Subculture: The Meaning of Style

Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979)
By Dick Hebdige

Synopsis: This book investigates the styles of subculture and the processes through which mundane objects take on symbolic dimensions. In doing so, Hebdige seeks to "recreate the dialectic between action and reaction which renders the objects meaningful" (2). Basically, this is a study of the meaning of style. Grounded in a cultural studies/semiotics perspective, Hebdige looks at case studies (Rastafarianism, hipters, teddy boys, punks, glam rockers) and performs "readings" on them, focusing on the functions of subculture, the use of styles, style as a type of communication, and style as embedded in subcultural meaning. Argues that tensions between dominant and subordinate groups are found in the surfaces of subcultures and their styles. "The meaning of subculture is, then, always in dispute, and style is the arena in which the opposing definitions clash with the most dramatic force" (3). Argues that the use of "common sense" is a way to bury ideology, i.e. of "naturalizing" it. Subcultures, he argues, represent noise and interference, as well as "symbolic challenges to a symbolic order" (page?). "Others" can either be dealt with via trivialization/domestication or turned into meaningless exotica. Bottom line: Subcultural style is intentional communication which means to be read (unlike "normal" style which attempts to be "natural" or "invisible"). Subcultural style all about collage and re-organization and mutations, rather than "pure" expressions.

Interesting Specifics:

Sometimes objects/styles become "a form of stigmata, tokens of a self-imposed exile" (2).

"...ideology saturates everyday discourse in the form of common sense" (12).

"Hegemony can only be maintained so long as the dominant classes 'succeed in framing all competing definitions within their range' [Hall, 1977]" (16).

"The succession of white subcultural forms can be read as a series of deep structural adaptations which symbolically accommodate or expunge the black presence from the host community...We can watch, played out on the loaded system of British working-class youth cultures, a phantom history of race relations since the war" (45).

"...the punk aesthetic can be read in part as a white 'translation' of black 'ethnicity'" (64).

"Reggae and punk were audibly opposed" (68).

"The twin concepts of conjuncture and specificity, (each subculture representing a distinctive 'moment' - a particular response to a particular set of circumstances) are therefore indispensable to a study of subcultural style" (84).

By subverting "conventional uses and inventing new ones, the subcultural stylist gives the lie to what Althusser has called the 'false obviousness of everyday practice'...and opens up the world of objects to new and covertly oppositional readings. The communication of a significant difference then...is the point" (102).

Subcultures can be conservative or progressive - "integrated into the community, continuous with the values of that community, or extrapolated from it, defining themselves against the parent culture" (127).

"...no amount of stylistic incantation can alter the oppressive mode in which the commodities used in subculture have been produced" (130).

Interacts With:

Many books on Janet's list, especially Stuart Hall and anything that deals with the flexibility of popular culture and the subversive potential embedded in it.
Barthes (through focus on semiotics).
Foucault ("naturalizing" of ideology by dominant class)
Gramsci (hegemony)
This is a key cultural studies book as it focuses on the totality of society, and not just on the "high" culture elements

Understanding Popular Culture

Understanding Popular Culture (2006 [1986])
By John Fiske

Synopsis: This book is an attempt to outline a theory of popular culture in capitalist societies (ix). Main argument is that popular culture is the culture of the subordinated and the disempowered, "and thus always bears within it the signs of power relations, traces of the forces of domination and subordination that are central to our social system"...(5). Popular culture is fluid and changing and full of contradiction, and change can only come from below. Popular culture is an active process that must be relevant to the immediate social situation of the people. In this way, "consumers" make their own oppositional meaning from within the space that they are given, which results in an ever present struggle for control over meaning. Uses jeans as a semiotically-rich example, as tearing can be an act of resistance. Popular culture is a type of pleasure which is sometimes subjugated by the ruling classes, as pleasure can be seen as a sort of "out of control-ness." There are two types of pleasure: jouissance (the pleasure of avoiding social order), and plaisir (the pleasure of relating to it) [I guess this comes from Barthes?]. Fiske argues that popular culture is not subject to "aesthetics" (in the elitist sense of the word), because popular culture is important for what it does and not for what it is. Popular culture can thus be used to create moments of progressivism which can help people combat the dominant culture.

Interesting Specifics:op

** Great one! Focus on for exam! **

Pop culture is full of contradiction.

In the U.S., news moves from East to West (due to time zones), and weather moves from West to East. East = Culture, West = Nature (10).

"A commodity is ideology made material" (14).

"Popular culture is not consumption; it is culture - the active process of generating and circulating meanings and pleasures within a social system: culture, however industrialized, can never be adequately described in terms of the buying and selling of commodities" (23).

A popular culture text must "contain both the forces of domination and the opportunities to speak against them" (25).

"Popular culture is the art of making due with what the system provides" (25). [This is very de Certeau]

In capitalist societies, there is no "authentic fold culture" against which to measure the "inauthentic" mass culture (27).

"Every act of consumption is an at of cultural production, for consumption is always the production of meaning" (35).

"Popular pleasures arise from the social allegiances formed by the subordinated people, they are bottom-up and thus must exist in some relationship of opposition to power (social, moral, textual, aesthetic, and so on) that attempts to discipline and control them" (49).

Loss of self = evasion of ideology [I think this connects to the idea of utopia - that within popular culture there is space to lose ones' self, and this is essentially what utopia thrives on].

"The struggle for control over the meanings and pleasures of the body... is crucial because the body is where the social is most convincingly represented as the individual and where politics can best disguise itself as human nature" (70).

The obsession with the individual body is an obsession with capitalism and labor, and what labor produces (96). [Which would be the opposite of the collective Rabelais-ian body].

"Aesthetics is naked cultural hegemony, and popular discrimination properly rejects it" (130). Aesthetics is also "an attempt by the bourgeoisie to exert the equivalent control over the cultural economy that is does over the financial" (130).

In saying popular culture is not mass culture: "Mass culture is a term used by those who believe that the cultural commodities produced and distributed by the industries can be imposed upon the people in a way that irons out social differences and produces a unified culture for a passive, alienated mass audience" (177).

"...I do wish to question the claims that radical art is politically more effective than the progressive uses of popular art" (191).

"...I believe the popular forces to be a positive influence in our society and that failing to take proper account of their progressive elements is academically and politically disabling" (194).

Interacts With:

Stuart Hall (with his belief in the firm existence of a "popular culture" category that appeals to the "downtrodden")
Anything that talks about the fluidity of popular culture.
Bakhtin (discussion of carnival and the "proper" uses of the body, especially as the body becomes "individualized" via capitalism and body as labor unit, versus the Rabelais world of the holistic/collective body)
de Certeau (as relates to idea that people make due with what they are given by the dominant culture; can then eek out own meaning within those goods/texts/practices]
Barthes
Bourdieu (as relates to idea that working class culture is more participatory, and bourgeois is more about distance)
I think this book was a bit of a break-through, idea that consumers of pop culture are not just mindless dupes, and can in fact create their own meaning and forms of resitence from what they're given.

Orientalism

Orientalism - Intro Only (2003 [1978])
By Edward Said

Synopsis: Said examines the exteriority of Orientalism - that is, its visible representation - in order to get at the origins of the use of Orientalism in the West, particularly as it relates to world political relationships and webs of power. He does this by looking at "style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, [and] not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to come great original" (21). Said argues that the Orient has helped to define Europe (and the West) via its position as a contrasting "image, idea, personality, experience" (2), hence the development of a dichotomy between the Orient and the Occident. This Western use of the Orient has allowed the West to dominate, restructure, and otherwise have authority over the Orient, a phenomena which has aesthetic, political, economic, sociological, historical, and philological dimensions.

Interesting Specifics:

Says "non-political" knowledge (such as literature) should not really be seen in such an apolitical way (10).

Orientalism is shaped by political, intellectual, cultural, and moral power (12).

Said is very interested in British, French, and American uses of the concept.

Interacts With:

In prioritizing only the image/representation, this book seems to be a straight-up myth symbol book.
References Gramsci's notion of hegemony.

Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America

Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988)
By Lawrence W. Levine

Synopsis: Investigates how and why cultural categories come into being, and demonstrates that such categories are products of their time. Looks at the movement of Shakespeare from the realm of popular to "high" culture; the sacralization of culture, partly via the emerging distinction between unique and mass-produced objects - attack on the "inauthentic"; the establishment of rigid rankings. Focuses mostly on the examples of theatre and music. Argues that culture is highly malleable and constantly in flux, thus we should not view categories as fixed and immutable. Americans became obsessed with order and individualization from the mid-nineteenth-century on, and this led to the hushing of the communally-focused bawdy, participatory theatre audiences in favor of the individually-focused and "polite" well-mannered audience. Levine expresses a sense of loss here, over "what I perceive to have been a rich shared public culture that once characterized the United States" (9). This "individualization" was partly a result of the increased chaos and "strangeness" of the city; it made elites want to escape the jumble and either retreat to the private realm or to make everyone more like the elite. The increased separation between private and public led to decreased accessibility and increased "high-brow"-ness. We need to know that "the same forms of culture can perform markedly distinct functions in different periods or among difference groups" (240).

Interesting Specifics:

"Culture is a process, not a fixed condition; it is the product of unremitting interaction between the past and the present" (33).

The Astor Place Riot of 1849 was "a struggle for power and cultural authority within a theatrical space" (68).

Although museums, symphonic halls, and parks, etc, were public places, "they were meant to create an environment in which a person could contemplate and appreciate the society's store of great culture individually. Anything that produced a group atmosphere, a mass ethos, was culturally suspect" (164).

Olmstead's Central Park (1850s) was a "didactic space" in which users had to be taught the "correct" way to use it (186).

"Highbrow" was first used in the 1880s to describe intellectual or aesthetic superiority, and "lowbrow" first used in 1900 to denote that which was not very refined or intellectual; both terms were derived from phrenology of racial types (221-22).

The creation of categories is largely about the struggle for intellectual and cultural authority (236).

Interacts With:

Stuart Hall (Hall seems to believe that categories are fixed - i.e. there is always a "popular" category, but feels that content changes)
Horrible Prettiness (transformation of theatre, from boisterous participation to "respectable" middle-classness)
Is it Eight Hours For What We Will? Basically, any of the books that talk about the rise of the middle class and of the increased separation of work from living space, and work from leisure.
The Lonely Crowd (with the discussion about the rise of "individualism" and the move away from community-mindedness); Bowling Alone;
No Place of Grace (for its discussion of the increasing importance of the "authentic")
That book that talks about John Philip Sousa (Sousa is mentioned here as one who defended his choice to appeal to the largest array of people possible - p. 235 or so).
An attack on those who feel there is a defined and definitive "cultural canon," and who believe the content and categories of such a canon are fixed and unchanging. Basically this fits with all the other books on this list that prioritize the fluidity of culture and of cultural categories.

"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"

"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975)
By Laura Mulvey

Synopsis: Utilizing Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to analyze the role of desire in the act of looking at/consuming film, Mulvey seeks to deconstruct the ease of narrative film and and visual pleasure, to "break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire" (30). Describes scopophilia (the love of looking at objects/people) as one of the biggest pleasures of cinema. In traditional cinema, this "gaze" has usually been focused on a woman, and thus the woman becomes objectified and fetishized while the male onscreen (and supposedly as embodied by the viewer too) becomes the one in control. The female becomes both an object of desire, and a representative of castration (hence, a threat). Because film is a medium which controls so much of the visual experience, "cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire" (39). We must break down these codes if we are to challenge the pleasures it provides. Bottom line: women are fetishized in film, while also embodying castration fears; the male gaze is the gaze of power.

Interesting Specifics:

"It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this essay" (30).

"Going far beyond highlighting a woman's to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself. Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing) cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire" (39).

Interacts With:

This is seen as one of the most famous film criticism essays ever written. She did introduce the idea of "the gaze," and the gaze as a symptom of power asymmetry.

Again, this annoys. Why does the gaze have to be male? Is this an inherently "male" way of looking, or is it just a "person in power" way of looking? This is problematic, and essentializes gender.

Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"

Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (1993)
by Judith Butler

Synopsis: Asks, how do certain bodies come to matter at all? Butler examines the fact that "'sex' is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time," and that "performativity "produces the phenomena that it regulates and constrains" (2). This is a mostly theoretical work which relies heavily of psychoanalytic Lacanian theory to postulate about power and hegemony and the heterosexual regime. Butler is very interested in "the body" and materiality and naming and heterosexist images. Basic argument seems to be that the heterosexual regime tries to impose itself on the materiality of bodies. She is interested in the "lesbian phallus" and all things phallocentric. She argues that the way things are named is imbibed with power and gender issues. "Performing" gender re-enforces some kind of heterosexist regime; performative acts as authoritative speech.

Interesting Specifics:

Performativity "produce[s] the phenomena that it regulates and constrains" (2).

When things are not clearly gendered, they seem almost "unhuman" (8).

"Matter" linked to "materiality" linked to productive capacity linked to womb linked to female.

"...there is no sexuality outside of power" (95).

Says she seeks in this book "to recast performativity as a specific modality of power as discourse" (187). She seems especially concerned with "the real" and with the construction of power relations.

"To the extent that gender is an assignment, it is an assignment which is never quite carried out according to expectation, whose addressee never quite inhabits the ideal s/he is compelled to approximate" (231).

Interacts With:

Honestly, this book was nearly impossible to understand, and I'm not sure if I even have a basic understanding of it yet. I realize basically that she is obsessed with gender in a fairly paranoid way, and is also obsessed with idea of "performing" gender.

Apparently, she takes a "poststructuralist" approach. According to some review in Gender and Society, Butler sees sex as "not simply a factual/natural category...rather, it is a normative one." Supposedly her theory is meant as an improvement on social constructionism.

Illuminations

Illuminations (1969)
By Walter Benjamin

Synopsis: This book is a series of essays that span about 15 years, and most are reflections on various cultural components or figures, including Baudelaire, Kafka, and Proust. Also includes a chapter on Benjamin's personal library. Book is most focused on the way history, memory, artifacts, and time together. Underlying all his work is the tension of modernity. In his most famous piece here - "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" - Benjamin argues that the shift from art as steeped in ritual and tradition, to art made solely for mechanical reproduction messes-up the concept of authenticity and also messes with the "aura" of the work. Benjamin is fixated on phenomena and "the wonder of appearance," and seems to be amazed by the way memory and history is embodied. There is a strong sense of loss and longing in his writing, and he seems very concerned with the way human relations and the artifacts between humans have been transformed by modernity. The nineteenth century seems to be more of his place than the twentieth.

Interesting Specifics:

Benjamin loved the flaneur; "To endow this crowd with a soul is the very special purpose of the flaneur" (195).

"The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity" (220).

"All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war" (241)

War is a way to mobilize all technological systems while still maintaining the property system (241).

Jew are forbidden in the Torah from investigating the future [is this why Benjamin is so obsessed with the past?].

Interacts With:

Anything on memory its link to material culture/artifacts
Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste

The Practice of Everyday Life

The Practice of Everyday Life (1984)
By Michel de Certeau

Synopsis: Utilizing a pop culture approach, de Certeau examines the ways in which "submissive groups subvert the meaning of those things imposed on them by using those things for their own, different means" (xiii). Argues that we must examine the gap between producers' intent and the actual consumer's use. He utilizes a range of fields including sociology, history, anthropology, and literature, though his theory is grounded in linguistics and focuses on speech acts and rhetoric. Book includes sections on ordinary culture, theory of practice, spatial practice, language, and believing. Is concerned with small creative acts of "weak" people rather than with overt oppositional movements; that is, how do consumers "resist" or make meaning through small acts/gestures. For example, he views walking as a creative act because you can carve your own path; reading too because it's about movement. Seems also to be annoyed by the privileging of speech/the visible/sight [interacts with Lefebvre in this way].

Interesting Specifics:

Most people today are on the margins, that is, they are not producers of culture. [This clearly is a pre-internet statement to make, because it totally leaves out the flexibility of production now, the value of the internet and digital media overall a la Convergence Culture's argument].

"Strategies" are more connected to a place/seat of power, whereas "tactics" are more about time - i.e. doing what you can in that given moment; a strategy is for those is power, a tactic is an act of the weak (37).

Strategies use spatial practices to articulate power.

"Walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language" (97).

"Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it 'speaks'" (99).

"To walk is to lack a place" (103).

Reading has no place; reader as traveler.

The fact that we no longer read out loud, shows that text no longer imposes its voice and rhythm on the body of the reader; text has become disembodied (175-76).

"The simulacrum is what the relationship of the visible to the real becomes when the assumption crumbles that an invisible immensity of Being (or of beings) lies hidden behind appearances" (187). We decide what is real based on its relationship to other things..

"The 'real' is what, in a given place, reference to another place makes people believe in" (188).

Interacts With:

Says his book interacts with Foucault in that both are interested in power and the way it is subverted.
In his focus on small everyday acts, does this connect to the Situationists at all?
Supposedly he was one of the forerunners of "power of the consumer" resistance idea, idea that small acts can be subversive and powerful. Apparently marked a turning point away from focus on the producer and to the consumer. Seen as radical.
Most every book on Janet's list that deals with resistance and re-appropriation/flexibility of meaning. Basically any book that talks about the ability of the consumer to create their own meaning from what they're given. Focus is on the consumer, not the producer.
Fiske (Understanding Popular Culture), Lefebvre, Bourdieu
Supposedly also refutes Bourdieu's idea that people are passive prisoners of the habitus and that cultural practices are used only to gain power. De Certeau says small cultural practices are ways of circumventing power. [So, his view believes more in agency that Bourdieu's does.]

The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art

The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (1988)
By James Clifford

Synopsis: This book examines the "postcolonial crisis of ethnographic authority" - that is, "who has the authority to speak for a group's identity or authenticity?" (8). It does this by tracing the development of anthropology, and says that West can no longer consider itself to the the sole authority on 'other' cultures. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the argument that there is tension between the humanizing aspect of anthropology which seems to render things understandable (the render the strange ordinary), and the surrealist aspect which seeks to render the ordinary strange. The surrealist does this by picking up on fragments and random oddness. Clifford himself is more in favor of the surrealist approach, and writes that "A 'culture' is, concretely, an open-ended, creative dialogue of subcultures, of insiders and outsiders, of diverse factions" (46). In this way, an ethnography of polyvocality should be employed. Some anthropology tries to "collect" culture, corner it, and categorize it, and label the non-Western as primitive artifacts always on the verge of disappearing.


Interesting Specifics:

Participant observation began around the 1940s.

"Ethnography is an explicit from of cultural critique sharing radical perspectives with dada and surrealism" (12).

"The West can no longer present itself as the unique purveyor of anthropological knowledge about others" (22).

"A 'culture' is, concretely, an open-ended, creative dialogue of subcultures, of insiders and outsiders, of diverse factions" (46).

Clifford equates surrealism with ethnography because surrealism's aesthetic "values fragments, curious collections, unexpected juxtapositions - that works to provoke the manifestation of extraordinary realities drawn from the domains of the erotic, the exotic, and the unconscious" (118). Seeks to provoke the unexpected (145). Culture now is all fragments and irony, and culture now as an object to be collected (120).

But, this ethnographic surrealism is different from ethnographic humanism which seeks to render culture and things comprehensible. [In this way, the two approaches can be seen as postmodernist vs. modernist].

Interacts With:
Seems to take a positive postmodern approach, without really explicitly talking about postmodernism. In this way, can be seen to interact with:
Jameson (pomo negative), Koolhaas (pomo positive), Venturi and Brown (pomo positive), Baudriliard (pomo negative, bordering on pomo neutral)

The History of Sexuality: An Introduction

The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1 (1990 [1978])
By Michel Foucault

Synopsis: Asks: Why have Westerners so obsessively talked about sex since the 17th century? Also wants to know "why we burden ourselves today with so much guilt for having once made sex a sin" (9). "The object, in short, is to define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality in our part of the world" (11). Says that all of the repression and endless discourse surrounding sexuality has been motivated by one major concern: "to ensure population, to reproduce labor capacity, to perpetuate the form of social relations: in short, to constitute a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative" (37). [I love that line! Conspiracy!] Foucault basically lays out the various ways sexuality came to be talked about and the ways it came to be controlled via its relegation to certain spheres and certain "pathologized" definitions (i.e. how it came to be cornered and contained and used as an element of power and weapon of control). Argues that in the 17th century, with an increased influence of Christianity and with the rise of the bourgeois, sex was pushed into a constant discourse and through an endless process of speech. It was not that we all became "repressed," but rather, sex was taken up and "owned" by the bourgeois and forced into very specific categories which they could then control - i.e. sex was "supposed" to be for married couples. Other types of sexuality which did not fit this category were pathologized and made deviant - and we see a rise in these "other" sexualities because of attempts to control them. The bourgeois control of sexuality focused on four categories: 1) the hysterical woman; 2) the masturbating child; 3) the Malthusian couple; 4) the perverse adult. Childhood sexuality was especially suspect and squelched, providing proof of the way sexuality was "discoursed" as a tool of power and control. Power is embedded in everything.

Interesting Specifics:

"...power is tolerable only on condition that is mask a substantial part of itself" (86).

It was in the bourgeois family that sexuality of kids and adolescents was first problematized and feminine sexuality medicalized (120).

Sex became a tool through which the body was disciplined and the population was regulated; the discussion of sex thus became a supreme form of power and control.

Interacts With:
Refutes books that deal with Victorian repression hypothesis. Foucault says it wasn't repression, it was obsession - but obsession forced into a very specific and controlled discourse.

Mythologies

Mythologies (1972; 1957 in French)
By Roland Barthes

Synopsis: French literary critic Barthes attempts to show the ways in which the bourgeois try to naturalize myth. Each chapter focuses on a different myth or symbol and discusses what that symbol/object has come to represent. Includes things like wrestling, fringe bangs signaling "Ancient Roman-ness," the platonic beauty of certain faces, wine, steak as symbolizing vigor, Einstein's brain as symbolizing man's triumph over nature, photos of political candidates, etc. "Myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion" (129). "The naturalization of the concept...[is] the essential function of myth" (131). This is one of the goals of the bourgeois, to get people to see their ideas as true realities/facts, and not as the constructs that they are. If the bourgeois can get people to see myths as natural or as a matter of common sense, then they can control reality, in a way; can get others to believe that their (the bourgeois) system, is the naturally right and true system (this is my take on him, at least).

Interesting Specifics:

"Myth is a type of speech" (109).

Signifier + signified = sign

Signifiers: "Its form is empty but present, its meaning absent but full" (124).

"Myth is always a language robbery" (131).

"Myth is depoliticized speech" (143); it purifies things and "makes them innocent" (143).

"Myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts" (143).

"The bourgeoisie hides the fact that it is the bourgeoisie and thereby produces myth; revolution announces itself openly as revolution and thereby abolishes myth" (146).

There are no left-wing myths.

"The foundation of the bourgeois statement of fact is common sense, that is, truth when it stops on the arbitrary order of him who speaks it" (155).

Interacts With;
Barthes is supposedly a structuralist (i.e. looks are things as eternal; ahistorical) on the cusp of poststructuralism. But, you cannot do poststructuralist myth and symbol because poststructuralism is all about being contingent on history, politics, class, conditions, etc; myth, by definition, transcends all these things.

Apparently Barthes believes that all myths are bad - no matter who wields them - because they are inherently oppressive.

"Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular'"

"Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular'" (1981)
By Stuart Hall

Synopsis: Popular culture is the battleground on which the struggle for power and cultural meaning is fought. Presents his theory of popular culture as an alternative to the two existing views, which claim that 1) "the people" are passive and are being duped constantly by dominant forces, or 2) there is some real or pure working-class culture that exists entirely beyond the bounds of dominant culture. He argues instead that while of course the dominant culture will have some effect, we should not look at things as being of one extreme pole or the other - i.e. of pure autonomy or of total encapsulation. Popular culture should be defined through its continuing tension with the dominant culture. It is not, after all, the content that makes it popular, but rather the "class struggle in and over culture" that makes it so. Thus, popular culture as a category is always contingent upon historical and social circumstances. Symbols and signs are never fixed in meaning throughout time, and there is no "universal popular aesthetic" - different groups can appropriate for different purposes and with different meanings. It all comes down to the popular causes versus the power-bloc, and context is everything. While always changes, the contentpower struggle is always there.

"The Place of Landscape: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting the American Scene"

"The Place of Landscape: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting the American Scene" (Dec 1997)
By Richard Schein (from Annals)

Synopsis: Although there is much ongoing debate as to what a cultural landscape is, all definitions have two major points: 1) they look at cultural landscape as a material object, and 2) "all are cohered by a loosely defined set of commonly accepted key works" (661). Basically, "the cultural landscape is produced and is ultimately implicated in the ongoing reproduction of social and cultural life" (662). Cultural landscapes are "discourses materialized" (663), and are potentially liberating mediums for social change as they are constantly "implicated in the ongoing reconstitution of a discourse" (664). Uses the example of the Kentucky suburb of Ashland Park (designed by Olmsted) to show ways in which landscape architecture, insurance mapping zones (Sanborn maps), zoning, historic preservation, the neighborhood association, and consumption all work to create discourses which shaped and were shaped by Ashland Park. Thus, "the cultural landscape serves to naturalize or concretize - to make normal - social relations as embodied in the various discourses and their combinations" (676). Thus, "the human agent is both object and subject" (676). [Hmm - talk about dialecticalism!]. We should look at the material and symbolic , and the interplay of actors as objects and subjects.

Interesting Specifics:

Cultural landscapes contain many different meanings and have "nodes' at the intersection of various different knowledge networks.

This article is the one that includes the cool Sanborn map description.

Contains an interesting discussion of zoning too.

The Federal Register was established in 1966 along with the Historic Preservation Act of 1966.

The American landscape is a "paradox between ideals of liberal individualism and the cultural landscape's disciplinary capabilities" (676).

Interacts With:

Debate as to what cultural landscape is about, but seems to fall in line with neither "old" or "new" cultural geography.
Basically, support idea that we need to look at both symbolic and material.

"The Reinvention of Cultural Geography"

"The Revinvention of Cultural Geography"
By Marie Price and Martin Lewis (1993)

Synopsis: This article started a series of arguments and responses, and is basically refuting the "new cultural geographers'" claim that the "old" Berkeley School style was highly problematic and that the "new" people are doing something totally different. Feels that new cultural geographers critique the Berkeley School for only being concerned with artifacts, and for being anti-ethnographical and very conservative. Price and Lewis say no, that Berkeley School is not just about artifacts. and that Sauer never really did embrace the problematic superorganic model. Denis Cosgrove responds by saying he doesn't consider himself part of any school, and maybe Price and Lewis are pissed because geography is more about the city now. James Duncan replies that Sauer must have had an implicit theory of culture, and maybe is did fit superorganic model. Peter Jackson says fuck off, there is no coherent "new cultural geography" group, so stop policing the boundaries. Bottom line question: Has cultural geography split from its Berkeley roots, or has it simply broadened?

The Condition of Postmodernity

The Condition of Postmodernity
By David Harvey (1990)

Synopsis: Asks: What is postmodernism, and are we indeed living in a postmodern age? His overall argument is that postmodernism builds on ideas of modernism (in its reaction to change, chaos, ephemerality, and time-space compression), but whereas modernism was all about the grand overarching plan that would make everything better, postmodernism represents the death of the grand narrative. Postmodernism instead embraces chaos and fragmentation and collage (and embraces the signifier rather than the signified), and was aided by the disembodied nature of capitalism itself. Though he celebrates the multiplicity of postmodernism, Harvey is afraid it may cause each specific group to remain in their own little ghettos, and a focus on surface and difference might lead to larger political inertia or disengagement from bigger picture (117-118). The late 1960s brought on a crisis of overaccumulation, as capitalism is a fetishizer and creator of new needs and wants.

Interesting Specifics:

Says postmodernism arose between 1968-72 as a result of the anti-modern movement of the 1960s (38).
1914 marks the rise of Fordism and ushering in of new way of life obsessed with mass production and functionalism.
Jefferson's homesteading project helped spatially set-up Enlightenment ideal in a utopian way (255-57).
Talks about the rise of image consultants as a fairly postmodern phenomenon (288).
Time-space compression (beginning around 1910 he says) is central to both modernism and postmodernism.

Geographical Imaginations

Geographical Imaginations
By Derek Gregory (1994)

Synopsis: This book details various episodes in the history of geography and does so by showing the ways they interact with other histories. It also focuses on "the problematic of visualization," or the way in which sight has come to dominate the modern era (15-16). By the end of the nineteenth century, it was common for "European ways of knowing to render things as objects to be viewed " (34), which basically served to create a distance between the observer and the observed - a main definer of modernity. His book focuses mostly on a history of different understandings of space. Spends some time on postmodern thinkers as well. Talks a lot about Harvey (actually seems to summarize a lot of his work) and criticizes him for being too Western-centric and lacking in feminist perspective. Talks also about Lefebvre and his view that the visual has taken over, leaving an absence of any bodily dimension (392). Ends with idea that we need to come up with a more holistic and true human geography.

Interesting Specifics:

Says David Harvey and others view Haussmann's redo of Paris as a triumph of bourgeois values, making the public spaces akin to bourgeois private spaces (222).

The Production of Space

The Production of Space (1991) [1974]
By Henri Lefebvre

Synopsis: Wants to bridge the gap between mental space, real/physical space, and social space, and thus is looking for a unitary theory of mental, physical, and social space which would break down the barriers between the various kinds of spaces (21). Spatial practice, representation of space, and representational space all work to form the perceived-conceived-lived triad (40). Space is intertwined with social processes, and social space is "a materialization of 'social being'" (102). Capitalism has fucked things up because it has compartmentalized and separated the various types of spaces, following the logic of the way we separate the forms of labor and production. Dominated space = space transformed by technology and practice; appropriated space = space adapted to the needs of the groups; abstract space = reduces all space to signs and symbols, thus obscuring the reality of the space - it's a tool of domination and it's the logic of state-imposed, destructive force. Therefore, to transform society we must transform space; we must move from the production of things (capitalism), to the production of space (with a decrease in private ownership). He wants to increase a sense of holism and unity in a world that has been fractured and compartmentalized and fethishized, and wants an organic, bottom-up space of the people. This book is heavily influenced by Marxism, and today is loved by postmodern geographers like Soja and Dear. Is a critique of poststructuralism, structuralism, and logocentrism. Lefebvre was a communist and socialist and Situationist. Believes in the revolutionary potential of space.

Specifics:

Sight has nearly totally eclipsed all the other senses due to our obsession with and prioritizing of signs and language (logocentrism) (139).

"To change life we must first change space" (190).

Modern life has caused a fracturing of the body into separate, disconnected parts (205).

"...absolute space is located nowhere. It has no place because it embodies all places, and has a strictly symbolic existence" (256).

Parts of the city are sexualized, just as certain zones of leisure are sexualized (310).

The bourgeois apartment has been stripped of eros (315).

Lefebvre was part of the Situationist movement.