What is culture? C/c: civilization, society

“Photography and Electoral Appeal”

1. 
   more personal link
   
2. 
   exemplifies/embodies political agenda (blind imitation)
   
3. 
   a “perfected” mirror for identification AND separation (awe)
   
4. 
   blackmail, censure (not VS human, but VS virtues shown)
   

-example: the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon first tv debate

showbiz personas as politicians and vice-versa

-C/c Horkheimer and Adorno

Student of R. Wiliams, New Left UK Cultural Studies

Colonial subjectorganic intellectual
“Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies” (1992)

-Culture as synergy of transient power struggles (“articulation” of “conjectures”) VS static “hegemony”

(C/c Mikhail Bakhtin’s polyglossia, heteroglossia,

carnivalesque, dialogic)

“positionalities” unified by a political agenda

“worldliness” of C.S. (VS Marxist materialism) to

face “tension” of inadequacy of theories

object of study)

organic intellectual best for C.S. work:

1. 
   works within historical conjecture
   
2. 
   engaged to enlighten others (“make a difference”) not just theorize
   

4 creative interruptions:

1. 
   class (Marxism)
   
2. 
   gender (feminism)
   
3. 
   race (postcolonialism)
   
4. 
   textuality (semiotics, deconstruction)
   

SIGMUND FREUD

The Structure of the Mind

Oedipus and Electra complexes
“Civilization and the Individual”

Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)
-Culture evolves, has a “mentality” like a human being

1. 
   formed by (the ritual death) of our cultural “forefathers”
   
2. 
   high culture=community superego
   
3. 
   culture sets up impossible ideal conscience demands (public morals)
   
4. 
   ethics clash with the aggression of the id, environmental hostility
   

 culture as a struggle between Eros and Thanatos

-Who has the authority to treat cultural neuroses?

Critique of 18^th-19^th industrialized capitalism from an “organic” intellectual

Not nation-state, but class lines cutting across boundaries (“The International”)

Culture not only “high/elitist” art or ideas, but material basis too (base/superstructure)

Class struggles as power behind history
“The Fetishism of Commodities” (1867)

-3 kinds of values:

use value

true (labor) value (hours x difficulty of work)

exchange value commodity (VS object)
-commodity has:

a. metaphysical value (different labor appreciation)

b. social (symbolic) value (humans work for one another)

 commodity as a synecdoche for worker value/status

-shown only in the act of exchange:

1. 
   I “meet” person through product
   
2. 
   worker feels worthless, non-communal if product is not bought)
   

-exchange value reason for making products

-symbolic, therefore can be twisted, exploited

MAX WEBER

“academic” sociologist and capitalism critic

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)

-Status groups (“subcultures”) inside a larger culture

-the “iron cage”: when efficiency, technology and bureaucracy trap individual

1. 
   Logos not enough to overcome modern culture’s contradictions
   
2. 
   Franklinean ethic (rich or poor is your choice)
   
3. 
   More goods and money less humanity
   
4. 
   We become the cage (manufacture of consent)
   

-Df. (p.111): “a kind of independent leadership [manipulation of power] in action” inside a “state” (i.e., something capable of claiming “monopoly of legitimate use of force” within its territory) or among states

1. 
   tradition (semi-personal)
   
2. 
   charisma/grace (personal)
   
3. 
   legality, rationale (impersonal)
   

“The Types of Legitimate Domination” (1920)

-Df. of domination:

1. 
   orders obeyed for: i. obedience’s sake, ii. our own interest too
   
2. 
   involves a staff (apparatchiks), loyal for material, affectual, or ideal (legitimation) reasons, which shares in diffusion of power
   
3. 
   not only one/linear kind operant in social relations
   

ANTONIO GRAMSCI

-Founder of Italian Communist Party, political theorist

-Wrote The Prison Notebooks (c. 1930; publ. 1950) while imprisoned by Fascist government

- “organic quality” (proximity to production level); intellectual bias acc. to economic class

-relation to “hegemony” (=“direct domination” + ideological supremacy in “civil society” + “political society”/State)

-“historic bloc”: synergy of social, institutional, intellectual and physical forces that maintain dominant status quo in the mind of subjects

 workers decide against their interests

 without people’s cultural hegemony, no socialist revolution can happen

2^nd wave feminist activist, co-founder of NOW, National Women’s Political Caucus

Written after a college graduate reunion survey (1957)

-why nameless?

-sexist cultural brainwashing:

1. 
   prescribed housewife/baby-maker role as only option
   
2. 
   discouraged from “unfeminine” science or public sector jobs
   
3. 
   immature sexualization
   
4. 
   contradictory negative semantics (“man-trap”)
   
5. 
   suburban conformity
   
6. 
   techno-material advancement as “golden cage”
   

-Organic intellectual (poverty, disability, black rights), author, critic

-The 1960s Civil Rights movement: nonviolent resistance but double victimization

-importance of herstory

-Slavery before and after 1863’s Emancipation Proclamation

-C/c Virginia Woolf’s “Shakespeare’s sister”

-effects of repressed spirituality

-hypocrisy of phallogocentrism:

1. 
   saintliness as double slavery
   
2. 
   womanhood as curse
   
3. 
   talent as burden
   

-outlets/safehouses for black female artistry: recipes, gardens, songs, homemaking (quilts etc).

-results of “mothers’” efforts

CASE STUDY: USA
STEPHEN FENDER

Professor of American Studies in the UK

Author of 50 Facts… series

“The American Difference”

-Why this belief?

1. 
   first new bourgeois nation
   
2. 
   in a land unusually rich and wild
   
3. 
   not real, but IMAGINED quality by Europeans and settlers
   
4. 
   based on a transformative, elective process of becoming American
   
5. 
   based on “the collective singular”, et pluribus unum of individuals
   

6. 
   being cut off from Europe bred isolationism, “purity” w/o contagion
   
7. 
   immigrant despriptions (new, bountiful, old sins erased)
   
8. 
   Puritans as “different” religiously and politically
   
9. 
   American Dream of a classless, meritocratic society
   
10. 
    Portable faith, faith in the portable
    
11. 
    Mass mobility as evolution:
    

: terror of captivity narratives

: “redeems” old wrongs (slavery, genocide)

: from “Go West, young man” to Pax Americana, global policeman

JEAN BAUDRILLARD

Philosopher, sociologist, cultural theorist

-USA as nation of “the astral and the primitive” (Sacvan Bercovitch’s “the cowboy and the skyscraper”)

-“Lights Out”: light as symbol of:

1. 
   first civilization (fire)
   
2. 
   brightness and gloryvirtuality
   
3. 
   techno-dependence
   
4. 
   machinization of humans (alone, work 24/7, velocity, amorality)
   
5. 
   excess breeds fear of future crash: dystopia/apocalypse
   

-Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

-Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)

-Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988)

AIMÉ CESAIRE

-Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, 1939

-Taught Fanon in Martinique—Caribbean as hotbed of revolutionary ideas (Haiti, Cuba, Patrick Chamoiseau, Edouard Glissand, Raphael Confiant, Maryse Condé)

-Négritude (1930s) inspired by French poètes maudits (Rimbaud’s style), Harlem Renaissance, activist anthropology-sociology VS bourgeois colonizer Europe
“Between Colonizer and Colonized” from Discourse on Colonialism (1955)

-Why “between” position?

1. 
   No contact, only “thingification”
   
2. 
   Price for technology and structures too high (lives, raw wealth, eco-disaster)
   
3. 
   Creation of a caste of servant-functionaries: corrupt, hypocritical, power-hungry
   
4. 
   Impossible to return to an idealized “past”
   
5. 
   Too weak to compete in a global free market with former colonizer
   
6. 
   Crimes of colonization a “historical accident”—must be overcome
   

PETER JACKSON

Commodity culture and the geography of consumption
“Routes/Roots” (1999)

-Today’s mix replaces “national culture”

-even “empirical” georgraphy is affected: no “pure” race

-combination of “native” traits and new dynamic influences

J(OHN) B(OYNTON) PRIESTLEY

Novelist, playwright, popular BBC broadcaster

-3 –isms:

regionalism

nationalism

internationalism

-Which one should matter? Why other two negative?

-How can we reconcile true “world culture” with different regionalisms?

Open-mindedness, communication, respect

-Pros and cons

-The role of the superpowers: From George Ritzer’s The McDonaldization of Society (1993) to Benjamin Barber’s Jihad vs. McWorld (1955) to…”The China Syndrome”?

STANLEY HOFFMANN

Harvard Professor on global political science
“The Clash of Globalizations” (2002)

-4 incomplete models of globalization:

1. 
   Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992), neoconservatist manifesto
   
2. 
   Samuel P. Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” (1992)
   
3. 
   Henry Kissinger’s “realpolitik”
   
4. 
   Raymond Aron’s “germ of universal consciousness” (e.g., Seattle)
   

-Problems with global theatre today:

1. 
   nationalist, intra-nationalist (ethnic) and religious clashes now more alive, more dangerous (WMDs, nuclear weapons)
   
2. 
   national protectivism of self-interests and introvertedness no “world citizens” yet
   
3. 
   unpredictable domestic politics factors (neocons, new fascism, fundamentalism)—simplistic or too-optimistic theories do damage
   
4. 
   intervention of global organizations a factor, but NGOs too weak
   
5. 
   terrorism: must intervene in other sovereign nations to stop it
   
6. 
   global/ “transnational” violence and crime (greed and envy)
   

-3 globalizations:

-economic (fear of injustices, control, exclusion of the poor)

-cultural (fear of Americanization/ worse alternative?)

-political (international network of (US-led) institutions, NGOS)

-C/c Immanuel Wallerstein’s 3 “geo-political cleavages”:

a. Triad (US, EU, Japan)

b. North/South

c Davos/Porto Alegre
-Is globalization really the only/necessary way?

Democracy, justice, material sufficiency is enough [isn’t that a Western model?]

HOMI BHABHA

Harvard theoretician of postcolonialist/literature studies

-“hybridity”
“Re-Inventing Britain: A Manifesto” (1995)

-Traditional uses of culture:

1. 
   “attribution of identity”
   
2. 
   “conferral of authenticity”
   

1. 
   articulation of meaningful demands/judgments
   
2. 
   translatability
   

-no perfect translation

-it’s not so much ID norms/needs that have changed, but the wider context of culture

-intellectual secularism as an example of new thinking

EDWARD SAID

Palestinian academic and activist

Orientalism (1978), Culture and Imperialism (1993), Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004)
“Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals” from Representation of the Intellectual (1994)

-why is the intellectual an exile?

1. 
   brain drain
   
2. 
   “displacement” of cultural critic
   
3. 
   marginalization of intellectuals in society (difficult “non Bell-curvers” and/or troublesome)
   
4. 
   exile makes one an organic intellectual of sorts:
   

-“global village” even harder (tantalizingly close, one cannot decide to settle “for good”)

1. 
   naysayer as philosopher (Adorno’s negative dialectics)
   
2. 
   extra sensitivity, original p.o.v.
   
3. 
   perpetual unsettled position untainted by mass cultural brainwashing
   
4. 
   creative labor out of pain of exile
   
5. 
   morality of not being “at home”—ecstasis of feeling “Otherness”
   

1. 
   self-fulfilling prophecy
   
2. 
   unpredictability
   

1. 
   biotechnology
   
2. 
   nanotechnology
   
3. 
   cybernetics, informatics, virtuality
   
4. 
   global dominion of interests
   
5. 
   the space race?
   
6. 
   danger of ecological disaster/ nuclear annihilation
   

JEAN BAUDRILLARD

-from double (representation) to simulation (hyperreal):

“models of a real without origin or reality”

end of Plato’s ideal world

end of metaphor: we ARE the signifier

end of anagogy (only egotistic duplication of “image”, murder of real referent of art)

-4 stages of simulacra:

1. 
   reflection of the real (representation)—good
   
2. 
   perversion of the real (lie, false icon)—evil
   
3. 
   mask of absence of the real (hoax)—play at being
   
4. 
   pure simulacrum—its own self/ethic
   

-not allegory of a real adult America, but masks the childishness and unreality (Disneyfication) of “real” America outside ”fictions of the real”

-repetitions of false sign (gadgets, jingles, various “lands”) validate it.

ARTHUR KROKER

Canadian theoretician of politics-technology-culture

-relation of human to machine:

cyberculture and cyberpunk

-Can we “fight the future”?

-Death of human citizen—how?

1. 
   “floating” reality/politics/ethics/bodies
   
2. 
   VR as sterilely-experiencing “organs without bodies” (following Slavoj Zizek’s reversal of Gilles Deleuze’s positive “bodies without organs”)
   
3. 
   “technology takes possession of us” “virtual recline”, inertia
   
4. 
   digitalization of the real  virtual (in)experience, “zero degree politics”
   
5. 
   no creation, but kitsch rerun loop (Deleuze’s “cancerous” body w/o organs)
   
6. 
   becoming cyborg with the aid of biotechnology
   

-Biotechnology as power: fixes reality to customer’s choice, but controls them

-U.S. is no more an image culture, but bioapparatus (technofaux)

-“Virtual USA is the uncertainty principle par excellence”:

1. 
   omnipresent reality shifts, can’t escape (we are all cyborgs; any conspiracy theory potentially true; apathetic “citizen”)
   
2. 
   Puritan+capitalist origin means frontier+biblical drive, doesn’t question “progress”
   

Feminist, biologist, philosopher

-Positive view of the cyborg, because:

1. 
   no “original sin” of traditional cultural hierarchies/categories or dominion of a primal “ideal”
   
2. 
   can resist/bypass “informatics of domination” (“a massive intensification of insecurity and cultural impoverishment, with common failure of subsistence networks for the most vulnerable”) by using its own tools against it [myth of the Hacker Hero]
   
3. 
   can use the language of pure simulacra (computer codes) to bypass patriarchal and other obstacles
   

4. 
   we are all cyborgs anyway, need new concepts to rethink our world, new stories to make borg familiar
   
5. 
   we cannot go back to “pure” essential identities (instead of the victim, be the monster!)
   
6. 
   next step after animal-human barrier broke down
   
7. 
   not uniform identity, but “affinity”