Lecture 2 - Cultural Studies

• Looks at less complex texts or anything else (art, music, etc.) and how it affects us as a culture

• The most influential theory within cultural studies such as Marxism, culturalism, structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and politics of difference (feminism, race, ethnicity, and postcolonialism)

• Power, race, class, and gender

• Subordination to the rules

  • Rules are necessary (enable us)

• Social and economic theory developed by Karl Marx in the 19th century

• Analyses the impact of the ruling class on the laborers

• Central importance of culture as an organizing force in human affairs

• Individuals are determined by their culture

• Individual is unable to leave their own culture but rather can only realize themselves within it

Interpretation and analysis of aspects of human cognition, behavior, culture, and experience, which focuses on relationships of contrast between elements in a conceptual system

a set of attitudes and a style of critique that developed in critical response to the growth and identification of the logic of structural relations

• Gender relations

• Belief that women should be allowed the same rights, power, and opportunities as men and be treated in the same way

• Race as a social construct

• Study of the effects of colonialism on cultures and societies

• Connection of different theories to power

• Definition of power

• Processes that generate and enable any form of social action, relationship, or order

• Power while certainly constraining is also enabling

• Popular culture is the ground on which this consent is won or lost

• Identity as an important factor

—> Consent is won = we agree to something

—> Consent is lost = we don’t agree to it anymore

• Body presentation (body shape, face, clothes, skin color)

• Educational text, lifestyle text, etc.

• Target/aim (successful businessman vs. everyday girl)

• What draws attention

• Colors of the cover itself (colorful vs less color to make it more serious)

• Who is addressed

• What is problematic

• Why does it appeal to certain kinds of people and why not

• Text and artifacts of any kind never objectively represent an empirical reality

• All representations and their meaning is inherently unstable

• Cultural texts are never neutral (they have different discourses)

• Meaning only exists in relation (symbol itself doesn’t have a meaning)

• The less a representation opposes its own constructedness the more political power it has (when you don’t realize the discourse and you take it for granted)

• Not even a world map can be a neutral representation (can have

  different discourses and is therefore not entirely objective)

• Method of reading a text to figure out where the text contradicts itself (taking the text apart)

• Meaning is not stable

• Language is self-referencing (one doesn’t make sense without the other)

• Language can never represent the reality we just use it as a tool

• Text in a book is just language referring to more language

• When u are analyzing literature your analyzing language