Persons
Lecture 1
Raymond Williams
Culture is “one of two or three most complicated words in the English language.”
Noun: growing crops
Expanded: cultivating the mind (Bildung) (18th century)
Culture as “lived experience” connected to a specific group (19th century): a more anthropological
definition of culture as a whole and distinctive way of life
He wanted to understand how and why cultural meanings and practices are enacted on a terrain that
is not of our making, even as we struggle to creatively shape our lives.
cultural materialism
● a whole way of life
● the arts and learning
Three levels of culture:
● The lived culture of a particular time and place,
● The recorded culture, of every kind, from art to the most everyday facts
● The culture of the selective tradition: the factor connecting lived culture and recorded culture
(making selections about what to record and archive and what not)
Matthew Arnold
Culture is a form of “human civilization” that counters the “anarchy … of the raw and uncultivated
masses”
Culture is… “the best that has been thought and said in the world”
F.R. Leavis
Culture is… the high point of civilization, and culture is… the concern of an educated minority
Lecture 2
Stuart Hall
“We must think a society or social formation as ever and always constituted by a set of complex
practices; each with its own specificity, its own modes of articulation.”
Television is implicated in ‘the provision and the selective construction of social knowledge, of social
imagery, through which we perceive the “worlds”, the “lived realities” of others, and imaginarily
reconstruct their lives and ours into some intelligible “world-of-the-whole”
We should think of the process of television encoding as the articulation of linked but distinct
moments in a circuit of meaning.
Each of the moments in this circuit has its specific practices which are necessary for the circuit but
which do not guarantee the next moment.
Although meaning is embedded in each level, it is not necessarily taken up at the next level. The
production of meaning what meaning you give to it on the production level (encoding) does not ensure
the consumption that meaning the meaning others understand (decoding).
‘circuit of television’
, Production: You make a show (always within a cultural context)
Distribution: You need to circulate the show (distribution channels)
Circulation: Viewers interpret it in their own way (from within their own cultural context)-
Reproduction: Viewers ‘use’ it to make sense of their own lives (it has impact on how people
think of themselves, the world, etc.
The enlightenment subject -> “… was based on a conception of the human person as a fully centred,
unified individual, endowed with the capacity of reason, consciousness and action, whose ‘centre’
consisted of an inner core … The essential centre of the self was a person’s identity.”
Five major shifts Leading to the decentered subject
Marxism: our agency and interests are determined by class
Psychoanalysis: our agency and interests are determined by subconscious drives
Psychoanalytic view of personhood fractures the cartesian subject by splitting it into three
levels: ego, superego and unconscious
Psychoanalysis explains how the ‘inside’ identity links up to the outside discourse of power
Psychoanalysis rejects the fixed nature of the subject and sexuality
Psychoanalysis points to the psychic and emotional identity of subjectivity through
identification
Feminism: our agency and interests are determined by gender
Challenges the distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ through the statement ‘the personal
is political’
Inner notions of identity, particularly gender, are therefore influenced by outside interactions.
Language: our agency and interests are determined by discourse
Foucault and the docile body: our agency and interests are shaped by disciplinary technologies.
The subject is entirely the product of history/power
Subjectivity is a discursive production: You do not actively and autonomously form your own
identity (‘the great myth of the interior’), you can only discursively produce it from existing
subject positions
Disciplinary technologies produce ‘docile bodies’ which can be subjected, transformed and
improved
Rationalization
Race does not exist outside its representation: it is formed in and by symbolization in a process of
social and political power struggle.
“Such a term [Black] “functions like a language.” Indeed it does - language, in fact, since the
formations in which I place it, based on my own experience, both in the Caribbean and in Britain, do
not correspond exactly to the American situation. It is only at the ‘chaotic’ level of language in general
that they are the same. In fact what we find are differences, specificities, within different, even if
related, histories.”
Lecture 1
Raymond Williams
Culture is “one of two or three most complicated words in the English language.”
Noun: growing crops
Expanded: cultivating the mind (Bildung) (18th century)
Culture as “lived experience” connected to a specific group (19th century): a more anthropological
definition of culture as a whole and distinctive way of life
He wanted to understand how and why cultural meanings and practices are enacted on a terrain that
is not of our making, even as we struggle to creatively shape our lives.
cultural materialism
● a whole way of life
● the arts and learning
Three levels of culture:
● The lived culture of a particular time and place,
● The recorded culture, of every kind, from art to the most everyday facts
● The culture of the selective tradition: the factor connecting lived culture and recorded culture
(making selections about what to record and archive and what not)
Matthew Arnold
Culture is a form of “human civilization” that counters the “anarchy … of the raw and uncultivated
masses”
Culture is… “the best that has been thought and said in the world”
F.R. Leavis
Culture is… the high point of civilization, and culture is… the concern of an educated minority
Lecture 2
Stuart Hall
“We must think a society or social formation as ever and always constituted by a set of complex
practices; each with its own specificity, its own modes of articulation.”
Television is implicated in ‘the provision and the selective construction of social knowledge, of social
imagery, through which we perceive the “worlds”, the “lived realities” of others, and imaginarily
reconstruct their lives and ours into some intelligible “world-of-the-whole”
We should think of the process of television encoding as the articulation of linked but distinct
moments in a circuit of meaning.
Each of the moments in this circuit has its specific practices which are necessary for the circuit but
which do not guarantee the next moment.
Although meaning is embedded in each level, it is not necessarily taken up at the next level. The
production of meaning what meaning you give to it on the production level (encoding) does not ensure
the consumption that meaning the meaning others understand (decoding).
‘circuit of television’
, Production: You make a show (always within a cultural context)
Distribution: You need to circulate the show (distribution channels)
Circulation: Viewers interpret it in their own way (from within their own cultural context)-
Reproduction: Viewers ‘use’ it to make sense of their own lives (it has impact on how people
think of themselves, the world, etc.
The enlightenment subject -> “… was based on a conception of the human person as a fully centred,
unified individual, endowed with the capacity of reason, consciousness and action, whose ‘centre’
consisted of an inner core … The essential centre of the self was a person’s identity.”
Five major shifts Leading to the decentered subject
Marxism: our agency and interests are determined by class
Psychoanalysis: our agency and interests are determined by subconscious drives
Psychoanalytic view of personhood fractures the cartesian subject by splitting it into three
levels: ego, superego and unconscious
Psychoanalysis explains how the ‘inside’ identity links up to the outside discourse of power
Psychoanalysis rejects the fixed nature of the subject and sexuality
Psychoanalysis points to the psychic and emotional identity of subjectivity through
identification
Feminism: our agency and interests are determined by gender
Challenges the distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ through the statement ‘the personal
is political’
Inner notions of identity, particularly gender, are therefore influenced by outside interactions.
Language: our agency and interests are determined by discourse
Foucault and the docile body: our agency and interests are shaped by disciplinary technologies.
The subject is entirely the product of history/power
Subjectivity is a discursive production: You do not actively and autonomously form your own
identity (‘the great myth of the interior’), you can only discursively produce it from existing
subject positions
Disciplinary technologies produce ‘docile bodies’ which can be subjected, transformed and
improved
Rationalization
Race does not exist outside its representation: it is formed in and by symbolization in a process of
social and political power struggle.
“Such a term [Black] “functions like a language.” Indeed it does - language, in fact, since the
formations in which I place it, based on my own experience, both in the Caribbean and in Britain, do
not correspond exactly to the American situation. It is only at the ‘chaotic’ level of language in general
that they are the same. In fact what we find are differences, specificities, within different, even if
related, histories.”
