Name : Rima Kartika Putri

NIM : 11190260000011 / 7 – A
Cultural Studies

SIGN SYSTEM
As part of structuralism and the investigation of the literary text as a semiotic impact, a
specific form of sign within a collective system, anthropology and structural linguistics
concepts were adopted into literary studies in the 1960s. The Saussurean distinction splits the
‘word on the page’ or vocal sign into the signifier (or sound picture) and the signified (or
meaning). Against authorialism, it can be argued that: there can be no signified without a
signifier; the literary text consists of a structure of signifiers; so the author is an effect of the
signifier, for as Roland Barthes says in “ The Death of the Author “, in the literary text’it is
language that speaks, not the author’( 1977, p. 143 ). Structuralism subverts any distinction
between the’work’(viewed as unified, authentic, literary, and canonical since it is an
expression of its author) and the’text’(recognized as an organization of signifiers that
produces particular effects and meanings in and for the reader) Both literary and popular
culture texts work through a system of signals, meanings originating from the organization of
the signifier. Umberto Eco’s 1979 examination of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books is a good
structuralist analysis of a popular cultural corpus. In the 1960s, Russian Formalists’ work was
revitalized, notably in Tzvetan Todorov’s 1965 French collection. A central goal of the
Formalists was to theorize the specificity of literature as a linguistic feature, its literariness.
This remained a concern at least until Roman Jakobson’s 1960 paper Style in Language. No
one has shown that a linguistic trait is present in great works but absent in inferior ones.
IDEOLOGY
After 1968, Marxist explanations of ideology were brought into literary theory and
cultural theory (Cinéthique and Cahiers du Cinema began publishing Marxist analyses of
cinema in 1969). The new Marxism maintained that literary meaning was a sort of ideology,
that is, meaning arising intersubjectively, ideology as socially shared meanings controlled
ultimately but not immediately by their link to the economic mode of production. The post –
1968 critique of literature as ideological contributed to the wider paradigm shift by putting
canonical and non-canonical texts into a common relation with ideology. There have been
attempts to re inscribe a binary that casts literature as authentic and’beyond’or in an
inherently critical relation with ideology while popular culture remains inauthentic, merely a
passive and “ transparent’bearer of ideology, for example, Louis Althusser in his’Letter on
Art® ( 1977, pp. 203-8 ). For the reasons given in the previous argument against defining
literature’s essence, such attempts are unpersuasive and impossible to show (see Tony
Bennett’s Formalism and Marxism, 1979). No one has shown that literature and ideology
have a special relationship.
GENDER
As with ideology, meanings that promote a particular stance toward issues of gender have
been decisively and irrevocably reinstated on the agenda of radical politics since 1970. If
ideology defines textual meaning in relation to mode of production, then gender meanings
must be viewed as socially determined in relation to patriarchy. Work in this renewed
feminist tradition quickly demonstrated itself to be encouragingly irreverent in its critique of
gender meaning in both high cultural and popular cultural texts. The author (the text as an
expression of a gendered author); the signified (the images of women and men represented in
a text); and the signifier (the possibility of écriture féminine and gendered writing) became
the three main areas of attention and critique to be discriminated. Any claim that literature
could be distinguished from nonliterary texts on the basis of a different conception of gender
was disproved.
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Since its inception, psychoanalysis has been connected with literary research, but The
Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes in 1973 gave the relationship new life (English 1976).
Contemporary conceptions of textuality arguably borrow the most from psychoanalysis,
which is both suggestive and destructive to the old paradigm of literary research. In the
conventional perspective, literature is almost synonymous with the intimate and pleasure;
psychoanalysis explains both in terms of fantasy and unconscious drive. Psychoanalysis
counts against the authorial conception—if the author meant a text, psychoanalysis must split
that intention between conscious and unconscious, pointing to the literary text not as a unity
but as an identity earned through disjunction (significantly, it was topsychoanalysis that
Macherey appealed when assailing textualintegrity). Psychoanalysis is unique in its ability to
reveal gender implications in unexpected places. Psychoanalysis is not a proposal for a
patriarchal society, but an analysis of one, says Juliet Mitchell in Psychoanalysis and
Feminism (1975, p. Xv).
The theory of ideology as “interpellation” that Althusser developed from Jacques Lacan in
his essay on ideology in 1970 stands out as a key slant on psychoanalysis. Since attempting to
summarize Lacan is an even greater injustice than normal, the cut should probably be made
as soon and briefly as possible.
INSTITUTION
After Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society was published in 1958, analyzing nearly
two centuries of cultural history as a history of institutions and practices, the study of popular
culture flourished in Britain. This began with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies (founded in 1964) and spread to courses (primarily taught at polytechnics
and colleges of education) variously described as “media studies,” “film studies,” and
“cultural studies.” The importance of the social structures responsible for popular culture’s
promotion and reproduction was thus firmly established.
CULTURALISM:THE LATE 1950s
Raymond Williams disputed Leavis’ use of the term “culture” exclusively for high culture
in Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961). If literature portrays the
English ruling class, “the gentry,” then popular culture may be defended as an expression of
the working class and cannot be ignored from an explanation of culture defined as a society’s
“way of life.” This analysis could be called culturalist since it assumes a group or class acts
freely and constitutively through its cultural representations, that the working class lives in an
enclave away from the rest of the social formation and can thus make up its “own” culture.
MARXISM/STRUCTURALISM: THE 1960s
Under the direction of Richard Hoggart and then Stuart Hall, the Birmingham Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies utilized both Marxism and structuralism to comprehend
popular culture (see Hall, 1990).Marxism brought emphasis to the economic conditions for
production andconsumption (for example, private ownership of newspapers by Torybaronets,
Hollywood studio production, etc.). Simultaneously, antipathy to structuralism was employed
to demonstrate how texts were organized in respect to what was deemed the dominant
ideology. Popular culture was not so much a free expression of the working class as it was a
set of imposed and confined meanings that were ultimately defined by economic power (the
so-called “dominant ideology” theory). In his 1980 essay, ‘Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms,’
Stuart Hall summarized firstthe culturalism of Raymond Williams and others (popular culture
as anexpression of the working class) and then the more recently introducedMarxist
structuralism (popular culture as an imposed set of meanings); he concluded that these were
the two major and as-yet unreconciled paradigms for the analysis of popular culture.
HEGEMONY AND TEXTUALITY: FROM 1970
Lacan, Barthes, Kristeva, and Foucault’s writings influenced certain English intellectuals
in the 1970s. The attempt, notably in the film journal Screen, to combine
AlthusserianMarxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis together on the terrain of a
closesemiological examination of text affected other subject areas, including cultural studies.
The result was a focus on signifying activities (film, advertising, photography, fine art, music,
literature) viewed as independent within a social cconstruction.Antonio Gramsci theorized
hegemony, the idea that a ruling bloc governs a subordinate bloc by seeking permission.
U203 uses the concept of hegemony to analyze popular culture as a sort of settlement
negotiated to the advantage of the ruling group; as hegemony, popular culture is both
structurally imposed and oppositional. On the assumption that each signifying practice is
largely autonomous, a formalist analysis of textuality is taken over from antecedents. U203
and other contemporary breakthroughs in cultural studies have almost reversed the
sociological divide between popular culture and literature. The divide between high and
popular culture, literary and cultural studies, has been destroyed anew, this time by cultural
studies.