Mary Jackson Pitts, Ph.D.

mpitts@astate.edu

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Culture-Centered Criticism

Chapter 9

Critical Approaches to Television

n Page 285

What is Culture?

n   Culture holds a society together

n   A way of living within an industrial society that encompasses all the meanings of that social experience

n   It is the beliefs, habits, values and customary ways of acting collectively that distinguish cultures

Study of Culture

n    Cultural studies gained recognition in Britain during the 1970s

n    University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Studies (CCCS)

•   Stuart Hall, British media critic

n    U.S. cultural studies of mass communications can be dated from 1938

n    The Silent Language

•   Edward Hall, author

Edward Hall

n           Culture/social behavior can be analyzed like a text

n           “Communication is culture and culture is communication”- Edward Hall

n          One can communicate with others only when one knows their culture, and yet

n          Cultures are revealed or exhibited only in communicative behaviors

Stuart Hall

“A set of social relations obviously requires meanings and frameworks which underpin them and hold them in place.  These meanings are not only meanings of social experience, but also meanings of self, that is, constructions of social identity for people living in industrial capitalist societies that enable them to make sense of themselves and of their social relations.” - Stuart Hall

Basic Assumptions in Cultural Studies

n   Marxist

n   Divided Societies

n   Ideological

Marxist Assumption

n   Meanings and the making of meanings are indivisibly linked to the social structure and can only be explained in terms of that structure and its history

n   Social structure is held in place by the meanings that culture produces

Divided Assumption

n   Capitalist societies are divided societies

n   Primary axis of division was originally thought to be social class

n   Gender has replaced social class as the most significant producer of social difference

Ideological Assumption

n    Culture is ideological

n    History casts doubt on the possibility of a society without ideology in which people have a true consciousness of their social relations

n    Reality can only be made sense of through language or other cultural meaning systems

n    Consciousness is never the product of truth or reality, but of culture, society and history

Other Axes of Division

n   Race

n   Nationality

n   Age Group

n   Religion

n   Occupation

n   Education

n   Political Allegiance

Basic Assumptions in Culture-Centered TV Criticism

n    A culture is a social group’s system of meanings

n    To study culture is to study meaning systems both descriptively and normatively

n    Members of a society usually comply with their own conjunction to meaning systems

n    The goal of most culture-centered criticism is critique

A Culture is a Social Group’s System of Meanings

n    Anything shared by people in some temporal or spatial grouping is thought to be meaningful

n    Meaningfulness is socially derived understandings and accounts of things people take shared perspectives on

n    Culture-centered criticism generally focuses on discourses and how they give meaning to lived experiences

To Study Culture is to Study Meaning Systems

n   Explore the ways in which meaning systems control perceptions, thoughts or actions of people

n   Inventorying the meanings attached to objects and actions in a TV show is the beginning of cultural studies

Society Usually Complies With Their Own Conjunction to Meaning Systems

n    In recognizing social obligation or a general acceptance of social demands, people signal that they’ve internalized the demands of society

n    i.e. “That’s the way things are done around here.”

n    One of the mechanisms for encouraging people to go along/get along is television

The Goal of Culture-Centered Criticism

n   The goal of most culture-centered critics is change

n   Change associated with such socially charged concepts as liberation, empowerment and freedom

Central Concepts in Cultural Studies

n   Vocabulary used by culturalists

n   Textualization-sequences of verbal, visual, acoustic or behavioral signs

n   Rules-Roles

•  Cultural rule-statement that directs or constrains an individual’s thoughts, words and deeds 

•  Role identity-who we are and what people of our types think and do

Central Concepts (continued)

n    Vocabulary

n    Performance-imitation of others is one of the potent forms of social learning in your life, therefore, seeing your culture performed on TV is very important (Edward Hall)

n    Ideology-systems of thought that embody social values and perceptual orientations to life, role relationships and the authority to enforce them

•   Social, economic, educational, religious and political institutions

Central Concepts (continued)

n   Vocabulary

n   Myth-kind of story or plot

n   Hegemony-where an elite or dominate class has control over a lower or subordinate class

•  Complicity-the acceptance of power relationships as normal…as the way things are done in a society

Central Concepts (continued)

n   Vocabulary

n   Race/Gender/Class-TV is a great weapon in the struggle to redefine racial, gender and class relationships

•  Questions of culturalism, diversity and political correctness are present in the study of race, class and gender by TV critics