Cultural 1

studies
Member:
1. Richa Yusrin F (A320190124)
2. Rahajeng Pangestika (A320190125)
3. Maya Oktaviani P (A320190134) - Leader
4. Ummu Habibah (A320190137)
5. Iraisha Fadilah (A320190148)
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Definition (Stuart hall)

✖ Cultural studies is a theory developed by Stuart Hall's thinking about how the
media instill ideology in their audiences.
✖ Cultural studies is the study of how the media construct a display of various
communication symbols to reflect social conditions. For example, Funk, Korean
Waves, etc.
✖ Ideology according to Hall is the view, values, and frame of mind that a person
has about social reality.
✖ Hall adopts the notion of domination when he talks about the role of the media in
culture which is generally associated with the strong influence of one State on
another. Media domination is not a conscious plan and its influence is not
universal.
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elements of the definition of

cultural studies
✖ Research into current society.
✖ Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines the
relationship between culture and power.
✖ To all practices, institutions that are ingrained in the habits of
individuals.
✖ Gender, racism, colonialism, class, etc. are examples of power that is
exported.
✖ The institutional arena is college.
 main elements of cultural 4

studies
✖ Representing the world in a way that is meaningful to us is a central concern of this
project's work.
✖ Cultural studies: the study of culture as the practice of interpreting representations.
✖ Representational materials: sounds, inscriptions, radio, images, books, magazines,
and television programs.
✖ Representations are produced, exhibited, used and understood in a certain social
context. They are also used in other contexts.
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key concept of cultural studies

✖ Culture and practice of meaning
✖ Materialism and non-reductionism
✖ Articulation
✖ Power
✖ Pop culture: as a basis for consensus
✖ Text and its reader
✖ Subjectivity and identity: anti-essentialism
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history of cultural studies

✖ Richard Hoggart, who founded the Birmingham Center for Cultural
Studies with Stuart Hall, invented this word in 1964.
✖ Since Gramsci believed that "culture is the key to politics and social
control," Stuart Hall created an international intellectual movement in 1970
that used the Marxist approach to investigate the relationship between
culture (the superstructure) and political economy (the foundation).
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Role of media
✖ Mass media plays a role:
• builds a value and
• convinces audience
• Sharing the same interest (wave)
• Which in the end becomes a new culture or popular culture (culture popularity)

✖ This situation is called a very strong culture industry or hegemony.

✖ Cultural studies has indeed provided a satisfactory explanation of the production, consumption
and distribution of culture.
✖ Cultural studies have indeed provided a satisfactory explanation of the production,
consumption, and distribution of culture.
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Making meaning
✖ Culture is concerned with the production and exchange of meaning.
✖ The way of giving meaning to a symbol can be called an ideology.
✖ Culture is a place of continuous contention of meaning, where the inferior
group tries to resist the imposition of meaning by the dominant groups. That
is why culture is also ideological.
✖ Cultural studies is not interested in what is communicated but in who
communicates
 Theory in the practice of 9

research

Theory, fear, loathing

✖ The word ‘theory’ can be promoted as a kind of master narrative, so that to be
thought ‘a theorist’ is both to excel and carry burdens of envy, distrust and the power
to intimidate. In politics, it is often placed in opposition to ‘practice’ or being
‘realistic’. These tensions so different from the high value placed on ‘theoria’ in
ancient Greek culture or German humanism or the prestige accorded to philosophy
in France or Scotland resurfaced in the debates about theory in history and cultural
studies in the late 1970s.
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✖ Certainly, theory is intrinsic to research activity. Research is as much about thinking

and reflecting as it is about carrying out surveys, conducting interviews or reading
texts. At stake is the acquisition or not of capacities for critical thinking and writing
that is self-reflective and communicative because it is conceptually clear. Theory in
this sense is everywhere, it is not restricted to the academic domain. Theories are
embedded in political programs, strategies and manifestos, they organize the details
of narratives and descriptions. Theories in research may be more complex and fully
articulated than the theories we need to get through the day, but this is a difference of
explicitness, scope and coherence, not of kind.
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Theory as opposed to practice

Theory can be seen as a self-validating activity that is opposed to practice. As such, it
entails curiosity, witness, contemplation, interpretation or understanding intellectual
labour in the purest sense. Cultural studies, as part of the critical academy, has not been
exempt from intellectual exclusiveness of a paradoxical kind, in which competence in
theoretical codes and ideas become prerequisites for entry to the field. Interest in theory
may start from a desire to explain culture with due complexity, but can end up excluding
from debates those very groups implicated in the research. We conclude that there are
actually good social reasons for refusing to internalize the narrowing of ambitions, both in
education and in research, that is a marked feature of governmental and corporate control
today.
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Theory and practice as praxis

A key word here has been ‘praxis’ a term the specialized modern sense of which is
Hegelian or Marxist. As William puts it, ‘praxis is practice informed by theory and also,
though less emphatically, theory informed by practice’. In a typical Williams formulation
praxis describes ‘a whole mode of activity in which, by analysis but only by analysis,
theoretical and practical elements can be distinguished, but which is always a whole
activity, to be judged as such’. Praxis makes sense of many aspects of cultural studies the
emphasis on power, links with the agenda of social movements, stress among advocates
on ‘doing cultural studies’ and even the quotations from Gramsci and Marx.
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Theory and the empirical

There are kinds of empirical in cultural studies:

✖ Empirical objections
- It is easy to see why Althusserian and similar epistemologies are a provocation to those who hold to strongly
empirical forms of research. Similarly, the symptom or anomaly that stimulates critique and can transform
what Kuhn calls ‘normal science’ is a textual or conceptual event, not an event in the world outside the text.
✖ Empiricist difficulties
- In terms of cultural theory, conceptually led epistemologies are a form of cultural determinism. Yet many
objections to an Althusserian method have themselves depended on notions of fact and evidence that are
reductionist in that they ignore or underestimate the relational dynamics between researcher and researched
and their mutual entanglements in cultural forms.
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✖ The empirical as other

- We would argue, against Althusser, that change in a framework may not be so complete or
sudden as his notion of ‘epistemological rupture’ prescribes, though moments of realization do
often seem sudden. They may be based, however, on a slower accretion of empirically based
knowledge that erodes the credibility of old frameworks.

Reading theory as a method

Reading for theory is a method that corresponds to this process of mapping. It involves not only
identifying theoretical approaches around the topics that we choose to study but also engaging with
them, thinking them through or critiquing them. It is here that the idea of theory as ‘problematic’ or
organizing framework is useful in practice. A critical reading will seek to identify the standpoint of
the authors or speakers and trace the conceptual framework that underpins the key questions and
how this framework affects the substantive account.
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The argument so far

So far, we have seen that theory is understood differently within different epistemologies
and each version has implications for practice. Traditional humanistic approaches uphold
theory as curiosity and openness against pressures towards the short term and utilitarian.
In strongly empirical epistemologies, theory is mainly limited to a question-posing function
– the real knowledge being extracted, it is often not clear how, from source, evidence or
fact. However, we locate our version of cultural studies mainly on the ground of praxis,
where theory and politics, conceptualization and engagement with others are all aspects of
research activity.
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Theory as an abstraction
✖ Abstraction is a sorting of incoming and outgoing elements by concentrating on the key aspects of
these elements without paying attention to the details of them.
✖ For example, in reading texts or transcripts. When we read or tell stories, we have abstracted from
a more complex real text into something we can tell.
✖ Level of abstraction
1. Theory, for higher levels of abstraction, for more abstract accounts.
2. Empirical, on a less abstract account. The abstraction level has two conditions namely first, that less
abstract accounts are also theoretically organized and constitute accounts (which is why we can
abstract theory from them). Second, that a higher or lower level of abstraction is not necessarily more
true or more false. Both types of accounts refer to the real world and, depending on qualities that go
beyond abstraction, can say things we need to know.
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✖ Kinds of abstraction: strengths and limits

The level of abstraction is related to the scope or range of a category reference. Thin or simple
abstractions often require 'culture' and 'power' are examples to delimit a particular area, but they have
only very limited limits. The opposite case is where the abstraction includes many relations, perhaps
too many, a form of abstraction that Marx called 'chaotic'. Chaotic abstraction seeks to understand
large complexities without analyzing different elements. Marx's favorite example is 'population',
which includes everything.

For example the media in the UK that focuses on adolescent sex issues and the phenomenon of
motherhood. Commentaries and editorials claim an interest in the well-being of young mothers, single
parents as a category (almost always a mother) associated with teenage pregnancy and, therefore, with
the moral decline or carelessness of youth.
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✖ Conclusion: theorizing as a practice

A work, usually engulfed by the theories we encounter and our general level of ignorance.
One way to deal with this is to write a review of the key text, author or theory at the start of
the research, a review that can form part of a project or dissertation or chapter in a thesis. A
theoretically informed review of the literature helps us to do just that because we can
engage with the positions at hand, decide the positions we want to take and the positions
we choose. The theoretical review section is not the only way to deal with the theoretical
map that exists in the wider work.
The most important advice, perhaps, is not to see theory as a starting point only, clustered
at the beginning of a work. In teaching, we often find dissertation and thesis writers having
a hard time getting their own work done, feeling that they must first review what others
have to say.
Thank you!