Capitalism

Capitalism
The most influential understanding of capitalism within cultural studies
has come from the nineteenth-century writings of Karl Marx. Here capitalism is
grasped as a mode of production premised on the private ownership of the means
of production. In the past this would have included factories, mills and workshops
while today it signals multinational corporations. Class conflict is a marker of
capitalism whose fundamental division is between those who own the means of
production, the bourgeoisie, and a working class or proletariat who must sell their
labour to survive. Today the class structures of Western societies are considerably
more complex and internally stratified than Marx described them. Class is now identifiable not simply through direct ownership of the means of production but
through share distribution, managerial control, income, education and lifestyles.
According to Marx, while the legal framework and common sense thinking of
capitalist societies may declare that workers are free agents and the sale of labour a
free and fair contract, this obscures the fundamental process of exploitation at work.
This is so because capitalism aims to make a profit and does so by extracting surplus
value from workers. That is, the value of the labour taken to produce goods, which
become the property of the bourgeoisie, is more than the worker receives for it. The
realization of surplus value in monetary form is achieved by the selling of goods
(which have both ‘use-value’ and ‘exchange-value’) as commodities. A commodity
is something available to be sold in the market place and commodification the
process associated with capitalism by which all spheres of a culture are increasingly
put under the sway of the market. Commodity fetishism is the name Marx gives to
the process through which the surface appearance of goods sold in the market place
obscures the origins of commodities in an exploitative relationship.


(adapted from: The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies, by Chris Baker)

Gender

Gender
The notion of gender can be understood to be referring to the cultural
assumptions and practices that govern the social construction of men, women and
their social relations. The concept gains much of its force through a contrast with
a conception of sex as the biological formation of the body. Thus, femininity and
masculinity as forms of gender are the outcome of the cultural regulation of
behaviours that are regarded as socially appropriate to a given sex. Given that
gender is held to be a matter of culture rather than ‘nature’, so it is always a matter
of how men and women are represented.

A good deal of feminist writing has sought to challenge what they take to be
essentialism and biological determinism through the conceptual division between
a biological sex and a culturally formed gender. Subsequently, it is argued that no
fundamental sex differences exist and that those that are apparent are insignificant
in relation to arguments for social equality. Rather, it is the social, cultural and
political discourses and practices of gender that are held to lie at the root of
women’s subordination.

However, the sex–gender distinction upon which this argument is based has
itself become the subject of criticism. The differentiation between sex as biology and
gender as a cultural construction is broken down on the grounds that there is in
principle no access to biological ‘truths’ that lie outside of cultural discourses and
therefore no ‘sex’ which is not already cultural. In this view, sexed bodies are always
already represented as the production of regulatory discourses. Judith Butler has been at the cutting edge of this argument by suggesting that the category of ‘sex’ is
a normative and regulatory discourse that produces the bodies it governs. Thus,
discourses of sex are ones that, through repetition of the acts they guide, bring sex
into view as a necessary norm. Here, while sex is held to be a social construction, it
is an indispensable one that forms subjects and governs the materialization of bodies.

Butler’s work is emblematic of a wider body of thought produced by feminists
who have been influenced by poststructuralism and postmodernism. These writers
have argued that not only are sex and gender social and cultural constructions, but
also that there are multiple modes of femininity (and masculinity). Here, rather
than a conflict between two opposing male–female groups, sexual identity concerns
the balance of masculinity and femininity within specific men and women. This
argument stresses the singularity and multiplicity of persons as well as the relativity
of symbolic and biological existence.


(adapted from: The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies, by Chris Baker)

Class

Class
In general terms class can be understood as a classification of persons into groups
based on shared socio-economic conditions. However, classes do not exist as stand
alone groups but are to be understood in relation to other classes in the context of
an overall stratification system. As such, class can be grasped as a relational set of
inequalities with economic, social, political and ideological dimensions. Since class
is a cultural classification rather than an ‘objective’ fact, post-Marxist writers such
as Laclau and Mouffe approach it as a discursive construct.

Within cultural studies, the most influential understanding of class has been that
associated with Marxism where class is broadly defined as a relationship to the
means of production. Here the organization of a mode of production is not simply
a matter of coordinating objects but also of the relations between people. These
relations, while social, that is, cooperative and coordinated, are also matters of
power and conflict. Indeed, Marxists regard class antagonisms, which are an
intrinsic part of a mode of production, as the motor of historical change. For Marx,
class is constituted by an objective relation to property ownership and the mode of
production. Nevertheless, he also recognizes that consciousness of those
circumstances is significant. Thus he makes a distinction between class-in-itself and
class-for-itself where the latter includes a self-consciousness that is absent from the
former.

The core of Marx’s work was his analysis of the dynamics of capitalism wherein
the fundamental class division is between those who own the means of production,
the bourgeoisie, and those who, being a propertyless proletariat, must sell their
labour. Although, for Marxists, capitalists and workers form the core of the
contemporary class system, it is acknowledged that other class divisions are also in
evidence. For example, small shopkeepers, clerks and students form part of what
Marx called the ‘petite bourgeoisie’ while the unemployed and the criminal
fraternity are at the heart of the so-called ‘lumpen-proletariat’.

It is now widely felt that the class system of contemporary capitalism is much
more complex than that envisioned by Marx during the mid-nineteenth century
and involves a more graduated set of unequal relations. That class is constituted by
more than one’s relationship to the means of production has long been the argument of Weber and his subsequent followers. Here, though class is considered
to be founded on divisions associated with ownership of the means of production,
it also includes lifestyle differences based on income, occupation, status, education,
qualifications and so forth that cluster together to form class.

In particular, class relations today include the much-expanded middle classes
who, while they are not owners of the means of production, are nevertheless
distanced from the manual working class by income and lifestyle. This has been the
consequence of both a sectoral redistribution of labour from the primary and
secondary sectors to the service sector and a shift in the make-up of labour towards
white-collar work. Indeed, the working class has itself become highly stratified by
transformations in the occupational structures of industrial capitalism and the
increased though differential consumption that an ever-expanding capitalism has
enabled. To a considerable extent these transformations are implicated in the
displacement of industrial manufacturing by service industries centred on
information technology and by a more general alteration of emphasis from
production to consumption.

The increased productivity of capitalism has meant that the majority of the
populations of Western societies have sufficient housing, transportation and income
to be in a post-scarcity situation. This has contributed to an increased consumption centredness
amongst the working class that has led to its fragmentation as their
differential incomes and consumption capabilities are expressed in the market.
Further, as its relative prosperity has risen so the employed working class has
become dislocated from the unemployed urban underclass. In this context, it has
been argued by the theorists of ‘New Times’ that (at least in the heartlands of
Western capitalism) we are witnessing the emergence of a two-thirds: one-third
society. That is, two-thirds of the population are relatively well off while one-third
are either engaged in de-skilled part-time work or form a new underclass of the
unemployed and unemployable.

With this re-construction of class relations has come a new uncertainty regarding
the relationship between class position and political behaviour. Thus there has been
a steady decline in allegiance between occupational class categories and the major
political parties. More generally, we have witnessed the demise of a revolutionary
working class politics that could realize an alternative social order. Nevertheless,
class does retain a powerful and important place in social life that cannot be
ignored. There are still inequalities in educational access and outcome that are
underpinned by social class and there are still differences in cultural tastes and
practices that mark out class boundaries.


(adapted from: The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies, by Chris Baker)

Communication

Communication
From a cultural studies perspective communication is concerned
with the production, consumption and exchange of meaning. The idea of
‘meaning’ is an important one to cultural studies in so far as the concept of culture
is based on the notions of ‘maps of meaning’ and ‘shared meanings’.
Communication takes place in a socially and culturally formed world that in turn
makes it possible, so that communication and culture constitute each other. That
is, every time we communicate we do so using cultural assumptions and tools just
as that very culture is enabled by communication.

Of course, meanings are not simply ‘out there’ waiting to be found and
exchanged, rather, they are generated through the organization of signs, most
notably those of language. Hence the strong interest that cultural studies has had
in semiotics (the study of signs), discourse (regulated ways of speaking) and the
philosophy of language. However, signs do not have transparent and authoritative
meaning but are polysemic, that is, signs are able to generate more than one set of
meanings. Indeed, the meanings of signs are always unstable and continuously slip
away. Further, the texts that are constituted by signs have to be read by people to
activate any meanings and it is now an axiom of cultural studies that audiences are
active and knowledgeable producers of meaning not products of a structured text.
How an audience reads signs will depend on the cultural competencies they bring
to the text and the context of communication.

From a cultural studies perspective then, ambiguity is built into communication
processes. This stress on ambiguity, circularity and meaning in the cultural studies
approach to communication is in stark contrast to the early ‘classical’ models of
communication that centred on the passage of information and/or the sending and
receiving of messages.
Thus the model of communication proposed by Shannon and Weaver in the
1940s (Figure 1) presents the process as a linear one in which the informational
message itself is clear and can be understood unambiguously by its receiver
provided it is not subject to interference (noise).

The study of communication within cultural studies has taken place at the levels
of production (political economy), text (semiotics, discourse analysis) and reception
(or consumption). Although debate has raged about the relative significance of each
level, it is clear that the processes of communication and culture need to be explored
at all these levels in a multi-perspectival examination of the circuit of culture.

(adapted from: The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies, by Chris Baker)

Identity

Identity
The concept of identity became a central category of cultural studies during
the 1990s. It pertains to cultural descriptions of persons with which we emotionally
identify and which concern sameness and difference, the personal and the social.
For cultural studies, identity is a cultural construction because the discursive
resources that form the material for identity formation are cultural in character. In
particular, we are constituted as individuals in a social process that is commonly
understood as acculturation without which we would not be persons. Indeed, the
very notion of what it is to be a person is a cultural question (for example,
individualism is a marker of specifically modern societies) and without language the
very concept of identity would be unintelligible to us.

Within cultural studies, identities are understood to be discursive-performative.
That is, identity is best described as a discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names through citation and reiteration of norms or conventions. The
concept of identity is further deployed in order to link the emotional ‘inside’ of
persons with the discursive ‘outside’. That is, identity represents the processes by
which discursively constructed subject positions are taken up (or otherwise) by
concrete persons’ fantasy identifications and emotional ‘investments’. The
argument that identity is not a universal entity but a culturally specific discursive
construction is grounded in an anti-representationalist account of language
whereby discourse defines, constructs and produces objects of knowledge.
Consequently, what we can say about the identity characteristics of, for example,
men, is culturally circumscribed.

The popular cultural repertoire of the Western world holds that we have a trueself,
an identity which we possess and which can become known to us. Here,
identity is thought to be a universal and timeless core, an ‘essence’ of the self that
is expressed as representations that are recognizable by ourselves and by others. That
is, identity is an essence signified through signs of taste, beliefs, attitudes and
lifestyles. However, cultural studies writers question the assumption that identity is
a fixed ‘thing’ that we possess. Identity, it is argued, is not best understood as an
entity but as an emotionally charged description. Rather than being a timeless
essence, what it is to be a person is said to be plastic and changeable, being specific
to particular social and cultural conjunctures.

The anti-essentialist position that is widely held within cultural studies stresses
that identity is a process of becoming built from points of similarity and difference.
There is no essence of identity to be discovered, rather, identity is continually being
produced within the vectors of resemblance and distinction. Thus identity is not an
essence but a continually shifting description of ourselves so that the meaning of
identity categories – Britishness, blackness, masculinity etc. – are held to be subject
to continual deferral through the never-ending processes of supplementarity or
différance. Since meaning is never finished or completed, identity represents a ‘cut’
or a snapshot of unfolding meanings.

This argument points to the political nature of identity as a ‘production’ and to
the possibility of multiple, shifting and fragmented identities that can be articulated
together in a variety of ways. This signals to Hall the ‘impossibility’ of identity as
well as its ‘political significance’. It is the very plasticity of identity that makes it
politically significant since contestation over the meanings of identity categories
concerns the very kinds of people we are becoming.

(Adapted from THe SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies, by Chris Baker)

Ideological State Apparatus

Ideological State Apparatus
A term that was developed by Althusser in the late 1960s
and early 1970s in the context of his structuralist Marxism. The concept entered the
vocabulary of cultural studies at the moment when thinkers at the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies engaged with structuralism and the question of
ideology.

For Althusser, our entry into the symbolic order, and thus our constitution as
subjects, is the work of ideology which, he argues, hails or ‘interpellates’ concrete
individuals as concrete subjects. According to Althusser, ideology exists in an
apparatus and its associated practices. Thus he designates a series of institutions as
‘ideological state apparatuses’ (ISAs): namely, the family, the education system, the
church and the mass media. While Althusser regards the church as the dominant
pre-capitalist ISA, he argues that within the context of capitalism it has been
replaced by the educational system. Thus schools and universities are implicated in
the ideological (and physical) reproduction of labour power along with the social
relations of production that pertain to capitalism.

Althusser’s work was significant in elevating the debate about ideology to the
forefront of thinking within cultural studies. However, his influence waned not least
because the operation of ISAs as argued by Althusser is too functionalist in
orientation. That is, ideology appears to operate behind people’s backs in terms of the ‘needs’ of an agentless system. The Althusserian formulation of the question of
ideology is also too coherent. The educational system, for example, is the site of
contradictory ideologies and of ideological conflict rather than a place for the
unproblematic and homogeneous reproduction of capitalist ideology.
(The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies, by Chris Brown)

Ideology

Ideology
So influential has the concept of ideology been within cultural studies that
the whole field was once dubbed ‘ideological studies’. Of course, the notion of
ideology has a long history and comes in various shapes and sizes. However, from
a cultural studies perspective, it has been the Marxist variants of the concept that
have formed the core usage and the centre of debate regarding its validity.

The concern of contemporary Western Marxism with the concept of ideology is
rooted in the failure of proletarian revolutions to materialize and the inadequacy
of historical materialism in relation to questions of subjectivity, meaning and
cultural politics. Put simply, the concern with ideology began as an exploration into
why capitalism, which was held to be an exploitative system of economic and social
relations, was not being overthrown by working class revolution. In particular, the
question asked was whether the working class suffered from ‘false consciousness’,
that is, a mistakenly bourgeois world-view which served the interest of the capitalist
class. There are two aspects of Marx’s writing that might be grounds for pursuing
such a line of thought.

First, Marx argues that the dominant ideas in any society are the ideas of the
ruling class. Second, he suggests that what we perceive to be the true character of
social relations within capitalism are in actuality the mystifications of the market.
That is, the appearance of market relations of equality obscures the deep structures
of exploitation. Here ideology has a double-character, both of which function to
legitimate the sectional interests of powerful classes. Namely, (a) ideas as coherent
statements about the world that maintain the dominance of capitalism and (b)
world-views which are the systematic outcome of the structures of capitalism which
lead us to inadequate understandings of the social world.

The most long-lasting and authoritative Marxist account of ideology in the
context of cultural studies has come from the writings of Gramsci that became
especially influential within cultural studies during the late 1970s. For Gramsci
ideology is grasped as ideas, meanings and practices which, while they purport to
be universal truths, are maps of meaning that support the power of particular social
classes. Here, ideology is not separate from the practical activities of life but provides
people with rules of practical conduct and moral behaviour rooted in day-to-day
conditions. Ideology is understood to be both lived experience and a body of
systematic ideas whose role is to organize and bind together a bloc of diverse social
elements, to act as social cement, in the formation of hegemonic and counterhegemonic
blocs. Though ideology can take the form of a coherent set of ideas it
more often appears as the fragmented meanings of common sense inherent in a
variety of representations. Within this paradigm common sense and popular culture
become the crucial sites of ideological conflict.
When the concept of ideology is read as power/knowledge then it suggests
structures of signification that constitute social relations in and through power. If
meaning is fluid – a question of difference and deferral – then ideology can be
understood as the attempt to fix meaning for specific purposes. Ideologies are then
grasped as discourses that give meaning to material objects and social practices; they
define and produce the acceptable and intelligible way of understanding the world
while excluding other ways of reasoning as unintelligible and unjustifiable.
Ideologies are thus about binding and justification rather than being concerned
with truth, falsity and objective interests. They are the ‘world-views’ of any social
group that both constitute them as a group and justify their actions.

(Adapted from The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies, by Chris Brown)

Imagined community

Imagined community
The concept of the ‘imagined community’ is most obviously
associated with the work of Benedict Anderson on the ‘nation’. For Anderson, the
nation is an ‘imagined community’ and national identity a construction assembled
through symbols and rituals in relation to territorial and administrative categories.
National identities are intrinsically connected to, and constituted by, forms of
communication. The nation is an imagined community because most of its
members will never know most of the other members and yet they consider
themselves to be a part of the same commonality. Despite their physical separation,
members of a nation often regard themselves as sharing in a fraternity with which
they identify.

An imagined community such as a nation is, according to Anderson, intrinsically
connected to communication processes. Thus, it was the mechanized production
and commodification of books and newspapers, the rise of ‘print capitalism’, that
allowed vernacular languages to be standardized and disseminated. This provided
the conditions for the creation of a national consciousness. In particular, the
mechanization of printing and its commercial dissemination ‘fixed’ a vernacular
language as the ‘national’ language and in so doing made a new imagined national
community possible. Communication facilitates not just the construction of a
common language but also a common recognition of time. For example, the media
encourage us to imagine the simultaneous occurrence of events across wide tracts
of time and space, which contributes to the concept of nation.

From a cultural studies perspective Anderson tends to overstate the unity of the
nation and the strength of nationalist feeling and thus covers over differences of
class, gender, ethnicity and so forth. Nevertheless, the whole idea of an imagined
community has wider applicability than the nation. The concept can be utilized in
relation to all forms of collective identity. Thus, just as national identity takes the
form of identification with representations of the nation, so can ethnic groups,
feminists, classes, New Social Movements and other communities of action and
identity be understood as imagined.
(Adapted from The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies, by Chris Baker)

The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment 
A stance in European philosophy that can be explored through
the writings of key seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers such as
Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume and Bacon. Enlightenment thinkers valued the power of
reason – especially science – to demystify the world over and against superstition, myth and religion. Here, human creativity, rationality and scientific exploration are
understood to be the forces that mark the break with tradition and herald the
coming of modernity. The philosophers of the Enlightenment period sought after
truths that could be seen as leading to progress, that is, an improvement in the
human condition. As such, the French Revolutionary slogan ‘Equality, Liberty,
Fraternity’ best encapsulates the moral-political agenda of the Enlightenment. In
both its scientific project and its moral-political project, Enlightenment
philosophy sought universal truths, that is, knowledge and moral principles that
applied across time, space and cultural difference.

One of the legacies of the Enlightenment is what Habermas calls ‘instrumental
rationality’. This can be understood as a process by which the logic of rationality
and science is put to work in the service of the regulation, control and domination
of human beings. Thus Adorno and Horkheimer argued that the Enlightenment
impulse to control nature is a manifestation of the will to control and dominate
human beings. In this view the logic of Enlightenment thinking leads not only to
industrialization but also to the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Belsen.
However, Habermas also suggests that the Enlightenment generates a critical
rationality capable of liberating human beings from exploitation and oppression.
Thus the Enlightenment promotes the development of universal education,
political freedom and social equality as well as that rationality which is capable of
critiquing domination.

The main criticism of Enlightenment philosophy is that it seeks after universal
truth and, in declaring that it has found it, then seeks to eradicate any alternative
points of view. Consequently, post-Enlightenment philosophy – Nietzsche,
Wittgenstein, Derrida, Foucault, Rorty – argues that knowledge is not metaphysical,
transcendental or universal but specific to particular times and spaces. Thus there
can be no one totalizing knowledge that is able to grasp the ‘objective’ character of
the world. Rather, we both have and require multiple viewpoints by which to
interpret a complex heterogeneous human existence.

Nevertheless, Foucault suggests that we do not have to be ‘for’ or ‘against’ the
Enlightenment and challenges the idea that there is a clear, distinctive and final
break between Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought. It is not a question
of accepting or rejecting Enlightenment rationality but of asking about what reason
is and how it is used along with exploration of its historical effects, limits and
dangers.

(adapted from: The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies, by Chris Baker)

Epistemology

Epistemology
Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with the
source and status of knowledge. Thus, the question of what constitutes truth is an
epistemological issue. The most significant debate concerning epistemology within
cultural studies has been between representationalism (realism) and those opposed
to it (poststructuralism, postmodernism and pragmatism). Thinkers who maintain
a realist stance argue that a degree of certain knowledge about an independent
object world (a real world) is possible even though methodological vigilance and
reflexivity need to be maintained. In contrast, poststructuralism and
postmodernism adopt Nietzsche’s characterization of truth as a ‘mobile army of
metaphors and metonyms’. That is, sentences are the only things that can be true
or false. Knowledge is not a question of true discovery but of the construction of
interpretations about the world that are taken to be true. In so far as the idea of
truth has an historical purchase, it is the consequence of power, that is, of whose
interpretations come to count as truth.

Modern realist truth-claims exhibit contradictory tendencies. On the one hand,
they are universalizing and assert their truths for all people in all places. On the other
hand, they also embody the methodological principle of doubt by which knowledge
is subject to chronic and continual revision. Poststructuralism and postmodernism
emphasize the production of truths within the language-games in which such truths
are founded and as such they accept the legitimacy of a range of truth-claims,
discourses and representations of ‘reality’. This postmodern understanding of
knowledge is on the ascendant within cultural studies but remains disputed.

(The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies, by Chris Baker)