NAME : Mahida Bhumika Prakashbhai
M A Sem - 3
ROLL NUMBER : 4
ENROLLMENT NUMBER :3069206420200021
SUBJECT : Paper 205 cultural studies
ASSIGNMENT TOPIC : Cultural studies and everyday life
Introduction:
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 power associated 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 studies and 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.
Cultural Studies and the
Culture of Everyday Life
By
JOHN FISKE
I want to start this paper from the premise that both academics in cultural and media studies, and left-wing political theorists and activists have found the everyday culture of the people in capitalist societies particularly difficult to study either empirically or theoretically. In this paper I wish, then, to interweave two lines of theoretical inquiry: one into the culture of everyday life within subordinated social formations and the other into our own academic practices involved in such an inquiry. Cultural distance is a multidimensional
concept. In the culture of the socially advantaged and empowered it may take the form of a distance between the art object and reader/spectator: such distance devalues socially
and historically specific reading practices in favor of atranscendent appreciation or
aesthetic sensibility with claims to universality. It encourages reverence or respect for
the text as an art object endowed with authenticity and requiring preservation. "Dis-
tance" may also function to create a difference between the experience of the art work
and everyday life. Such "distance" produces ahistorical meanings of art works and allows
the members of its social formation the pleasures of allying themselves with a set of
humane values that in the extreme versions of aesthetic theory, are argued to be universal values which transcend their historical conditions. This distance from the historical is also a distance from the bodily sensations, for it is our bodies that finally bind us to our historical and social specificities. As the mundanities of our social conditions are set aside,
or distanced, by this view of art, so, too, are the so-called sensuous, cheap, and easy
pleasures of the body distanced from the more comtemplative, aesthetic pleasures of the mind. And finally this distance takes the form of distance from economic necessity: the separation of the aesthetic from the social is a practice of the elite who can afford to ignore the constraints of material necessity, and who thus construct an aesthetic which not only refuses to assign any value at all to material conditions, but validates only those
art forms which transcend them. This critical and aesthetic distance is thus, finally, a
marker of distinction between those able to separate their culture from the social and
economic conditions of the everyday and those who cannot.
There is no "distancing," however, in the culture of everyday life. Both Bakhtin
and Bourdieu show how the culture of the people denies categorical boundaries between art and life: popular art is part of the everyday, not distanced from it. The culture of
everyday life works only to the extent that it is imbricated into its immediate historical
and social setting. This materiality of popular culture is directly related to the economic materiality of the conditions of oppression. Under these conditions, social experience
and, therefore, culture is inescapably material: distantiation is an unattainable luxury. The culture of everyday life is concrete, contextualized, and lived, just as deprivation is
concrete, contextualized, and lived. It is, therefore, a particularly difficult object of
academic investigation.
I wish to turn to Bourdieu's (1977, 1984) theory of the "habitus" as a way to
think through both the material practices of everyday culture and our difficulty in studying them. The concept "habitus" contains the meanings of habitat, habitant, the
processes of habitation and habit, particularly habits of thought. A habitat is a social
environment in which we live: it is a product of both its position in the social space and of the practices of the social beings who inhabit it. The social space is, for Bourdieu, a multidimensional map of the social order in which the main axes are economic capital,
cultural capital, education, class, and historical trajectories; in it, the material, the symbolic, and the historical are not separate categories but interactive lines of force whose
operations structure the macro-social order, the practices of those who inhabit different positions and moments of it, and their cultural tastes, ways of thinking, of "dispositions." The habitus, then, is at one and the same time, a position in the social and a historical trajectory through it: it is the practice of hiring within that position and trajectory, and the social identity, the habits of thoughts, tastes and dispositions that are formed in and by those practices. The position in social space, the practices and the identities are not separate categories in a hierarchical or deterministic relation to each other, but mutually inform each other to the extent that their significance lies in their transgression of the categorical boundaries that produced the words I have to use to explain them and which are therefore perpetuated by that explanation.
But it is a habitus at odds with those through which the various formations of the
people live their everyday lives. An explanation is necessarily of a different ontological
order from that which it explains, but this difference should not be absolute: the gap
should be both crossable and crossed. Bourdieu's theory of the habitus allows the pos-
sibility of such movement-we can, after all, visit and live in habitats other than the one in which we are most at home. But though such tourist excursions can give us some
inside experience they can never provide the same experience ofthese conditions as those
who live or have lived there. Brett Williams (1988) gives a good example of both living
in a mainly black, working class culture, and providing an academic account of it. She
moves between the two habituses in a way I believe to be exemplary. Her study details some of the key features of a habitus whose culture is of the
material density of embodied practices.
The social order constrains and oppresses the people, but at the same time offers
them resources to fight against those constraints. The constraints are, in the first instance, material, economic ones which determine in an oppressive, disempowering way, the limits of the social experience of the poor. Oppression is always economic. Yet the everyday culture of the oppressed takes the signs of that which oppresses them and uses them for its own purposes. The signs of money are taken out of the economic system of the dominant and inserted into the culture of the subaltern and their social force is thus complicated. The plastic flowers are for Leal's newly suburbanized peasants, deeply
contradictory. They have a mystique because of the "mystery" of their production (unlike natural flowers)-they are fetishes, syntheses of symbolic meanings, of modernity: but
they are also commodity fetishes. They require money, another fetish, and transform
that money into an object of cultural display. Real money is not an appropriate decoration
or cultural object, but transformed money is; its transformation occurs not just in its form, coin to plastic flower, but in the social formation, theirs to ours. The commodity fetish is deeply conflicted: it bears the forces of both the power bloc and the people. It produces and reproduces the economic system, yet simultaneously can serve the symbolic interests of those subordinated by it. The plastic flowers, Leal argues, because they cannot
be produced within the domestic space but must be bought, bring with them the "social legitimacy, prestige and power" that, in an urban capitalist society can most readily be gained, in however transformed a manner, from the order of oppression.
as a socially interested agent. It seems to me that
there are so many contradictory forces at work within the multiple elaborations of late
capitalist societies that we have to develop the notion of a social agent who is capable
of negotiating his or her particular trajectory through them. The contradictions in these
forces are so many that we cannot be simply subject to them, for as soon as we become
subject to one set of determination, we meet another set which clash with or deflect
them. Complexly elaborated societies produce social agents, not social subjects. I call
these agents "socially interested" because I believe that under certain conditions, though
maybe not all the time, people can both be aware of their social interests and be capable
of acting to promote them. Again, I don't want this agency to appear like a revised
rationalism, for there is nothing ahistorical about it. It is a situated agency which is
concerned to negotiate those specific conditions with which it is faced and in this
negotiation to use the resources which those historical conditions have made available.
References:
Pain, R. and Smith, S. eds., 2008. Fear: Critical geopolitics and everyday life. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
cultural studies | interdisciplinary field". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 28 June 2017.
Bérubé, Michael (2009), "What's the Matter with Cultural Studies?", The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Hartley, John (2003). A Short History of Cultural Studies. London: Sage.
Gilroy, Grossberg and McRobbie (eds.) (2000). Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall. London: Verso.
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