Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: narr Studienbücher LITERATUR- UND KULTURWISSENSCHAFT
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Today, virtually all BA programs in English at German universities place a strong focus on Cultural Studies. However, textbooks that introduce first-year students to the subject are rare, and the few existing ones are too complicated or not comprehensive enough. By contrast, this textbook introduces the key theories and concepts of Cultural Studies systematically and thoroughly. It puts particular emphasis on their application, aiming to enable students to do their own analyses of cultural artefacts and practices. The author draws on many examples, mostly taken from American culture, but in each chapter, he applies the ideas introduced to The Hunger Games franchise and the coronavirus pandemic to show how different theories can lead to very different interpretations of the same phenomenon. Each chapter ends with exercises that allow students to apply what they have learned.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 582
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
Michael Butter
From Panem to the Pandemic: An Introduction to Cultural Studies
© 2023 • Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KGDischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen
Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetztes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen.
Alle Informationen in diesem Buch wurden mit großer Sorgfalt erstellt. Fehler können dennoch nicht völlig ausgeschlossen werden. Weder Verlag noch Autor:innen oder Herausgeber:innen übernehmen deshalb eine Gewährleistung für die Korrektheit des Inhaltes und haften nicht für fehlerhafte Angaben und deren Folgen. Diese Publikation enthält gegebenenfalls Links zu externen Inhalten Dritter, auf die weder Verlag noch Autor:innen oder Herausgeber:innen Einfluss haben. Für die Inhalte der verlinkten Seiten sind stets die jeweiligen Anbieter oder Betreibenden der Seiten verantwortlich.
Internet: www.narr.deeMail: [email protected]
ISSN 2627-0323
ISBN 978-3-8233-8444-1 (Print)
ISBN 978-3-8233-0496-8 (ePub)
Inhalt
Acknowledgements
This book has been far too long in the making. It was supposed to be done years ago, but life in general and the pandemic in particular interfered several times. Now that it is finally done, it is a great pleasure to thank all the people who have contributed to its successful completion. At Narr, Corina Popp and Kathrin Heyng have been very supportive and more than understanding whenever I told them I would miss yet another deadline. Marina Pingler, Mara Precoma, Janine Schwarz, and Annika Thiem have read parts of the book and provided very helpful feedback. Even more importantly, they have collaborated with me over the past years in teaching the “Introduction to Cultural Studies” module and thus significantly shaped the content of this book before I finally started to write it. They have also provided input for the study questions at the end of each chapter. I am also grateful to my friend Birte Christ for her feedback and encouragement. Alexandra Dempe has meticulously proof-read each chapter. She has provided helpful feedback on the content, checked all quotations and references, and compiled the bibliography. All remaining errors are of course mine. Thanks are also due to Julius Haferkorn for formatting the images reproduced in the book and helping me film the videos in which I provide answers to the study questions at the end of each chapter. Finally, I would like to thank the students who have taken my lectures over the years and who asked many questions and brought up numerous examples of their own. They have thus had considerable impact on the form and content of this book.
1Introduction
This book has grown in equal parts out of fascination and frustration. It is the result of fascination because “The Introduction to Cultural Studies,” a central part of the English curriculum at German universities, is one of my favorite classes to teach. It is fun because of the sheer range of material one can cover in a single session: from ShakespeareShakespeare, William to Shakira, from conspiracy theoriesconspiracy theory to haute couture, and from shopping habits to the ways in which people use their smartphones on the subway. In fact, it was the possibility to go beyond literature, to study film and popular culture that lured me away from German and into English and American Studies when I was a student. Even more importantly, as I explain in more detail below, more than any other class I have ever taught, “The Introduction to Cultural Studies” has the potential to change students’ lives and help them see the world differently.
However, this book is also the result of frustration. As I quickly learned when I first taught the class, there is no good comprehensive textbook that introduces beginning students to the relevant conceptsconcepts and ideas. Don’t get me wrong. There are quite a few very good introductions to different aspects of Cultural Studies, for example, to visual culture, material culture, or questions of gender, race, or class. (If you have no idea what some or any of these things are, don’t worry. It’s exactly the goal of this book to introduce you to them thoroughly and in a good order.) But books designed to introduce Bachelor students to Cultural Studies as a whole don’t do that very well. They either assume that you already know things that most of you don’t know when you enroll in an introductory class, or they are not systematic enough. Others leave out some important concepts but go into too much detail with regard to others. And most of them are written in a style that is way too complicated for beginning students. Moreover, most existing introductions are not very good when it comes to teaching you how to apply these concepts in your own analyses.
For me, however, this is the most important task of such an introduction. It is not enough to understand the conceptsconcepts that are important in Cultural Studies. You also need to be able to work with them. It is not very likely that you will be called upon to explain how race and class are related in an abstract fashion in a seminar in a few semesters’ time. It is far more likely that your task will be to analyze how they are related in a specific text, case study, or cultural practice. Knowing which concepts to apply to a “text” (I explain in chapter 1 why I put this word in quotation marks here) or practice and how to apply them, then, is what you need to learn in order to do well in your studies.
As you probably know already, learning – and especially learning how to do something – requires active engagement and exercising. Just listening to a lecture or reading a book won’t do. When I teach “The Introduction to Cultural Studies” at my home university, my lecture is accompanied by tutorials. The tutorials are led by advanced students and provide a space for beginning students to discuss what they have learned in the lecture and to practice its application. I also interrupt my lectures roughly every twenty minutes to allow students to ask questions or do small tasks. For example, I ask them to work with their neighbor or in small groups and apply a concept I have just introduced to an image, a short text, or a movie clip.
Obviously, it is impossible to include such interactive elements in a book. But there are questions for self-study for you at the end of each chapter, and I hope you will make use of them. Sometimes these are very open questions or questions that ask you to draw on your personal experience. In these cases, it’s obviously impossible for me to provide a model answer. But other questions are more specific, asking you, for example, to interpret a song or think about a specific phenomenon. In these cases, I have model answer ready. For each of these questions, I have recorded a short video that you find on the publisher’s YouTube channel (@narrfranckeattemptoverlag228). In fact, there is a playlist for this book. In an ideal world, you would read a chapter, take a shot at answering the questions and only then check out the answers. I am not sure, though, that we are living in an ideal world.
While the interactivity this book can provide is limited by factors beyond my control, I have intentionally set limits to what I am covering in it. If you are already an advanced student who is using this book to refresh your memory of certain things or to revise for an exam, you will most likely shake your head repeatedly because you feel that I have left out too many important conceptsconcepts or that I have simplified others too much. This will be even more true if you are an instructor who is considering this book for a class of yours. Believe me – I am very much aware of the many important concepts, theories, and terms that I have omitted. And sometimes the decision what would make the cut and what wouldn’t was pretty hard. But this book is an introduction to Cultural Studies, and I wanted to take the idea of the introduction seriously. Not everything can and should be taught in an introduction. What this book teaches you is the tip of the iceberg, and many things will remain hidden under the surface of the water. If this sounds a bit ominous, let’s use another image. Think of this introduction as the foundation on which you will build in the future, in particular in the classes you will take in the next semesters. (And maybe, if you are an instructor, this book will help you to cover more than before because you can build on it in your lecture or seminar.)
Accordingly, the theories, conceptsconcepts, and terms that I introduce in this book are the ones that I consider absolutely essential for Cultural Studies. Obviously, opinions can differ with regard to what is essential and what isn’t. This is why the subtitle of this book is “An Introduction to Cultural Studies.” I have chosen the indefinite article intentionally because this book is merely one possible way to introduce you to the topic. In order to do so, I draw on many different examples – mostly, but not exclusively from American culture –, but there are two examples to which I return again and again: The Hunger GamesHunger Games, The novels (2008-10) and the films (2012-15) based on them, and the Coronavirus pandemiccoronavirus pandemic. This is why the title of the book is “From Panem to the Pandemic.” Panem is the fictional country where the story of The Hunger GamesHunger Games, The series is set. The Hunger GamesHunger Games, The have been my prime example ever since I first taught this class more than a decade ago. Many students already know the novels or at least the films before they enroll in my class, and those who don’t usually enjoy reading and watching them. The novels and the films are also quite complex and contradictory and thus can be meaningfully analyzed with many different concepts and theories. (Throughout this book, I will assume that you know the first film. If you don’t know it yet, please watch it.) The last two times I taught the class I used the coronavirus pandemiccoronavirus pandemic as my other major example. Not only because it affected all our lives so much or because it delayed the writing of this book considerably, but mostly because it allows me to demonstrate how the insights of Cultural Studies enable us to make sense not only of fictional stories but of real-life events.
Modelled on a one-semester lecture course, this book contains twelve chapters, including the introduction and the conclusion. Chapters 2 to 8 discuss the different elements of the “circuit of culturecircuit of culture,” an excellent model to understand culture that Paul du Gay and his co-authors introduced in their book Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. (This is the book I have been using mostly in my classes, but, as it was published in 1997, it is by now outdated. It also does not explain all conceptsconcepts equally well and doesn’t do an ideal job when it comes to teaching students how to apply the concepts.) These chapters introduce the basic concepts of Cultural Studies – representation, identity, productionproduction, consumptionconsumption, and regulation –, which du Gay and his colleagues think of as forming a circuit to capture how the elements all influence each other (more on models in general below). Chapters 9 to 11 put spotlights on specific aspects of culture, for example, space or memory but also visual or popular culture. They discuss how the concepts introduced in the first part help us make sense of these specific aspects and introduce additional concepts that have been specifically developed for understanding them. Chapter 12 concludes our journey with a short reflection on the politics of Cultural Studies.
In this introductory chapter I address a few central questions to get us started. I begin with the key question: What is culture? Cultural Studies is, obviously, all about culture, and therefore we need to be quite clear what we are talking about. The following section then asks that question that follows logically: What is Cultural Studies? I provide a definition and discuss why Cultural Studies should in theory be interested in all aspects of culture alike but, in reality, isn’t. Afterwards I ask: How can we do Cultural Studies? I explain why we need theories, conceptsconcepts, and models to do Cultural Studies and introduce the model of “the circuit of culturecircuit of culture.” In closing I address what I call the promises and pitfalls of Cultural Studies – why learning its basic concepts can be particularly rewarding for you but also quite challenging.
What is culture?
There is a very short and straightforward answer to this question: Culture is everything that humans do and produce. This culturebroad definition broad definition of culture broad definitionculturebroad definition can be derived from the original meaning of the English word “culture.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, which is the best source for researching how the meanings of words have changed over time, “culture” originally meant “[t]he action or practice of cultivating the soil.” In the 15th century, therefore, when the word was first used, “culture” meant what the word “agriculture” means today. Culture, then, are the changes that humans impose on the natural world. In other words, culture is everything that nature is not; it is the opposite of nature.
Nature and culture thus form what Cultural Studies scholars call a binary oppositions binary opposition binary oppositionsbinarybinary oppositions oppositionbinary oppositions. Binary oppositions are an important way of organizing our experiences and structuring the world, and you will encounter many of them in this book. However, binarybinary oppositions oppositions can also be a bit misleading. When we use them, we suggest that two entities (nature and culturenature and culture, but also, for example, public and private, or masculine and feminine) are really entirely different from each other and that our language simply reflects this divide. In reality, however, by using different terms like “nature and culture,” “private and public,” or “masculine and feminine” we create this divide. We put things that cannot always be that easily separated into neat little boxes. In other words, we construct the distinctions, and our language only makes it appear as if they existed all along.
If you think about it for a moment, it is rather obvious that nature and culture nature and culture nature and culture cannot be that easily separated from each other. After all, human beings are part of nature as well. We breathe air, eat, sleep, urinate, defecate, and procreate – like all other animals. Everything that we do and produce is therefore, from a certain perspective, part of nature as well. And in fact, as Bruno LatourLatour, Bruno, a historian of science, has shown (1993), the binarybinary oppositions oppositionbinary oppositions of nature and culture, the clear divide between the two, is a relatively new invention and only a few centuries old. It is one of the most important characteristics of what historians and sociologists call modernity. According to LatourLatour, Bruno, before the beginning of the modern age around 1500, humans did not think of themselves as separated from nature. And we could add that this distinction only emerged in what we call the western world.
narrow definition of culture Maybe, then, if the opposition to nature is not as watertight as it may appear at first, it is not a good idea after all to define “cultureculture” in such a broad way. And maybe you felt uncomfortable with this broad definitionculturebroad definition anyway. Because if everything that humans do and produce is culture, then everything is – on some level at least – equally valuable. And this might feel wrong to you. Surely, you might say, there must be distinctions between the very different things that humans do and produce, and maybe we should reserve the term “culture” for those things that possess a certain quality. This culturenarrow definition narrow definitionculturenarrow definition of culture is younger than the broad one we have used so far. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that it first appeared in the late 17th century and describes it as follows: “Refinement of mind, taste, and manners; artistic and intellectual development. Hence: the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.” The narrow definitionculturenarrow definition of culture is one that you are probably familiar with from school or from the arts (or culture) section of newspapers or magazines. According to this definition, only human products and actions that meet a certain standard are part of culture.
In its most extreme form, this narrow definitionculturenarrow definition was propagated by the poet Arnold, Matthew Matthew Arnold Matthew Arnold. Arnold lived in 19th-century England and belonged to what literary historians call the Victorian Age. Besides poetry, he also wrote many works of literary and cultural criticism. In the preface to his most important work Culture and Anarchy (1869), he famously defined culture as “the best which has been thought and said in the world” (5). For Arnold, then, not even every poem or work of philosophy deserves the label “culture.” Only the best poems and works of philosophy do. He would have strongly objected to the idea that everything that humans do – including playing rugby in the mud or the fiddle in a pub – is culture if this idea had ever occurred to him, which I doubt.
Matthew ArnoldArnold, Matthew’s position is extreme, and you would be hard pressed to find somebody supporting it today. But in milder versions it is still around, and until recently it was even fairly widespread. There are still people who think that only those human ideas and products that meet a certain quality standard are worth engaging with and studying. However, unlike Arnold these people usually do not deny that ideas and products that do not meet the standard are cultureculture. In order to distinguish them from what they think is worthy of their attention, they either distinguish between “Culture” with a capital C, that is, the ideas and products that meet the standard, and “culture” with a small c, that is, the ideas and products that don’t. Or they use qualifiers to indicate what is worthy of consideration and what isn’t. The ideas and products deemed worthy are then referred to as high culture high culturehigh culture. Those that are deemed unworthy are correspondingly labeled mass culture, or popular culture.
I will have much more to say about such attempts to map cultural field the cultural field the cultural field in chapter 11 where I discuss different definitions of popular culture. What is important right now is that it is not that simple to distinguish between high and popular culture, between that which some people deem worthy studying and that which they think should better be ignored. Take ShakespeareShakespeare, William, for example. For a long time, his plays and poems have been the epitome of high culturehigh culture. Quoting lines from his works – think of Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy – has for a long time been a way to show off how cultured one is. But initially his plays and poems were part of the everyday culture of his time, and performances of his plays were attended by people from all classes and ways of life. In the Globe Theatre in London, where many of ShakespeareShakespeare, William’s plays were first performed, you did not even have to pay for a seat but could buy a cheaper ticket to stand next to the stage. It was only in later centuries that his works were put on the pedestal on which many people still see them today. Similarly, TV shows were for a long time seen as a cheap form of popular entertainment. In recent years, however, they have been much celebrated for their complexity and increasingly considered high culture worthy of being reviewed in serious magazines and newspapers.
culturebroad definitionEven more than the distinction between nature and culturenature and culture, then, the distinction between high culture and popular culture distinction between high culturehigh culture and popular culture or mass culture is problematic. As we will see in much more detail in chapter 12, there is nothing in a ShakespeareShakespeare, William play itself that makes it better than a song by Shakira, just as opera is in itself not more valuable than country music. The criteria that people use to determine what they value highly and what they don’t are arbitrary, and they change over time. Moreover, what people value highly and what they deride is closely tied to the social classclass they belong to. As the French sociologist Pierre BourdieuBourdieu, Pierre, whose work I also discuss in detail in another chapter, has shown, tastetaste is a very problematic category. Claiming that the cultural products one likes are superior to others usually serves the function of elevating the group one belongs to over others.
Attempts to distinguish between “good” and “bad” cultureculture, then, are problematic, and scholars of Cultural Studies should not use such distinctions to determine the object of their studies. (Instead, like BourdieuBourdieu, Pierre, they should and indeed often do investigate why people make such distinctions in the first place and what we can learn from that about their identities.) The only useful and reasonable answer to the question “What is culture?” therefore is indeed the one I already gave above: Culture is everything we do and produce Culture is everything that humans do and produce; it’s the opposite of nature. (Let’s not be deterred by the fact that the binarybinary oppositions oppositionbinary oppositions of nature and culturenature and culture does not quite hold. Such binarybinary oppositions oppositions never do, but they are nevertheless necessary and helpful.) In the memorable phrase of Raymond WilliamsWilliams, Raymond, one of the founding fathers of Cultural Studies, “culture is a whole way of life” (93). Accordingly, Cultural Studies is interested in everything that humans do and produce. What a specific analysis focuses on is not determined by the alleged value of the practice or artifact that is studied but by the question a researcher is interested in at that moment.
In the previous paragraph I did something that a good scholar shouldn’t do. I cut off the quote by Raymond WilliamsWilliams, Raymond mid-sentence. When he writes that culture means “a whole way of life,” he adds, in order to explain this, “the common meanings” (93). What he means by “common” is, as we just established, that cultureculture is ordinary, that it exists not only in the seemingly detached realm of the arts but that it is everywhere and everything. What he means by “meanings” is that everything that humans do and produce means something. It indicates who we are, what we think, what we believe, and what we value. culture is about shared meanings Here it is important to remember that “common” means not only “ordinary,” but also “shared.” If we understand Williams’s phrase in this way, culture is not only about the meanings of ordinary things but also about shared meaningscultureas shared meanings. And, in fact, this is exactly how Stuart HallHall, Stuart, another important figure in Cultural Studies, defines culture in his book Representation (1997, 2013), on which I will draw heavily in the next chapter. In the introduction to the book HallHall, Stuart writes: “To put it simply, culture is about ‘shared meanings’” (1). What he means by that is that being part of a culture means to understand the meanings of what people do and produce.
Since meanings are predominantly shared by way of language language, to be part of a culture means to speak a specific language. You belong to a culture or understand it really well if you know its language, codesignss, and rituals. This is particularly obvious with what we sometimes refer to as foreign cultures, which often appear quite alien to us, but it is also true much closer to home. I lived in England for a year as an undergraduate, and although I already spoke English fairly well at the time and felt that I understood English culture, I never really mastered the rules of cricket. But many people in India, Pakistan, and other parts of the world do. They speak the language of cricket and can thus be said to belong – together with many but by no means all of the people in Britain – to an international culture of cricket. Or think about youth culture and the specific language that teenagers use to set themselves apart from children and adults alike. Depending on how old you are, you might still be part of it, but in a few years, you won’t understand it anymore unless you make a conscious effort, as the language of this culture is constantly changing to maintain the distinctions towards those considered too young and too old.
culture academic culture But if you are newly enrolled at a university, you are right now being introduced to a new culture: academic culture. If these are your first weeks at university, you are in the middle of learning its codessigns and conventions. If you are studying at a German university, you have probably already figured out that a class announced for 2pm only starts at 2.15pm, and that you are not supposed to clap at the end of a lecture but to knock on the desk with your knuckles. But you may not have been to an office hour yet and once you go to one for the first time, you might feel a bit lost because you might not be sure about the dos and don’ts. You have begun to learn the language of this particular culture, but you haven’t really mastered it yet.
The previous paragraphs show that we can and indeed have to distinguish between different cultures after all. However, not in the evaluative and hierarchical way in which people have tried – in vain – to separate high culturehigh culture from low culture or elite culture from popular culture. But in an entirely descriptive and non-evaluative way. There are many cultures, because people do many things very differently and many things mean different things to different people, depending on where they live, how old they are, how much money they have, which ethnicity and gender they belong to, and a whole lot of other factors. Cultures can be specific to certain regions, countries, groups, or religions. We can speak, for example, of German culture, western culture, Asian culture, working-class culture, Islamic culture, fan culture, football culture, and so on. At the end of the day, it only makes sense to speak of cultures in the plural cultures in the plural. There are always many cultures.
What is Cultural Studies?
The task for scholars of Cultural StudiesCultural Studies, then, is clear. In order to the study of shared meanings understand a specific culture or a part of it, we need to understand what things mean in this culture, and how and why they come to mean what they mean. The best way to do this is to study how these meanings are shared (and, in fact, as we will see in the next chapter, produced). This is why Cultural Studies is so interested in representations: in texts and images of all kinds. And as my comments about youth culture and other cultures stress (and as you knew already anyway), culture and identity are closely connected. Studying the meanings of what people do and produce also helps us understand who they are, and this is another big interest of Cultural Studies. We can therefore define Cultural StudiesCultural Studies as the scholarly exploration of the shared meaningscultureas shared meanings of a specific culture or a part of that culture.
Since everything humans do, from writing modernist poetry to defecating, is part of culture, truly everything can be the subject everything can be the subject of a Cultural Studies analysis. In theory, nothing is beyond or beneath it. In reality, however, Cultural Studies is not equally concerned with every aspect of culture. It does not favor high culturehigh culture over popular culture, but it has its own biases and exclusions. It is, for example, more interested in TV shows than in Dan Brown novels. To understand why scholars in this field prefer some topics over others, we have to understand how Cultural Studies became part of university curricula and what kind of scholars usually do Cultural Studies.
At the University of Tübingen where I teach, students in the B.A. programs offered by the English Department take classes in four different areas: Academic English, that is language classes; Literary StudiesLiterary Studies; Linguistics; and Cultural Studies. Other departments in Germany might use slightly different labels, but their curriculum is usually very similar. However, it wasn’t always like this. When I studied English in the late 1990s, we did not have classes in Cultural Studies. Instead, we had what was called Landeskunde LandeskundeLandeskunde, which could be translated as “country studies.” Landeskunde was meant to provide future teachers of English with the necessary knowledge about Great Britain, the U.S., and increasingly also the rest of the English-speaking world. Students were expected to learn about the political systems of these countries (Who elects the British prime minister and who the American president?), as well as about culture (What is cricket, what is American Football?), history (What happened in 1066, what was the Boston Tea Party?), and media (What is the BBC, how is it financed, and how does it differ from PBS in the United States?).
Landeskunde replaced by Cultural Studies Landeskunde, at least as I experienced it, was focused on facts and not on the interpretation of phenomena and practices. It was usually taught by language instructors. But ten years later, Landeskunde had almost completely disappeared from English degree programs and been replaced by Cultural Studies. To cut a long story short, there are two interrelated reasons for this major overhaul of the curriculum. First of all, there was the insight that the phenomena traditionally covered by Landeskunde could and better should be studied with less focus on the facts and more on interpretation, on their meanings and what one could learn from them about British, American, and other English-speaking cultures. Another factor was the growing awareness that not only novels, plays, and poems could be interpreted but films, photographs, and TV shows as well, and that the same was true for everyday and other practices. And Cultural StudiesCultural Studies became the place to do this. This is why by now almost every B.A. program in English at German universities features an introduction to Cultural Studies in one form or another, and usually additional classes that build on it. And this is also why it is best to consider Cultural Studies a field – and not a discipline like English or Sociology.
In Germany, as we just established, Cultural Studies is predominantly a field of study within English Departments. By contrast, in the United Kingdom, where Cultural Studies emerged earlier as a distinct field, specific departments were dedicated to it. The most famous of these was the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, which was founded in 1964 already. In both countries, however, Cultural Studies exists in close vicinity Literary Studies to Literary StudiesLiterary Studies. In Germany, they are part of the same department, and many instructors teach both Literary and Cultural Studies. In the United Kingdom, they are – or used to be, as many Cultural Studies departments and centers have been closed in recent years – situated in the neighboring departments, and many instructors were affiliated with both.
In theory, of course, Literary StudiesLiterary Studies could and maybe even should be a part of Cultural Studies. After all, literature as part of culture literature is a part of culture. But the design of academic departments and curricula is never an entirely logical matter. It is always also about protecting existing jobs, and since Literary Studies was there first, Cultural Studies swallowing it up completely was out of the question (although some scholars of literature worried that it might happen). Thus, Literary Studies and Cultural Studies have co-existed on often friendly, but sometimes on less friendly terms for the past decades, with each claiming a specific territory of their own. Put simply, Literary Studies, as its name implies, is concerned with literature in the narrow sense, with novels, short stories, poems, and plays. Cultural Studies does the rest. It is concerned with different media such as television, film, or photography, with non-fictional texts, and the practices of everyday life.
If you are already a more advanced student, you are maybe shaking your head right now because you may have never experienced the separation between Literary and Cultural Studies Literary and Cultural StudiesCultural Studies as that strict. And you are of course right. Many of your instructors do research in both fields and would be hard-pressed if they had to decide for one. At German universities, the separation is often to a large degree a bureaucratic one. Classes that deal only with literature serve the modules in Literary Studies; classes that deal with film, photography, or social movements serve the modules in Cultural Studies; and classes that deal with literature and other media serve the modules in both fields. Usually, if a student wants to get credit for a Literary Studies module, their term paper needs to focus on literature; if they want credit for a Cultural Studies module, their term paper needs to focus on a different mediumrepresentationmedium.
Importantly, as porous and artificial as the border between Literary Studies and Cultural Studies might be, it nevertheless exists. And its existence explains why Cultural Studies scholars hardly ever work on literature. They simply leave it to their colleagues in Literary Studies. This is fine as long as it is canonical literature, on which Literary Studies still focuses despite several waves of canon revisions in the last decades. But it constitutes a problem when it comes to popular fiction popular fiction: thrillers like the ones by Dan Brown, or romances like the Twilight Saga (2005-20). They have of course received some scholarly attention but not nearly as much as their popularity and thus impact would warrant. And popular fiction that is less successful often still flies completely under the radar of academia. Literary Studies scholars ignore it because it is not part of the canon. Cultural Studies scholars ignore it because it is literature, and what often drew them to Cultural Studies – I am no exception in that regard – was the promise to work on media other than literature.
But popular fiction is by no means the only topic that Cultural Studies tends to neglect. There is also quite a strong presentist bias a strong presentist bias in the field, meaning that most of the work done deals with contemporary culture. The center at the University of Birmingham where British Cultural Studies originated, was not accidentally called Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, and until today older phenomena are often left to the closely related field of Cultural History. Once again, the main reason for this exclusion seems to be that most Cultural StudiesCultural Studies scholars enjoy contemporary culture more than older variants. To be sure, scholars in all fields and disciplines have the tendency to focus on what they enjoy or even love, but this tendency appears to be particularly pronounced in Cultural Studies. My colleague Russell West-Pavlov once described Cultural Studies scholars in a lecture as middle-class, leftist, snobbish, and driven by a desire to be young. This is certainly a caricature, but it explains why Cultural Studies has focused heavily on rock and pop music and youth culture and rather neglected topics such as gardening, religion, and – in the past – even sports, even though they are central parts of many peoples’ identities.
In recent years this has changed to a certain degree, and some scholars have written on topics that they see critically. This is a positive development because it expands the range of cultural phenomena that get analyzed. And Cultural Studies should be all about understanding people and phenomena, however strange and even repulsive they may appear to us at first sight. Of course, it is impossible to leave our emotions completely out of the picture. How we feel about a topic will always have an impact on how we analyze and thus understand it. And so will our own positionality our own positionality. I am a cis, heterosexual, able-bodied, White, upper-middle class man, and this does of course influence my understanding of things. But even if complete neutrality is neither possible nor desirable, we should nevertheless strive to be as balanced and nuanced as possible in the scholarly work we do. What we work on should be determined by the relevance of the phenomenon, not by our opinion of it; and our feelings should not be a shortcut to our eventual evaluation. This is what the best work in Cultural Studies does; this is what I have tried to do in this book; this is what I would like you to learn.
How do we do Cultural Studies?
Learning to do Cultural StudiesCultural Studies is like learning a new language. You may be familiar with some of its vocabulary already, as terms like narrative, identity, or gender are also part of everyday language by now, but I assume that you are not yet familiar with the scholarly meaning of these and other terms and thus also not with the conceptsconcepts they designate. As I said before, what I have always found problematic about other introductions is that they throw you into the cold water. From page one onward, they tend to assume a familiarity with certain concepts that beginning students usually don’t have and that makes it hard, if not impossible for them to follow the argument that is being made. I will not do this in this book. I will assume that you only know about Cultural Studies what I have said so far, and I will assume that you are not familiar with any of the concepts that I discuss. Therefore, I will properly define every concept when I introduce it. These introductions happen in the chapters that follow. What I want to do here is to lay the foundation for the introduction of these concepts concepts. And these foundations are the same as in any other field in the humanities.
Unlike the natural sciences, scholars in the humanities, including Cultural StudiesCultural Studies scholars, do not weigh, count, or measure things. They interpret phenomena of all kinds, seeking to understand them. And as you no doubt remember from school, an interpretation is much more than a set of numbers or any other kind of data. It is more complex, and also less exact. It is therefore more difficult for others to check if a specific interpretation is sound, if it is, in other words, a good interpretation. They can’t run the same test again and see if the resulting numbers match. (In reality, the natural sciences are also less exact and objective than some of their proponents still think. After all, the data that tests and experiments generate also need to be interpreted. They do not speak for themselves. But that’s a different story that does not need to concern us here.) The most important criterion to determine the quality of an interpretation in the humanities is therefore intersubjective understandability intersubjective understandability (Schneider 7). Intersubjective understandability means that others need to be able to trace the different steps that we have taken in an interpretation to evaluate if these steps make sense and are free of contradictions. They also need to know which assumptions – for example, about how films affect their audiences, or how memory works – have guided our interpretations. This is why we need theories, methodsmethods, and modelsmodels.
theories Theoriestheories create clarity and facilitate meaningful exchange. They have a specific topic or area that they cover – for example, what representation is and does, the topic of the next chapter. They provide clear definitions of a number of conceptsconcepts – in this case, for example, mental representation, linguistic representation, or code. They spell out how these different concepts are related to each other in a systematic and unambiguous manner – stating, for example, that the code ties a mental representation to a linguistic one. They provide us with a coherent language to talk about and understand different phenomena, for example, representation. Theories thus not only enable us to approach and understand different phenomena in a scholarly fashion; they also allow us to make our assumptions explicit and to share them with others, permitting them to understand how we approached the phenomenon.
I cannot stress enough that there is no analysis without a theory no interpretation or analysis that is not informed by a theory. There may still be some scholars who claim that they do not need theories, that theories are restricting, and that they approach the phenomena they are interested in neutrally without any assumptions. But that is impossible. As literary theorist Terry Eagleton famously put it many years ago, “Hostility to theory usually means an opposition to other people’s theories and an oblivion of one’s own” (xiv). Being aware that one is drawing on a specific theory to understand a phenomenon and being explicit about this, is a strength, not a weakness. It is an important step to achieve the intersubjective understandability we are striving for.
There are of course theoriestheories that differ from each other because they address different phenomena, for example, popular culture and material culture. But there are also theories that are interested in the same phenomenon but make very different assumptions and therefore arrive at very different conclusions. In chapter 8, for example, I will discuss two theories of consumption. One claims that consumers are passive, that they simply accept the goods and meanings offered to them. The other claims that consumers are active, that they change the goods and meanings offered to them. Such disagreement is a strength, not a weakness. It is good that there are competing theories competing theories about the same phenomena, even though I will explain in that chapter why I think one of the theories is better than the other. But because there are competing theories, it’s even more important to be explicit about which theory one is drawing on in a particular analysis. And the existence of competing theories also shows that theories are both enabling and restricting at the same time. They make us see certain things, but also make us miss others. They are like glasses that bring certain things into focus but keep others out of it.
As I already said in the previous section, Cultural Studies is not like English, Sociology, or Anthropology. It’s not a real discipline and usually not located in departments of its own. It makes more sense to think of it as Cultural Studies as a specific field of study a specific field of studyCultural Studiesas a specific field of study that is practiced within other departments or interdepartmental centers where scholars that share an interest in cultural phenomena come together. Or, as in the case of degree programs in English at German universities, it is even only a part of the curriculum. One consequence of this is that there are hardly any theoriestheories that are specific to Cultural Studies, as there are theories that we can label sociological or philosophical. Instead, Cultural StudiesCultural Studies borrows from a large number of disciplines, for example, Anthropology, Film Studies, Linguistics, Literary Studies, Media Studies, Sociology, and many more. The theories that Cultural Studies scholars use function like a lingua franca. They allow scholars originally from different disciplines to talk to each other, and to scholars from those disciplines from which the theories have been poached.
But theories are and need to be abstract. In order to apply them to cultural phenomena, we need more. We need methods methodsmethods. Methods translate theories into specific approaches that we can take to study the phenomena we are interested in. It will come as no surprise at this point that Cultural StudiesCultural Studies is, as with the theoriestheories it draws on, quite syncretistic when it comes to methods, and that it mostly draws on methodsmethods from the disciplines that it also borrows its theories from. Cultural Studies scholars that are interested in everyday practices, for example, often use the anthropological method of participant observation to immerse themselves into and thus to understand the culture they are studying. If they are interested in how ordinary people make sense of certain phenomena, they might use a sociological method and conduct interviews with them. If they are interested in how a specific issue is represented throughout a broad number of news reports they might employ a method that is called discourse analysis and that has its roots in Linguistics, Political Science, and – in a version I discuss in chapter 3 – in History. If they want to find out how a specific film, song, or photograph works, they could do a close reading and thus use a method originally from Literary Studies. Since my origins are in Literary Studies and since my major examples in this book are The Hunger GamesHunger Games, The and the pandemiccoronavirus pandemic, I will draw on this method more frequently than on others.
However, the model that structures this book is a genuinelytheories Cultural Studies one. Models Modelsmodels are visual representations of specific theories or methods. They focus on specific aspects of a theory or method and highlight them, while leaving out others. The model that I find most helpful for learning what Cultural Studies is was developed by Paul du Gay and his colleagues in their study of the Walkman, which I already mentioned earlier. It’s called “the circuit of culturecircuit of culture,” and this is what it looks like:
Fig. 1: The Circuit of Culture
The model of circuit of culture the circuit of culture the circuit of culture highlights that cultural phenomena are complex.Cultural Studies In order to understand them, we need to consider different elements – labelled representation, identity, productionproduction, consumption, and regulationregulation – and the ways in which they influence each other. (Never mind what these conceptsconcepts mean exactly, we will get to this in due course. For the moment, your everyday understanding of them suffices completely.) The model understands cultural processes as embedded into the logic of capitalism since production and consumptionconsumption are concepts from economy (although they mean more than that in the model and I will use them accordingly). But the model also rejects any straightforward economic reductionism, that is, it does not say that the economy determines everything else, while nevertheless acknowledging its importance. In other words, production has an influence on representation, but does not determine it. It is just one of several factors that need to be considered. As the multiple arrows make clear, the model understands culture as a complex, multi-faceted process, as dynamic and not at all static. It also holds that we can only properly understand specific representations – a TV show or a YouTube video – if we situate them in multiple contexts. Only studying the representations in isolation won’t do.
Interestingly, the model also the model visualizes assumptions visualizes certain assumptions that its designers may not have been aware of but that are apparent in how they analyze the Walkman in their book. The model’s explicit claim is that all five elements of the circuit of culturecircuit of culture are equally important. But it is no coincidence that “representation” is located at the top, as it is the element that the book pays most attention to. By the same token, it is not surprising that “identityidentity” is situated directly next to representation if we move clock-wise along the circuit as members of western cultures will almost automatically do because identity is the second major interest of the book. Production, consumption, and regulation are not discussed that extensively, and are connected very quickly to questions of representation (for example, how the invention of the Walkman was later represented by the company) and identity formation. This makes the book a rather typical Cultural StudiesCultural Studies analysis, as studying representation and identity is absolutely central to the field. This is why I also dedicate more chapters to these topics than to the other three. I have, however tried, to pay more attention to production, consumptionconsumption, and regulation than the creators of the model of the circuit of culture did.
The Promises and Pitfalls of Cultural Studies
At my home university B.A. students have to take three different introductions: to Literary Studies, to Linguistics, and to Cultural StudiesCultural Studies. I think – and exam results confirm this impression – that the Introduction to Cultural Studies is challenging Cultural Studies is the most challenging one. Students usually already have an idea what Literary Studies is when they begin their studies because they have interpreted novels, poems, and plays in school already. They have to adapt to the way it is done at university, but they are not dealing with something entirely new. Linguistics, by contrast, is entirely new for most of them. They are unlikely to have ever heard of morphemes or generative grammar. But Linguistics is rather self-enclosed; it is so specific and technical that one usually does well once the initial strangeness has been overcome. Cultural Studies is a different matter, because it is familiar and new at the same time, and it has the potential to affect your life in ways that Literary Studies and Linguistics do not have.
I said earlier that you are most likely already familiar with some of the terms that are important in Cultural Studies. That’s because narrative, identity, or gender are terms used in everyday language these days, as they are important for our lives. And Cultural Studies is about familiar terms who we are and how we live our lives. You may or may not care about literature or linguistics, but – since it is so encompassing – it is impossible that you do not care about the things that Cultural Studies is concerned with. And that’s a challenge but also a chance.
It’s counterintuitive claims a challenge because it is very likely that you hold strong opinions about some of the things that Cultural Studies deals with (and that I therefore deal with in this book). And you might find some of the claims that Cultural Studies makes counterintuitive, and they might trigger resistance. It might even be that you will have to confront some prejudices that you hold (we all have them). At the very least, you will, as I also already said, need to learn a language – one that is particularly challenging because, unlike the very special language you learn in Linguistics, it partly overlaps with the language that you use outside of the classroom. And let’s be frank: Some of the conceptsconcepts and theories I discuss are complicated and pretty difficult to grasp at first. In fact, one is never entirely through with them. I may have written this book, but I would never claim that I entirely master everything I discuss myself. I am still learning, too.
But learning how to do Cultural Studies is rewarding Cultural StudiesCultural Studies can also be extremely rewarding. As students from my class confirm each time I teach it, it has the potential to make you see the world differently. It may very well help you to better understand yourself and the world around you. So, let’s go and see what it’s all about.
Works Cited
Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy [1869], edited by Jane Garnett. Oxford UP, 2006.
Du Gay, Paul et al. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, 2nd ed. SAGE, 2013.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Anniversary Edition. Blackwell Publishing, 2008.
Hall, Stuart. “The Work of Representation.” Representation, edited by Stuart Hall, 2nd ed. SAGE, 2013, pp. 1-47.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard UP, 1993.
Schneider, Ralf. “Plädoyer für eine theoriegeleitete Literaturwissenschaft – Einleitung und Überblick.” Literaturwissenschaft in Theorie und Praxis: Eine anglistisch-amerikanistische Einführung, edited by Ralf Schneider. Narr, 2004, pp. 2-22.
Williams, Raymond. “Culture Is Ordinary.” 1958. Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, edited by Robin Gable. Verso, 1989, pp. 3-14.
“Culture.” Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com/view/Entry/45746?rskey=lVT5cz&;result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid. Accessed 15 May 2023.
2Representation and Semiotics
As we saw in the last chapter, “representation” sits at the top of the circuit of culturecircuit of culture. It is the most important concept in that model. But what is representation? If you are a German student of English – my target audience, but hopefully not the only one – it is possible that you are unfamiliar with the word, even in its everyday use, as its German equivalent, Repräsentation, occurs much more rarely in ordinary speech than the English term. But as a good citizen, you are familiar with the concept of representative democracy. Germany is a representative democracy, and so are the United Kingdom, the United States, and all other democracies in the world. Their citizens do not vote on laws and bills themselves (although some countries hold referenda regularly where all citizens can vote on certain issues), but every few years they elect representatives who will do the voting for them in the regional and national parliaments. These representatives stand for the citizens of their voting district. In other words, they represent them and (are supposed to) look after their interests. This is the idea of political representation political representationrepresentationpolitical.
By contrast, the kind of representation that I explore in this chapter is concerned with signs signssigns, with words, and images standing for conceptsconcepts and ideas. In the first section, I explain what representation is, and how spoken and written language and images take on their meaning. This is the logical first step that we need to take, because, as we established in the last chapter, Cultural Studies is the scholarly exploration of the shared meaningscultureas shared meanings of a culture. We therefore need to understand how these meanings come into existence and how they are shared. As we will see, representation is the answer to both of these questions.
Throughout the first section (and beyond), I draw heavily on Stuart HallHall, Stuart, the scholar whose definition of culture as shared meaningscultureas shared meanings I have adopted for this book. HallHall, Stuart has written an important book chapter in which he develops a theory of representation and explains it very well. HallHall, Stuart’s central claim, which I also highlight, is that meaning is not determined by the things in the world and merely reflected by representations. Meaning is also not determined by the intentions of the people who use representations when they speak, write, draw, take pictures, and so on. Instead, meaning is constructed meaning is constructed by the systems of representation, i.e., words, images, and the like, and their relationships to each other. This has important implications for the relationship between language and our understanding of the world. I discuss them in the second part of the chapter.
Importantly, that meaning is constructed does not mean that meaning is not really real. As we will see, it has constructions have real effects very real effects. But, to come back to the binarybinary oppositions oppositionbinary oppositions of nature and culturenature and culture I talked about in the introduction, it means that meaning is not a natural, but a cultural phenomenon. And as we will see in later chapters, this goes just as much for other phenomena that we might take for granted such as gender, sexuality, or race. In fact, the insight that meaning on all levels – from single words, as discussed in this chapter, to the memory of whole nations, as discussed in chapter 10 – is constructed, is at the heart of Cultural Studies.
In the third part,language I then broaden the focus and discuss what is called semiotics semioticssemiotics. As I will show, fashion, food, and many other things function – to a certain degree at least – like language because what we wear and eat also functions as signs. In a broader, more metaphorical sense, we can therefore speak of the language of fashion or the language of food, as some of the same rules apply to these phenomena. This is of course where things get really interesting for Cultural Studies scholars because it cuts right to the issues that the field is interested in.
