Cultural studies and features of cultural studies.

Topic: What is Cultural Studies?  Which are the features of Cultural Studies?

Name: Baraiya Sonal Rameshbhai.

Class: M.A.Sem-2.

Subject: Paper No.: 8- The Cultural Studies

Guide: Dilip Barad.

Submitted To: Smt. S.B. Gardi,

                                Department of English,

                                M.K.Bhavnagar University.

Introduction:

       When we discussed about Cultural Studies first we discussed about the word ‘‘Culture’’. ‘Culture’ has meant before that ‘Culture’ derives from ‘cultura’ and ‘colere’, meaning ‘to cultivate’. It also meant ‘to honour’ and ‘protect’. By the nineteenth century in Europe it meant the habits, customs and tastes of the upper classes. At the present time it is define in Cultural Studies as ‘Culture’ is the mode of generating meanings and ideas. This ‘mode’ is a negotiation over which meanings are valid. Meanings are governed by power relations. Elite culture controls meanings because it control the terms of the debate. Non-elite views on life and art are rejected as ‘tastless’, ‘useless’ or even stupid by the elite. What this implies is that certain components of culture get more visibility and significance. Through this we can say that we can’t reach at ultimate definition of culture.

What is Cultural Studies?

          The word ‘‘culture’’ itself is so difficult to pin down, cultural studies’’ is hard to define. As was also the case in chapter 8 with Elaine Showalter’s ‘‘cultural’’ model of feminine difference, ‘‘cultural studies’’ is not so much a discrete approach at all, but rather a set of practices. As Patrick Brantlinger has pointed out, cultural studies is not ‘‘a tightly coherent, unified movement with a fixed agenda,’’ but a ‘‘loosely coherent group of tendencies, issues, and questions’’. Arising from the social turmoil of the 1960s, cultural studies is composed of elements of Marxism, poststructuralism and postmodernism, feminism, gender studies, anthropology, sociology, race and ethnic studies, film theory, urban studies, public policy, popular culture studies, and postcolonial studies: those fields that concentrate on social and cultural forces that either create community or cause division and alienation. For example, drawing from Roland Barthes on the nature of the literary language and Claude Levi-Strauss on anthropology, cultural studies was influenced by structuralism and poststructuralism. Jacques Derrida’s ‘‘deconstruction’’ of the world/ text distinction, like all his deconstructions of hierarchical oppositions, has urged- or enabled- cultural critics ‘‘to erase the boundaries between high and low culture, classic and popular literary texts, and literature and other cultural discourses that, following Derrida, may be seen as menifestations of the same textulity.’’

        The discipline of psychology has also entered the field of cultural studies. For example, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious structured as a language promoted emphasis upon language and power as symbolic systems. From Michel Foucault came the notion that power is a whole complex of forces; it is that which produces what happens. A tyrannical aristocrat does not just independently wield power but is empowered by ‘‘discourses’’- accepted ways of thinking, writing, and speaking- and practices that embody, exercise, and amount to power. From punishment to sexual mores, Foucault’s ‘‘genealogy’’ of topics includes many things excluded by traditional historians, from architectural blueprints for prisons to memoirs of ‘‘deviants.’’ Psychoanalytic, structuralist, and poststructuralist approaches are treated elsewhere in this Handbook; in the present chapter, we review cultural studies’ connections with Marxism, the new historicism, multiculturalism, postmodernism, popular culture, and postcolonial studies.                                                                         

     

Features of Cultural Studies:

(1)            Power Relation and its influence and shape on cultural practices:

            In several instance earlier in this chapter we noted the cultural and new historical emphases on power relationships. For example, we noted that cultural critics assume ‘‘oppositional’’ roles in terms of power structures, wherever they might be found. Veeser, we pointed out, credited the new historicists with dealing with, ‘‘questions of politics, power, indeed on all matters that deeply affected people’s practical lives’’. And of course there are the large emphases on power in the matter of Jonathan Swift’s Laputa, as previously noted.

              Let us now approach Shakespeare’s ‘‘HAMLET’’ with a view to seeing power in its cultural context.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, these two characters that we study under the approach of cultural studies. After the play within the play, Claudius is talking privately with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet’s fellow students from Wittenberg. In response to Claudius’s plan to send Hamlet to England, Rosencrantz delivers a speech that-if read out of context-is both an excellent set of metaphors and a summation of the Elizabethan concept of the role and power of Kingship:

              The singular and peculiar life is bound

              With all the strength and armor of the mind

              To keep itself from noyance, but much more

              That spirit upon whose weal depends and rests

              The lives of many. The cease of majesty

              Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw

              What’s near it with it. It is a massy wheel

              Fixed on the summit of the highest mount,

              To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things

              Are mortised and adjoined; which, when it falls,

              Each small annexment, petty consequence,

              Attends the boisterious ruin. Never alone

              Did the king sigh but with a general groan.

Taken alone, the passage is a thoughtful and imagistically successful passage, worthy of a wise and accomplished statement.

         But how many readers and viewers of the play would rank this passage among the best-known lines of the play-with Hamlet’s soliloquies, for instance, or with the king’s effort to pray, or even with the aphorisms addressed by Polonius to his son Laertes? We venture to say that the passage, intrinsically good if one looks at it alone, is simply not well known.

  Why?

    Attention to the context and to the speaker gives the answer. Guildenstern had just agreed that he and Rosencrantz would do the king’s bidding. The agreement is only a reaffirmation of what they had told the king when he first received them at court. Both speeches are wholly in character, for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are among the jellyfish of Shakespeare’s characters. Easy it is to forget which of the two speaks which lines-indeed easy it is to forget most of their lines altogether. The two are distinctly plot-driven:

     Empty of personality, sycophantic in a sniveling way, eager to curry favor with power even if it means spying on their erstwhile friend. Weakly they admit, without much skill at denial, that they ‘‘were sent for’’. Even less successfully they try to play on Hamlet’s metaphorical ‘‘pipe,’’ to know his ‘‘stops,’’ when they are forced to admit that they could not even handle the literal musical instruments that Hamlet shows them. Still later these nonentities meet their destined ‘‘non-beingness,’’ as it were, when Hamlet, who can play the pipe so much more efficiently, substitutes their names in the death warrant intended for him.

             If ever we wished to study two characters who are marginalized, then let us look upon Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

    The meanings of their names hardly match what seems to be the essence of their characters. Murray J. Levith, for example, has written that ‘‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are from the Dutch-German: Literally, ‘garland of roses’ and ‘golden star.’ Although of religious origin, both names together sound singsong and odd to English ears. Their jingling gives them lightness, and blurs the individuality of the characters they label’’.

       Lightness to be sure. Harley Granville-Barker once wrote in an offhand way of the reaction these two roles call up for actors. Commenting on Solanio and Salarino from ‘‘The Merchant of Venice’’, he noted that their roles are ‘‘cursed by actors as the worst bores in the whole Shakespearean canon; not excepting, even those other twin brethren in nonentity, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’’.

       Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, they are pawns for Claudius first, for Hamlet second. Because they know that the power on the hand of Claudius and their more constant motive is to please the king, the power that has brought them here. Their fate, however, is to displease mightily the prince, who will undermine them and ‘‘hoist with own petard.’’ Claudius was aware of power, clearly, when he observed of Hamlet’s apparent madness that ‘‘Madness in great ones must not unwatched go’’. With equal truth Rosencrantz and Guildenstern might have observed that power in great ones also must not unwatched go.

      In short, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are no more than what Rosencrantz called a ‘‘small annexment,’’ a ‘‘petty consequence,’’ mere nothings for the ‘‘massy wheel’’ of kings. Through this we can conclude that that type of characters have same speech as hero has though they have not much attention as hero has. We seemed in various movies that supporting characters sometimes gave the idea that how to meet hero to heroine and then hero take action on that. Sometimes what happen that supporting characters are more important than hero.  For Example- In the novel Tughlaq by Girish karnad. No doubt that it is historical play but in which Girish Karnad presented same thing.  With the approach of the cultural studies we seemed in this novel that both characters Aziz and Aazam are marginalized but they both are having more commonsense than the king Tughlaq has. For example – When Tughlaq passed the rule that all coins are translated into copper that time that both characters know that when we translated coins into copper, every one made this coins and there is no any comparison and hierarchy between any of them that is why they both of them collected all silver coins with the thinking of that that when good king came and changed this nonsense rule that time these all coins help him to became rich. Not only in this matter but there are various matter that is proved that that both characters are very intelligent than hero rather the king.

(2)            Cultural studies is not simply the study of cultural as though it was a discrete entity divorced from its social or political context. Its objective is to understand culture in all its complex forms and to analyze the social and political context within which it manifests itself.

(3)             Culture in cultural studies always performs two functions: it is both the object of study and the location of political criticism and action. Cultural studies aims to be both an intellectual and a pragmatic enterprise.

(4)             Cultural studies attempts to expose and reconcile the division of knowledge, to overcome the split between tacit (that is, intuitive knowledge based on local cultures) and objective (so-called universal) forms of knowledge. It assumes a common identity and common interest between the knower and the known, between the observer and what is being observed.

(5)            Cultural studies is committed to a moral evaluation of modern society and to a radical line of political action. The tradition of cultural studies is not one of value-free scholarship but one committed to social reconstruction by critical political involvement. Thus cultural studies aims to understand and change the structures of dominance everywhere, but in industrial capitalist societies in particular.

(6)            Features of cultural studies is that it share four goals:

                           

1)    Cultural Studies transcends the confines of a particular discipline such as literary criticism or history.

2)    Cultural Studies is politically engaged as we discussed above the power relation which is related with political things. Cultural critics see themselves as ‘‘oppositional,’’ not only within their own disciplines but to many of the power structures of society at large. They question inequalities within power structures and seek to discover models for restructuring relationships among dominant and ‘‘minority’’ or ‘‘subaltern’’ discourses.

3)    Cultural Studies denies the separation of ‘‘high’’ and ‘‘low’’ or elite and popular culture.

4)    Cultural Studies analyzes not only the cultural work, but also the means of production.

Conclusion:

      In short we can say that as we discussed the characteristics of cultural studies it also have some own limitations. The weaknesses of cultural studies lie in its very strengths, particularly its emphasis upon diversity of approach and subject matter. Cultural Studies can at times seem merely an intellectual smorgasbord in which the critic blithely combines artful helpings of texts and objects and then ‘‘finds’’ deep connections between them, without adequately researching what a culture means or how cultures have interacted.