Assignment of Paper No.5

 Assignment of Paper No. 5

Department of English,M. K. Bhavnagar University     

Name :-  Chudasama Nanditaba kishorsinh

Roll No :- 13

Department :-M. A.English department

Submitted to :-  Dr. Prof. Dilip Barad

Semester :-  3

Paper No :-  5.  Cultural Studies 

UNIT - 4 . Limitations of Cultural Studies  

ASSIGNMENT TOPIC -  The Limitations of Cultural Studies 

Limitations of Cultural Studies

Cultural studies is a field of theoretically, politically, and empirically engaged cultural analysis that concentrates upon the political dynamics of contemporary culture, its historical foundations, defining traits, conflicts, and contingencies. Cultural studies researchers generally investigate how cultural practices relate to wider systems of powerassociated with or operating through social phenomena, such as ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation. Cultural studies views cultures not as fixed, bounded, stable, and discrete entities, but rather as constantly interacting and changing sets of practices and processes. The field of cultural studies encompasses a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and practices. Although distinct from the discipline of cultural anthropology and the interdisciplinary field of ethnic studies, cultural studies draws upon and has contributed to each of these fields.

Cultural studies was initially developed by British Marxist academics in the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and has been subsequently taken up and transformed by scholars from many different disciplines around the world. Cultural studies is avowedly and even radically interdisciplinary and can sometimes be seen as antidisciplinary. A key concern for cultural studies practitioners is the examination of the forces within and through which socially organized people conduct and participate in the construction of their everyday lives.

Cultural studies combines a variety of politically engaged critical approaches drawn including semiotics, Marxism, feminist theory, ethnography, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, social theory, political theory, history, philosophy, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, communication studies, political economy, translation studies, museum studiesand art history criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies and historical periods. Cultural studies seeks to understand how meaning is generated, disseminated, contested, bound up with systems of power and control, and produced from the social, political and economic spheres within a particular social formation or conjuncture. Important theories of cultural hegemony and agency have both influenced and been developed by the cultural studies movement, as have many recent major communication theories and agendas, such as those that attempt to explain and analyze the cultural forces related and processes of globalization.

During the rise of neo-liberalism in Britain and the US, cultural studies both became a global movement, and attracted the attention of many conservative opponents both within and beyond universities for a variety of reasons. Some left-wing critics associated particularly with Marxist forms of political economy also attacked cultural studies for allegedly overstating the importance of cultural phenomena. While cultural studies continues to have its detractors, the field has become a kind of a worldwide movement of students and practitioners with a raft of scholarly associations and programs, annual international conferences and publications. Distinct approaches to cultural studies have emerged in different national and regional contexts.

 Introducing Cultural Studies, the following five main characteristics of cultural studies:

• The objective of cultural studies is to understand culture in all its complex forms, and analyzing the social and political context in which culture manifests itself.

• Cultural study is a site of both study analysis and political criticism. For example, not only would a cultural studies scholar study an object, but they may also connect this study to a larger political project.

• Cultural studies attempts to expose and reconcile constructed divisions of knowledge that purport to be grounded in nature.

• Cultural studies has a commitment to an ethical evaluation of modern society.

• One aim of cultural studies could be to examine cultural practices and their relation to power, following critical theory. For example, a study of a subculture such as white working-class youth in London would consider their social practices against those of the dominant culture in this example, the middle and upper classes in London who control the political and financial sectors that create policies affecting the well-being of white working-class youth in London.

• The contributors to The Limits of Culturefind that, contrary to the currently popular view, culture is rarely more important than other factors in shaping the foreign policies of countries in the Caspian region. They find that ruling regimes do not necessarily act according to their own rhetoric. Iran, for example, can conduct policies that contradict the official state ideology without suffering domestic retribution. Also, countries frequently align with one another when they do not share religious beliefs or cultural heritage. For example, Christian Armenia cooperates on trade and security with non-Christian Iran. Cultural identities, the contributors find, are flexible enough to enable states to pursue a wide range of policies that are consistent with their material interests. As the essays in The Limits of Culturemake clear, the emerging foreign policies of the Caspian states present a significant challenge to the culturalist argument.

Arising from the social turmoil of the 1960-s, Cultural Studies is an academic discipline which combines political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, art history criticism etc. to study cultural phenomena in various societies. Cultural Studies researches often focus on how a particular phenomenon relates matters of ideology, nationality, ethnicity, social class and gender.

Discussion on Cultural Studies have gained currency with the publication of Richard Hoggart’s Use of Literacy (1957) and Raymond Williams’Culture and Society(1958), and with the establishment of Birmingham Centre for is Contemporary Cultural Studies in England in 1968.

Since culture is now considered as the source of art and literature, cultural criticism has gained ground, and therefore, Raymond Williams’ term “cultural  materialism”, Stephen Greenblatt’s “cultural poetics” and Bakhtin’s term “cultural prosaic”, have become significant in the field of Cultural Studies and cultural criticism.

The works of Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart with the Birmingham Centre, later expanded through the writings of David Morley, Tony Bennett and others. Cultural Studies is interested in the process by which power relations organize cultural artefacts food habits, music, cinema, sport events etc. It looks at popular culture and everyday life, which had hitherto been dismissed as “inferior” and unworthy of academic study. Cultural Studies’ approaches :

1) transcend the confines of a particular discipline such as literary criticism or history 

2) are politically engaged 

3) reject the distinction between “high” and “low” art or “elite” and “popular” culture 

4) analyse not only the cultural works but also the means of production.

In order to understand the changing political circumstances  of class, politics and culture in the UK, scholars at the  turned to the work of Antonio Gramsci who modified classical Marxism in seeing culture as a key instrument of political and social control. In his view, capitalists are not only brute force (police, prison, military) to maintain control, but also penetrate the everyday culture of working people. Thus the key rubric for Gramsci and for cultural studies is that of cultural hegemony. Edgar and Sedgwick point out that the theory of hegemony was pivotal to the development of British Cultural Studies. It facilitated analysis of the ways in which subaltern groups actively resist and respond to political and economic domination.

The approach of Raymond Williams was clearly marxIst and poststructuralist, and held subject identities and relationships as textual, constructed out of discourse. Cultural Studies believes that we cannot “read” cultural artefacts only within the aesthetic realm, rather they must be studied within the social and material perspectives; i.e., a novel must be read not only within the generic conventions and history of the novel, but also in terms of the publishing industry and its profit, its reviewers, its academic field of criticism, the politics of awards and the hype of publicity machinery that sells the book. Cultural Studies regards the cultural artefact like the tricolour or Gandhi Jayanti as a political sign, that is part of the “discourse” of India, as reinforcing certain ideological values, and concealing oppressive conditions of patriarchal ideas of the nation, nationalism and national identity.

In Cultural Studies, representation is a key concept and denotes a language in which all objects and relationships get defined, a language related to issues of class, power and ideology, and situated within the context of “discourse”. The cultural practice of giving dolls to girls can be read within the patriarchal discourse of femininity that girls are weaker and delicate and need to be given soft things, and that grooming, care etc. are feminine duties which dolls will help them learn. This discourse of femininity is itself related to the discourse of masculinity and the larger context of power relations in culture. Identity, for Culture Studies, is constituted through experience, which involves representation the consumption of signs, the making of meaning from signs and the knowledge of meaning.

Cultural Studies views everyday life as fragmented, multiple, where meanings are hybridized and contested; i.e., identities that were more or less homogeneous in terms of ethnicities and patterns of consumption, are now completely hybrid, especially in the metropolis. With the globalization of urban spaces, local cultures are linked to global economies, markets and needs, and hence any study of contemporary culture has to examine the role of a non-local market money which requires a postcolonial awareness of the exploitative relationship between the First World and the Third World even today.

Cultural Studies is interested in lifestyle because lifestyle 

1) is about everyday life 

2) defines identity 

3) influences social relations 

4) bestows meaning and value to artefacts in a culture.

 In India, after economic liberalization, consumption has been seen as a marker of identity. Commodities are signs of identity and lifestyle and consumption begins before the actual act of shopping; it begins with the consumption of the signs of the commodity.

Thank you...