Cultural studies YR2 Lecture 1

Cultural studies 2: 

Cultural studies 2 Course overview Part 1: Dead white European males

Karl Marx: 

Karl Marx In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say we do not set out from what men say, imagine conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of imagined, conceived …We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process The German Ideology 1845-46

VN Volosinov (1895-??): 

VN Volosinov (1895-??) Art too is just as immanently social; the extraartistic milieu, affecting art from the outside, finds direct intrinsic response within it. This is not a case of one foreign element affecting another but of one social formation affecting another. The aesthetic…is ony a variety of the social Discourse in life and discourse in art (1926)

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937): 

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of the essential function in the world of economic production, creates…one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields The Prison Notebooks (1926-1937)

Georg Lukacs (1885-1971): 

Georg Lukacs (1885-1971) (Bourgeois) hegemony is exercised not merely by a minority but in the interest of that minority and so the need to deceive the other classes and to ensure that their class consciousness remains amorphous is inescapable for a bourgeois regime History & Class Consciousness 1923

Theodor Adorno (1905-1969): 

Theodor Adorno (1905-1969) The stronger the positions of the culture industry become, the more summarily it can deal with consumers’ needs, producing them controlling them, disciplining them, and even withdrawing amusement: no limits are set to cultural progress of this kind. The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947)

Roland Barthes (1915-1980): 

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) Statistically, myth is on the right. There, it is essential; well-fed, sleek, expansive, garrulous, it invents itself ceaselessly. It takes hold of everything… Mythologies (1957)

Michel Foucault (1926-1984): 

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer Power/Knowledge (1972-77)

Guy Debord (1931-1994): 

Guy Debord (1931-1994) The fetishism of the commodity — the domination of society by “intangible as well as tangible things” — attains its ultimate fulfilment in the spectacle, where the real world is replaced by a selection of images which are projected above it, yet which at the same time succeed in making themselves regarded as the epitome of reality. The Society of the Spectacle (1967)

Jurgen Habermas: 

Jurgen Habermas “I am of the opinion that social pathologies can be understood as forms of manifestation of systematically distorted communication ….”

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002): 

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) Action guided by a "feel for the game" has all the appearances of the rational action that an impartial observer. endowed with all the necessary information and capable of mastering it rationally, would deduce.

Jean Baudrillard: 

Jean Baudrillard Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don't even arise.

Suggestions for further reading: 

Suggestions for further reading Barker C (2000) Cultural studies: Theory & practice London: Sage Held D (1980) Introduction to critical theory: From Horkheimer to Habermas London: Hutchinson Kellner D (1989) Critical theory, marxism & modernity Oxford: Polity Press