Cultural Studies

• Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field that explores the relationship between culture, society, politics, economics, history, and power.
• George Orwell (1903 - 1950) was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic who is known for his novels Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Animal Farm (1945).
• In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell showed how forms of indoctrination and propaganda constitute violent forms of language.
• In the novel, the Newspeak language project aims to eliminate connotative features, changing natural into artificial language so as to create a closed system with rigid codes.
• George Orwell is the author of "1984" and "Animal Farm".
• Stuart Hall (1932 - 2014) was a British cultural theorist and sociologist who is known for his work on media and popular culture.
• The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was a research centre at the University of Birmingham that focused on media and popular culture.
• Stuart Hall's 'Encoding, Decoding' (1973) is a theory on media and popular culture.
• In Breaking Bad, Stuart Hall's 'Encoding, Decoding' theory is mentioned.
• Stuart Hall observes the emergence of a 'politics of signification', or a 'struggle in discourse', at this moment - i.e., a point at which events which are typically signified and decoded in a negotiated way, are instead given an 'oppositional' reading.
• Gustavo Fring's statement 'A man provides' from Episode 3.5 of 'Breaking Bad' encapsulates this failure.
• A recognition not only of the grotesque perversion of one manifestation of 'the American Dream', but also the failure of the very framework within which it is imagined.
• Viewers may recognize the depths of Walter White's sins and his subversion of 'American values', but may also hold a misogynistic mistrust or resentment of his wife, Skyler, for her supposed failure to embody archetypical 'female' ideals as a wife and mother.
• The viewer 'detotalizes' the message in the preferred code in order to retotalizes the message within some alternative framework of reference.
• For example, the viewer who listens to the debate on the need to limit wages but 'reads' every mention of the 'national interest' as 'class interest'.
• Stuart Hall's "Encoding/Decoding" model is discussed in the context of TV's "Breaking Bad".
• In 1972, Stuart Hall became Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, and in 1979, he became Professor of Sociology at The Open University.
• Harry Potter is part of the same British tradition as the boys' weeklies, and can be seen as a vehicle for liberal or progressive ideals.
• The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was founded at the University of Birmingham in 1964 by Richard Hoggart, a Professor of English, and grew out of the political and social conditions of postwar Britain, including the revival of industrial production, the establishment of the welfare state, and the apparent 'flattening' of class hierarchies.
• Stuart Hall, born into a middle-class family in Jamaica, arrived as a student at Oxford in 1951 and became active in left politics, becoming the first editor of New Left Review in 1960.
• In the school stories of the later magazines Skipper and Champion, working-class characters are usually depicted as comics, prize-fighters, acrobats, cowboys, professional footballers, or members of the Foreign Legion.
• In contrast to the 'culture and civilization' tradition, which was preoccupied with 'high culture' and its mediation of morality, the Centre aimed to investigate popular and 'everyday' culture: mass media, sport, dance crazes.
• George Orwell argued that the media often portrays people in positions of command, above all those who are never troubled by shortage of money.
• George Orwell criticized the media for not representing working-class life or addressing issues of unemployment, trade unionism, strikes, slumps, and civil war.
• Key 'founding' publications of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies include Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1958), and Raymond Williams' Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961).
• The French Marxist Louis Althusser developed a more complex theory of ideology than Marx, showing that ‘ideological’ apparatuses such as the family, the law, and the education system are significant in instilling consent for the capitalist status quo.
• Althusser showed that many determining forces – economic, political, and cultural – compete with each other in making up society, and that culture isn’t simply a ‘superstructure’, produced by an economic ‘base’, as Marx suggested.
• There is no intelligible discourse without the operation of a code, and iconic signs are therefore coded signs too.
• Stuart Hall builds on Gramsci’s Marxist theory of hegemony, viewing individuals as both the consumers and producers of culture at the same time.
• Structuralism is a diffuse idea that has found applications in many different areas, generally characterized by an interest in the systems, the sets of relationships, the formal structures that frame and enable the production of meaning.
• Ferdinand de Saussure proposed the establishment of a science that would study ‘the life of signs in a society’, which he called ‘semiology’.
• Naturalism and “realism” are the result, the effect, of certain specific articulation of language on the “real”.
• For Hall, culture is a critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled.
• Reality exists outside language, but it is constantly mediated by and through language, and what we can know and say has to be produced in and through discourse.
• Discursive “knowledge” is the product not of the transparent representation of the “real” in language but of the articulation of language on real relations and conditions.
• Signifieds accumulate an array of connotations and cultural associations, which Roland Barthes calls ‘myths’ in his work Mythologies (1973).
• Signs are split into two parts: the signifier, which is the physical form of the sign, and the signified, which is the mental concept referred to by the signifier.
• The viewer is interpreting according to what is ‘natural’, ‘inevitable’, or ‘taken for granted’ about the social order.
• The television text, or sign, is particularly complex: it is both ‘visual’ and ‘aural’, as well as being ‘iconic’ (i.e., possessing some properties of the thing that is represented).
• Examples of dominant/hegemonic position include the belief that illegal drugs cause less damage than perceived, stereotypical (derogatory) portrayals of Latino drug dealers, and cultural celebration of the American Dream – and the nuclear family.