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

Spring 2009

Required Books

  • Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Theory Since 1965. Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1989. [ISBN: 0813008441] (=CT)
  • Michael Ryan, Cultural Studies: An Anthology. Blackwell, 2008. [ISBN: 1405145773] (=CS)
  • Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, Introduction. New York: Pantheon, 1976. Reissue: New York, Vintage, 1990. [ISBN: 0679724699]
  • Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky), Rhythm Science. Cambridge, MA: Mediawork/MIT Press, 2004. [ISBN: 026263287X]
  • Philip Smith and Alexander Riley, Cultural Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009. [ISBN: 9781405169073]

About the Seminar

This seminar will provide a context for a self-reflexive and critical study of the various theories and discourses that surround the study of culture, especially the aspects of culture studied in the CCT program. The seminar will be especially focused on the key philosophical and methodological questions in the study of culture(s) from multiple disciplines.

Unlike most classroom-based courses, this seminar will be conducted with weekly student writing in the course Wiki, where real-time commentary and reflection will extend the application of cultural theory to cases and examples discussed by the seminar participants. (See the course philosophy and Wiki project description.)

Requirements: Weekly contributions to the seminar (individual and group), presentations of material contributed to the seminar Wiki on cultural theory (key concepts), and final article or essay contributed to the seminar Wiki (Metapedia.com). Grades will be based mainly the collaborative work of the seminar and contributing content to the Wiki site. Students will also benefit from web publishing credit as writers and contributors to an ongoing Wiki that will be world-accessible and cross-referenced by search indices like Google and other Wiki information sites.

Seminar Wiki

The seminar will practice and enact a self-reflexive critical methodology through a collaborative Wiki site for cultural theory (Metapedia.com).


| Theory Sources | Key Concepts | Metapedia Cultural Theory Wiki | Grading and Wiki Project |


1 Introduction: Orientation to Doing "Cultural Theory" as Self-Reflexive Theory []

Preparation for week 1:

Introductory Lecture [notes online]

  • Introduction to self-reflexive theory, the objects of knowledge and methodologies of cultural theory.
  • Re-inserting "cultural theory" in philosophy and real-world practices.
  • Cultural theory in the era of cultural hybridity, globalization, destabilization of authority and identity.
  • What does doing theory or being theoretical mean today for fields in the humanities and social sciences?

Background Readings: "Cultural Studies" and "Cultural Theory" as Academic Disciplines

How do we work with theory in meaningful interdisciplinary ways today, after many failed paradigms?

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)?

Introductory Case Studies:

Introduction to the method of the seminar: collaborative Wiki (metapedia.com), weekly participation and presentations, real-time examples and case studies.

2 Orientations to Core Readings: Cultural Studies and Cultural Theory []

Learning Objectives:
An orientation to Cultural Studies and Cultural Theory through some major definitions and Foucault's theory of discourse.

Key Questions: Is there an intellectually and institutionally demarcated field of study for cultural theory/cultural studies? Considered from the key questions of philosophy like epistemology and ethics, how does Rorty's approach offer an orientation to cultural theory? How does Foucault's theory of discourse provide an important way of thinking about the objects and boundaries of culture theory, cultural institutions, and the disciplines and professions that we entrust with the authority to define culture.

Readings

Useful Supplementary Readings

Seminar Discussion: Round Table Discussion and Self-Reflexive Critique of Readings

Introductory Wiki site contributions and discussion

3 Culture, Discourse, Power, Ideology []

Cultural Studies and the Question of the Distribution and Maintenance of Power

Learning Objectives:

This unit introduces the concepts of ideology and power as they are used in cultural theory to explain the function of "dominant cultures" vs. "subordinate" or various kinds of "popular" cultures seen as outside the center of power and authority in a society.

Although many of these views and strategies for analysis have emerged from post-Marxian thought, it is useful for a student to gain a sense of the significance of these concepts before turning to the classical statements in Marx and other Marxian philosophers.

What is the role of power in culture and cultural theory? What is the significance of a theory of power for understanding culture and ideologies? What examples of panopticism (internalized policing and monitoring of thoughts and actions) and hegemony (consent to dominant views, beliefs, and practices) do we encounter every day? How are we continually "disciplined," in Foucault's view, to internalize self-policing for sex and political views? Censorship in the media? Self-censorship in expression and the arts?

Readings

Representations and critiques of Panopticism and Hegemony in popular culture: movie tradition

Student Group Presentation and Wiki Contribution

4 Political-Economy and Culture: Marxism to Post-Marxism to Recent Theories of Cultural Capital []

Learning Objectives:

Understanding the key concepts of post-Marxian political-economy theory and relevance to cultural theory. Introduction to theories of cultural capital and network economic theories.

Questions: does the labor theory of value apply in today's information and knowledge economy? What about intellectual property and circulation of intangible value in cultural goods and media products? How do we describe the current globalized, networked economy? Post-capitalist? How does current theory account for the uneven distribution of political-economic systems? Understanding cultural goods and intellectual property values.


Readings and Reference Works

Marx

Critique of the Frankfurt School view of the "Culture Industries"

  • The works of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, leaders of the Frankfurt School, have been influential in maintaining a version of Marxian thought that sees popular culture and mass culture as products of a capitalist-consumerist "culture industry" with only one strategy: blinding the masses to their true conditions through entertainment and illusion in order to perpetuate economic and political hierarchy and social dependency. This rigorous determinist and totalizing view has many problems, but the theory is important to know for further critique.
  • From The Frankfurt School emerged "critical theory" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy overview), critical social theory, from a blend of reflective philosophy from the 1930s-1960s. See also overview of Adorno's philosophy.
  • See The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception (web). Text also in CT and in pdf.
    • Adorno's follow-up essay, "The Culture Industry Reconsidered" (lecture 1963, published 1967) is a continuation and reassertion of their totalizing argument, as if post-modernism, Pop art, and hundreds of other forms of popular culture are not happening!
    • "[The culture industry] proclaims: you shall conform, without instruction as to what; conform to that which exists anyway, and to that which everyone thinks anyway as a reflex of its power and omnipresence. The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness. The order that springs from it is never confronted with what it claims to be or with the real interests of human beings." (from "The Culture Industry Reconsidered")
  • Consider self-reflexive critiques:
    • Adorno and Horkheimer preserve an elitist, Romantic view of "culture" and offer no possible future for the movement of modern art, literature, music, film, photography or philosophy itself.
    • Why does this line of argument have such little regard for the intelligence of "the masses," as if people are not capable of intervening with their own independence? No regard for the agency of individuals and multiple uses of popular culture.
    • Unprepared to deal with globalization and multiple sub-cultures.
    • Cannot consider the proliferation of art and popular media from many non-mainstream sources.
    • Misses the ironic and subversive readings of entertainment industries' products.
    • Theory not extensible to the role of consumers as producers in post-Web and digital media world.

Pierre Bourdieu: Theory of cultural capital and symbolic value of cultural goods. An important re-interpretation of the concept of "capital."

  • Bourdieu, "Forms of Capital."
  • One of the most important re-conceptualizations of capital and value. Important for helping to explain symbolic value and value of intellectual property (intangible "property" and forms of "capital" capable of producing great value).

Political Economy of Media and Entertainment Industries

  • Map of Concentration of Media Industries, 2006 (The Nation)
  • Media ownership and industry concentration follows the logic of consolidation and vertical integration. What does ihs mean for media and consumers of cultural goods?

Self-Reflexive Critique of Marxist and post-Marxian Cultural Philosophy

  • Consider questions of agency (individual and class) for change, knowledge economy conditions, global market interdependence, global consumerism, intellectual property, cultural capital.

Student Group Presentation and Wiki Contribution

5 Structuralism and Semiotics: Towards a Grammar of Culture []

Learning Objectives

Understanding the main assumptions and concepts of structuralism and semiotics concerning language and signs. What is the significance for cultural theory of the "linguistic turn," approaching all aspects of culture as a language, a system of learned codes. How can the concepts and methods of semiotics be extended to all forms of culture as multiple kinds of cultural languages?

Readings:

Structuralist models of language and the linguistic sign

  • Smith and Riley, chap. 6, 92-102.
  • Ferdinand de Saussure, selections from Course in General Linguistics (CT, 646-654)
  • Further Reading: Paul Bouissac, "Perspectives on Saussure," University of Toronto, 2003.
  • Emile Benveniste, "The Nature of the Linguistic Sign" and "Subjectivity in Language." (CT, 725-32)

Introductions to Semiotics

Examples from popular culture and media

  • Advertising, popular TV genres, movies: some cases to illustrate "the grammar of meaning" using semiotic concepts and methods of analysis.

Student Group Presentation and Wiki Contribution

6 Cultural Semiotics []

Learning Objectives
Using the core theories of semiotics, how can cultural semiotics be applied to all forms of cultural productions today? How does interpretation and meaning-making work across media forms and genres (movies as "commentaries" on books, TV genres, or comics) and cultures (cross-globalization interpretations). How can we read new media and web sites like MySpace and YouTube? How do we extend the theory to examples from both high and low culture?

Core Readings

  • Smith and Riley, 102- 108 (on Barthes); chap. 11, 180-184 (on Bakhtin and Eco)

Barthes and Semiology

  • Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1, "Myth Today" (trans. Annette Lavers, 1984) (pdf). (An html version)
    • One of Barthes' first descriptions of semiology, the term adopted by French theorists. A source of confusion may be his use of the term "myth," by which Barthes means the second-order meanings and codes that we live by.
  • Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology (1964; English edition, 1968). [Become familiar with his terms and approach: semiology as approach to all cultural meaning, though still modeled on the "text".

Yurij Lotman, "On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture" (CT 410- )

Cultural Encoding and Decoding

  • Stuart Hall, "Encoding/Decoding." (print: CS, 907-916.) [Reconsider in this context]
  • Daniel Chandler, "Encoding/Decoding" [background and review of cultural semiotic theory]

Important Issues in Cultural Semiotics:

  • Lotman's "Incompleteness Theory": all cultures experience themselves as essentially incomplete, which is why we continue to make new works, new interpretations, commentaries, additions to past and current cultural productions.
  • Cultural meanings function like a language, that is, they are learned (not natural), rule-governed (multi-levels of "grammar"), and collective/social (not private or individual).
    • Lotman's corollary: culture is the non-hereditary memory of a community

Intertextuality, Dialogism

A word (or in general any sign) is interindividual. Everything that is said, expressed, is located outside the soul of the speaker and does not belong only to him. The word cannot be assigned to a single speaker. The author (speaker) has his own inalienable right to the word, but the listener has his rights, and those whose voices are heard in the word before the author comes upon it also have their rights (after all, there are no words that belong to no one).
[Mikhail Bakhtin. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Trans. Vern McGee). Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986, pp. 121-122.]

Bakhtin, Kristeva, Eco: The Activity of Meaning and Interpretation

Examples from popular culture and media

Student Group Presentation and Wiki Contribution

7 Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction []

Learning Objectives

What are the key strategies of deconstruction? What philosophical traditions does Derrida draw from? Working through the playfulness and rhetorical audacity of Derrida's writings, what key assumptions do you find? How can discourses and whole cultural systems like laws and sexuality be "deconstructed" to disclose unacknowledged, suppressed, or repressed contradictions that provide a path for criticism and change? How can deconstruction be used in interpreting cultural works against dominant beliefs or ideologies?

Derrida and Deconstruction: main theories and legacy

Derrida and Deconstruction: Lecture Notes (Irvine)

Film Examples

  • Blade Runner as a deconstruction of the utopian futuristic genre, merging film noir and post-Frankenstein human-machine engineering
  • Chains of intertextual dependencies: Blade Runner, Akira and Japanese anime, Ghost in the Shell, the Matrix Series
8 Foucault and Cultural Archaeology []

Learning Objectives:
How does Foucault's model of "Archaeology" provide a method for doing cultural history? Explain Foucault's key concepts of "discourse," "discursive practice," "the archive." Tie together our earlier readings of Foucault and cultural semiotics. With his essay on "What is an Author," how does he move inquiry toward the function of authority and bodies of discourse that function socially and ideologically apart from individuals? How can we use this approach to analyze current media and cultural issues like the role of producers, users, and consumers of information in mass media and the Internet? How can we use the model of "archaeology" heuristically to make new discoveries about the social, political, economic, and ideological networks in play at any given social-historical moment?

Readings

Further Reading and Sources

Applied Archaeology Topic: The Current Status of the Book and Text in the post-digital and (mainly) visual culture world

  • What is the status and function of writing, the book, and text in our culture over the past 500 years? past 100 years? past 25? Today?
  • See Martin Irvine, "The Book, the Page, the Text, and Biblio-Futures  or, The Once and Future Book" (multimedia conference presentation).
  • Ideologies of writing, the text, the book: do a horizontal view through a current slice of time. Ideology of writing and text in various media (handwriting, print, word processed, Web, e-books, pdf documents, etc.), contexts of signifying, products and commodities, advertising, libraries (real vs. online), copyright regimes, Amazon and Google and texts, news online, text messaging, the combination of text and image.

Student Group Presentation and Wiki Contribution

9 Theories of Media and Technology []

Is there, or can there be, a generalized or generalizable "theory of technology" in relation to culture? The ideology of "technology" is interwoven in much of the discourse of America and the developed world, but it is seldom clear what the referent of the term is. The most popularized representations of "technology" span both utopian and dystopian views and projections; which views are dominant today? Consider some of the main traditions of theory and discourse on technology and culture since "critical theory" (various post-Marxist positions like Benjamin, Debord, and Adorno/Horkheimer), including techno-determinist views (McLuhan), and the cross-institutional view of Debray (whom we will consider in more detail later).

Readings

  • Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." [Another copy.]
    • Benjamin was part of the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxist writers, but proposed his own more nuanced theory, though still in the grip of presuppositions about "mass culture" that couldn't deal with emerging trends in modernism and possible subversive uses of mass culture.
  • Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967) [Another copy.]
  • Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium is the Message" (Excerpt from Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man. Part I, Chapters 1-7, 2nd Edition). (See especially Part 1, "The Medium is the Message," paragraphs 1-3.). Another version of the chapter.
  • Introducing Mediology as an alternative view:
    • Regis Debray, "What is Mediology?" Le Monde Diplomatique, Aug., 1999. (Trans. Martin Irvine)

Sources

Media, Film, Video, Advertising

Student Group Presentation and Wiki Contribution

10 Postmodernism and Post-Postmodernism []

Learning Objectives:
What was postmodernism? Distinguish between "the postmodern," "postmodernism," and "postmodernity." How much of postmodern theory from the 1960s-1990s is relevant for thinking today? Where are we now in both cultural assumptions and ideas and practices that circulate with or without self-consciousness or intention? What are some good examples of the "post-postmodern" in popular and high culture today? Music, media, film, TV, video, art, photography, web? How is the current use of hybrid media doing "theory by other means"?

Readings

Hybridity and Globalization

  • Homi Bhabha, from The Location of Culture (read Introduction) (London, New York: Routledge, 1994).
  • Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003) (Excerpts: Intro | Chap. 3)
  • Marwan Kraidy, Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005). Read Preface and Chapter 1. [good overview of issues from the point of view of international communications]

A Way of Thinking about Post-postmodernism: Postproduction

Reading and Listening: Theory and Practice

Student Group Presentation and Wiki Contribution

11 Mediology and Cultural Theory []

Learning Objectives:

Having reviewed a variety of traditions of cultural theory, we return to the question of media and communication theory after postmodernism. Is there a way to move beyond replicating the academic, institutionalized authorities to a view that integrates the study of culture, technology, social institutions, history, and economics? Debray proposes a new point of view that takes for granted the intellectual traditions of the modern and postmodern eras, but doesn't get stuck in any of them. Mediology looks for what's left out in traditional disciplinary views and subject matter.

What are the heuristic and self-reflexive possibilities of mediology for current and future studies of culture, media, and technology? How does mediology continue, extend, or critique other theory traditions we have examined: communication theory, semiotics/semiology, post-modernism?

Readings

Resources and Sources

Working with Mediology

What questions to ask?

  • Missed institutional embeddedness of media?
  • Institutions of transmission?
  • Media as memory systems?
  • Mediaspheres and total, reconfigurable systems of media at any given cultural moment?
  • Hierarchies of media and technologies, cultural significance of various media before content or information is conveyed?
  • Is the technology of the medium separable from the meaning of the content transmitted?
  • Are ideologies separable from the material means (mediums) of transmission (for example, religion, politics, class structures, identities, subjectivities); that is, how is ideology interdependent with the material means of communication, information, and transmission?
  • What information is transmitted in the medium itself by its form and social function?

Mediology Case Studies for discussion:

  • The Internet and Mediology: A Look at Our Current Mediasphere
  • The Washington Mall: what is communi9cated and transmitted through this heavily encoded social space and institutional structures?
  • TV Culture and Institutions
  • The Fashion World and the Art World: institutions of transmission, codes, mediation and media channels
  • The Museum
  • The University

Student Group Presentation and Wiki Contribution

12 Sex and Sexuality, Feminism, and Gender Studies []

Learning Objectives:

The investigation of the cultural bases of sex and gender has been an important component of cultural studies and the study of media, art, and communication. What are the foundational approaches, and how are they used to construct arguments for analysis of sex and gender as cultural formations? How has feminist thought since 1980s provided methods of analysis for the social and political critique of sexuality and gender?

Readings

The Question of Sex, Gender, Sexuality, and the Sexed Human Body as Historically and Culturally Constructed

  • Smith and Riley, chap. 15, esp. 252-261; chap. 16, 262-79.
  • Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1
  • Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990) (selections in pdf): Chaps. 1-2 (selection) | chap. 5 (selections) | chap. 6 (selections).

The Development of Theories of Sex and Gender in Feminist Studies after Foucault

Supplementary Reading: Critiques of Butler's Theory

Discussion Questions

  • What are the main traditions of discourse for theorizing sex, gender, and sexuality?
  • What are the consequences of Foucault's move to "put sex back into discourse"?
Student Group Presentation and Wiki Contribution

13 PoMo Sexuality (and the Promise of Post-PoMo Sexuality) []

Learning Objectives

This week we'll consider some of the other ways sex, desire, and pleasure are played out, represented, and practiced in the multiplicity of identities often termed "postmodern sexuality." Is there an adequate cultural theory for multiplicity of experiences, sexual identities, desires, and fantasies expressed today? While the surface ideological battles about sex, desire, pleasure, and "heteronormativity" continue in the public forum of partisan politics and mass media, many people have been working out alternative practices, identities, fantasies, and life styles.

What used to be underground is now more or less mainstream; the outside is inside (and as Derrida has shown, the excluded "outside" or projected "otherness" has always already been inside but repressed and unacknowledged. Are we seeing "the return of the repressed" (Freud), or a new space of expression in the simultaneous advance of the multimedia porn market, "sex positive" feminism, and ways of imagining sexuality beyond the received categories? How does cultural theory deal with "the scandal of pleasure" and the multiplicity of sexual and erotic desires and practices? Why is so much public discourse obsessed with the regulation of sexual pleasure? The elephants in the living room (or should we say bedroom?): what everyone knows is there but walks around and tries to avoid acknowledging or talking about.

Readings in Postmodern Sex and Gender Theory

  • Gayle Rubin, "Thinking Sex," originally published in Pleasure and Danger (1984).
  • Eve Sedgwick, "Axiomatic," Chap. 1 of Epistemology of the Closet (1990).
  • Judith Butler, "Against Proper Objects," differences, 6 (1994). On the essentialist and binary debates haunting sex and gender theory.
  • Judith Butler, "Critically Queer," GLQ, 1993. [Important statement of the "performative" theory of gender identity and the social encoding of gender.]
  • Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto": Web version. [An influential view of postmodern sexuality and gender that uses the idea of the cyborg as a fantasy worth embracing for sexuality identity.]
  • Michael Uebel, "Toward a Symptomology of Cyberporn," Theory and Event, 2000. [An article that began in Uebel's course in CCT in 1998. Of course, some of the porn references are outdated.]
  • Daniel Bergner, "Female Desire: What do Women Want.," New York Times Magazine, Jan. 22, 2009.

"Sex-Positive Feminism": a way to expose contradictions and disclose repressions on all sides of the sex and gender debates

Sources

Evading the Panopticon: Other sources and references on the Metapedia site

Student Group Presentation and Wiki Contribution

14 Wiki Projects: Discussion and Presentations []

Final Wiki Project Instructions

Group review of Wiki content and presentation of final Wiki project ideas.

Martin Irvine
irvinem@georgetown.edu
© 2004-2009
All educational uses permitted with attribution and link to this page.