were developed).
• First principles of self-reflexive thought:
  • becoming aware of the assumptions, presuppositions, unexpressed commitments of a discipline, a philosophy, theory, set of concepts, or point of view.
  • openness to critiquing the foundational assumptions of a discipline, acknowledging internal contradictions, moving beyond replicating traditional approaches and seeking new points of view.
  • critique of received and inherited assumptions and methodologies: critique the authority and power of institutions where "cultural theory" has been located.
• Theory as a heuristic activity (discovery methods, working assumptions, techniques for discovering knowledge or news ways of representing the known), not privileged position outside cultural productions being analyzed.
  • Importance of the Heuristic Value of Theory: what discoveries does it allow for you that you could not make unless you were already thinking with the set of concepts under consideration?
  • Required for the ability to generate new discoveries and build new knowledge, rather than merely replicating the institutional practices of existing disciplines.
• If the core concepts or intellectual models we work with don't lead to new discoveries, what good are they?

Institutionalized Pre-reflexive Positions of "Cultural Studies"

• Anglo-American "Cultural Studies" as institutionalized in universities usually involved an unquestioned limitless search for asymmetries of power in culture, modeled on conflicts between dominant and subjected cultures.
  • Interpretations resulted in a reconfirmation of the givenness of "dominant views" rather than recognition of the multiplicity of cultures already in practice.
• The myth of the monolithic "culture industry": "Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part. " --Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception."
  • How is it possible to maintain, for example, the existence of a unified, totalizing, monolithic "culture industry" (Adorno and descendants) in an era of multiple cultures, de-centralized control, micro-markets, competing and often contentious and resisting subcultures, globalization, and new technologies of production and distribution in the hands of users and receivers of cultural goods (music, video, texts, books, photography)?
• An unquestioned acceptance of the sufficiency of explanatory categories as they have developed in disciplinary practices: class, race or ethnicity, gender and sexuality, national and ethnic identities, subcultures and dominant cultures.
  • These categories act as rhetorical topoi, places, "topics" for organizing arguments.
  • They are self-justifying and given in academic discourse as established rules of procedure, not susceptible to critique since they are used as the ground or possibility for critique in certain systems of cultural theory practices.
• The university and academic disciplines are often inhabited as neutral grounds for studying or critiquing culture, promoting a detached and ironic view of cultural practices.

The Question of Discursive Domains, Disciplines, Objects of Knowledge

• Cultural Studies rarely reflects on the problem of knowledge, epistemology, except to critique ideological foundation and regimes of "truth" in relation to structures of power
• Cultural Theory after Michel Foucault's Order of Things (Les Mots et les Chose) (French, 1966; English Trans. 1974) and The Archaeology of Knowledge
  • A neo-Kantian and post-structuralist turning point: objects of knowledge do not precede the discourses in which they are constituted (disciplines, ideologies, sciences, systems of thought), and are only known to us as such within a "discursive practice".
  • Overview of Foucault's philosophy in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    
• Compare Richard Rorty's parallel argument from within the practice of philosophy in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979):
  • Philosophy from Descartes to analytical philosophy and the philosophy of language in 1940s-80s had reached dead ends because of an adherence to "representational epistemology" or a "correspondence theory of truth," that is, a model of mind or language as a mirror or representation of truth or states of being in nature, which a scientific philosophy could express if it could just clarify its ideas or refine the right language.
  • Overview of Rorty's Philosophy in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Today's Historical Context, and the Possibility of Doing Cultural Theory in Re-Mix Culture

• Theory, practice (cultural production), and descriptions of culture in a post-postmodern era.
• Cultural multiplicity with centers of nodal concentration and aggregation in global cities: globalization and culture.
• The (pre)condition of hybridity: the end of unified, totalizing cultures, impossibility of maintaining positions of "authenticity" or cultural "purity."
• Production and "post-production": describing cultures of the mix,sampled, hybrid, products defied in post-production practices (music studio, film studio, photography). See Paul Miller and Nicolas Bourriaud:

Postproduction is a technical term from the audiovisual vocabulary used in television, film, and video. It refers to the set of processes applied to recorded material: montage, the inclusion of other visual or audio sources, subtitling, voice-overs, and special effects....

Since the early nineties, an ever increasing number of artworks have been created on the basis of preexisting works; more and more artists interpret, reproduce, re-exhibit, or use works made by others or available cultural products. This art of postproduction seems to respond to the proliferating chaos of global culture in the information age, which is characterized by an increase in the supply of works and the art world's annexation of forms ignored or disdained until now.

These artists who insert their own work into that of others contribute to the eradication of the traditional distinction between production and consumption, creation and copy, readymade and original work. The material they manipulate is no longer primary. It is no longer a matter of elaborating a form on the basis of a raw material but working with objects that are already in circulation on the cultural market, which is to say, objects already informed by other objects. Notions of originality (being at the origin of) and even of creation (making something from nothing) are slowly blurred in this new cultural landscape marked by the twin figures of the DJ and the programmer, both of whom have the task of selecting cultural objects and inserting them into new contexts. (Bourriaud, Postproduction, Introduction)

• With the conceptual gear of semiotics, theories of intertextuality and hybridity, we enter a new cultural logic: deep remixing as a condition, ground, and code for the possibility of new works.

Doing a Brief History of Cultural Theory:
Is there a History, A Narrative Trajectory, a goal, a future?

• Cultural Theory (Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Media Studies, etc.) has it's own self-authenticated institutional history: see map of cultural theory traditions.
• Cultural Theory in university departments is a construction of a mythology that this body of theory was developed to critique:
• the institutional use of myths of origin and teleologies of completion, trajectories leading from foundational origins to culminations of purity and self-awareness
• largely an institutional construction, led by humanities and social science departments in universities, providing career-path options for academics.
  
• We can also intervene with an alternative and self-reflexive history, and reclaim the philosophical method of cultural theory.
• To work in the field, we need to know what has been done, what can be critiqued or undone, and what remains to be done.
• In any given case of interpreting or analyzing cultural practices, artifacts, production: what questions can be asked, what do we need to know to even begin asking useful or relevant questions, what methods can be used?
  • Various theorists would answer these questions or challenges differently: getting to know the assumptions and moves is part of learning the game.

Capsule Views of key traditions

• British "Cultural Studies" paradigm (1970s-1990s): "culture" is ordinary, all classes of society have cultures (plural); "culture" is not merely/only what is traditionally defined hegemonically by the dominant classes. "Culture" is dependant/determined by/contingent on social class position, awareness of positions, and always an ongoing negotiation with power centers, rules of inclusion and inclusion, competition for resources, disruptions against hegemonic control or ideologies.
• Social constructivism and Bourdieu: culture as what is socially constructed, with hierarchical distribution rules. Rules for the circulation of cultural goods and symbolic capital; the function of cultural capital in the general economy.
• Foucault and post-Marxian views: culture and cultural products as constructed within a field of discursive practices and ideologies.
• Cultural Semiotics: cultural meanings are formed only within, and because of, a network of learned, symbolic associations that provide both the internalized rules for interpretation and the rules for generating (producing) new cultural expressions. The codes of reception/interpretation and production.
• American popular culture studies: interdisciplinary inheritance of prior theory in the study of all popular culture forms, media, TV, movies, video, art, music.

Main traditions of discourse in the received or now-institutionalized history of Cultural Studies:

• British traditions of questioning the idea of "culture" and the consequences of the social class system
  • Raymond Williams: Culture and Society (1958); The Long Revolution (1961); Keywords (1976)
  • Breakthrough: "Culture is ordinary"
    • "Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning... A culture has two aspects: the known meanings and directions, which its members are trained to; the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested... We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life--the common meanings; to mean the arts and learning--the special processes of discovery and creative effort... Culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind. (Williams in N. McKenzie, ed., Convictions, 1958, p.6)
  • Williams' definitions of Culture, from Keywords
  • An overview of Williams in The New Criterion (Feb., 1990)
• Stuart Hall and the emergence of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
  • Richard Hoggart The Uses of Literacy (1957) credited with beginning CCCS approach.
  • Stuart Hall and political emphasis in Cultural Studies
  • Study of subcultures and social class system
• Presupposes and questions prior British tradition of cultural reflection from the "high" or "official" or "ruling class" point of view (Arnold and Leavis)
  • Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869); see especially chap. 3, "Barbarians, Philistines, Populace"
  • F.R. Leavis: Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (1930)
• Anthropology and Sociology: Convergences with Cultural Studies
  • Claude Levi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth" (1955) and Structural Anthropology (1963).
  • Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973).
• European Continental Philosophical Traditions: Marxism, Frankfurt School, French Marxism and Structuralism
  • Frankfurt School Marxism: Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (1923)
  • Expanded "classical" Marxist thought to include culture and ideology, mass culture, "working class" culture and the "culture industries"
  • Core group: Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse
  • Gramsci and theory of Hegemony
  • Barthes and Althusser: structuralism and Marxism
• Semiotics, Post-Structuralism
  • De Saussure, Benveniste, Barthes, Derrida
  • Cultural Semiotics: Lotman, Eco
  • Intertextuality: key to cultural meanings
• Derrida and deconstruction
  • Convergence of European philosophical critiques of language and metaphysics with structuralist linguistics and semiotics
• Foucault: Structures of Power and the Construction of Knowledge & Theories of sexuality
• Literary Theory and Cultural Theory
  • Convergence of semiotics, deconstruction, post-structuralism, post-colonial studies, cultural studies, feminist studies, and queer studies with literary theory, 1970s-2000
• Pierre Bourdieu and the sociology of culture, symbolic value, circulation of symbolic good, forms of capital (financial and material, cultural, social)
• Philosophy and Post-Modernism
  • Richard Rorty
• Feminisms: Questioning Gender and Power
• Sexuality and Queer Studies: Post-Foucauldian inquiry into sexual and gender identities and ideology
• Identity Politics debates: 1980s-1990s
• Postmodernism and the Ideology of Consumer Culture
• Globalization and Global/International Cultural Studies
• Visual Culture Studies
• Recent Interdisciplinary Moves
• Mediology
• Social Network Theory
• Intellectual property, cultural goods, cultural commons, "gift economics" theories

What Remains to be Done? The challenge of mediology and expanded interdisciplinary

• Communication and culture in its materializations, institutions, and ongoing configuration of ideology and cultural value
• Mediology: Study of Media Systems and Institutional, Cultural, Political Conditions

Case studies of contemporary culture (high and low): art museum exhibition, Top-rated TV shows (Nielsen Top 20)