User:Daniellefink/Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies

Stuart HallJamaican-born British Marxist sociologist, cultural theorist, and political activist.

Introduction

Culture is defined as the collection of knowledge, communication, experience, beliefs, values, traditions, religions, and behaviors that define a group of people. Culture is a way of life shaped by one's surroundings; how one celebrates certain holidays; why one speaks with the tone and dialect they do; the clothing one wears. Experience builds culture. Stuart Hall, a Jamaican-British scholar, has studied the relationship between culture and political power, as well as the relationship between culture and media. How does media influence one's everyday life? What has more influence on one's culture? Is it the media? One's life experiences? Generations of tradition and belief passed down from one era to the next? Hall tackles the relationship between culture and society's influence on it in an attempt to understand its overall effects.

Stuart Hall was a contributor of critical theory and asserted himself in political and public contribution. Through his work he has explored pop and subcultures in a multicultural society and the interactions between them. Hall's goal was to break free people's way of societal understanding that has been engraved since birth in order to "unmask the power balance within society." Hall references the people of the United States and their belief in the two-party system (The Democratic Party and the Republican Party), and how people tend to align themselves with one or the other even though they see problems existing within both parties. In the same breath, those same people understand there are multiple parties in which their beliefs align, yet they tend to ignore said parties because of their lack of support. His focus was on the way society was built, and the power dynamics between it and its people. Hall also believed that the media shapes culture and its thought process, whether it be via television, print, radio, or social media today. Essentially, mass media strips society of the ability to process and form our own thoughts and ideas.

Cultural Studies Theory is the makeup of several theories that create a general perspective of culture as a whole. This includes the studying of political, capitalist democracies, media, and pop culture relationships. But what is cultural studies? Cultural studies is a study in which multiple and selective perspectives of culture examine the connection between culture and power. This relationship lies within the practices and institutions, systems classification and customs of particular that are concerned, and connected with routine and social habits or conducts. Diversity of cultural studies include gender, race, and relation between power that changes the way of thinking about culture, ideology and beliefs.

Underlying in this theory is and interest in ideology as discourse, language, and representation that highlight the cultural and ethnic differences. Hall's work has influenced conversations about culture and cultural studies internationally.

Background and History

Cultural Studies first emerged in England in the 1950-1960's. Scholars Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams began thinking about the distance between "canonical cultural touchstones—the music or books that were supposed to teach you how to be civil and well-mannered—and their own upbringings." They believed that the constantly changing forms of mass communication were changing the relationship everyone has to power and authority, "there was no longer consensus."

In 1983, the Jamaican scholar Stuart Hall, traveled to the University of Illinois to give a lecture about cultural studies. A student in the class, Jennifer Daryl Slack was so interested in cultural studies and his lecture that she decided to tape and transcribe one of the lectures. After a decade, Hall decided to publish those transcripts which took years to complete. They were finally published in 2016 in an ongoing Duke Press series called "Stuart Hall: Selected Writings,” and his transcript was called “Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History." Stuart Hall sadly died in 2014 due to kidney disease. Hall was responsible for studying the significant issues of representation and racial, ethnic, and gendered differences and their relationship to economic, political, and cultural power. To this day, his approach to cultural studies has provided the framework to show "why representation in media matters, who profits from representational matters, who gets representations matter and how matters, and why communication scholars have an ethical imperative to study them."

Cultural studies challenged the "intellectual dominance" of the Frankfurt School's model of politics and media. The Frankfurt School was founded by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in 1923 in Germany. This school was responsible for creating the model centered after World War II culture and was about the easy accessibility of mass communication developed because of the war. The Frankfurt School also composed many significant articles and manuscripts such as "The Cultural Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" (Adorno & Bernstein 2001). Research shaped from this framework consistently display's a compelling theory for "understanding the relationship between capitalism, cultural commodifications, politics, and the negative effects of the consumption of mass media and popular culture by society."

Goals and Functions

Cultural studies theory was created to study the relationships between the political, capitalist democracies, media, and popular culture. It is also the critique of media and popular culture, as they are thought to be of key importance when creating a more equitable, pluralistic, and democratic society. Stuart Hall generated two significant contributions to the study of popular communication in cultural studies. The first focuses on the study of audiences and the second emphasizes representations of race and other forms of difference.

Ideology

According to Stuart Hall, Ideologies are systems of representation in which we create meaning and he argues that these ideologies are created through a diverse array of social practices. These practices may include language, discourse, media, and popular culture. There are two cultural implications to be aware of:

1. There is not one ideology, but multiple. These systems conflict and converge to represent these multiple ideologies.
2. In capitalist democracy systems, Ideologies are located more in private institutions of civil society, rather than public government systems. Some of these private systems include schools, religious organizations, the media, and popular culture.

Therefore, the relationships between these ideological, economic, and political systems are complex and indirect. You see this frequently in elections where voters make strategic decisions on which candidate to vote for based on a series of ideologies. Some ideologies are grounded in economic beliefs, while others revealed social and political beliefs grounded in religion, nationalism, systemic racism, and gender bias.

Hegemonic Struggle and Hegemony

Hall engaged the concepts of hegemony and hegemonic struggle to piece out how capitalist democracies stayed in power when they have no control over the media or state representations. The hegemonic struggle describes the process where capitalist democracies (of a free society with freedom of speech and representation in the media) maintain preexisting organizations of political, economic, and cultural power. Under a hegemonic analysis of media and popular culture, Hall was able to identify political, economic, and cultural conditions that may eventually be incorporated into dominant ideologies and those outside of the dominant as well. Those outside of the dominant ideologies may act as internalized and external oppositional-pressure forces.

Hegemony alone is the moment where the process of ideological struggle results in a dominant political, economic, or social group achieving/maintaining economic, political, or cultural power. It is internally and incrementally unstable, hard to achieve in short term, and difficult to maintain over long periods of time. It is because of this that Hall calls for an in depth hegemonic analysis within media productions and representations and the correlation to their contexts.

Encoding/Decoding and Audiences

The theory of encoding/decoding challenges the idea that audiences are dependent on the dominant linear model of communication of sender→message→receiver. Alternatively, the theory follows a more repetitive model of communication where media messages, their production, and reception are shaped by the relationships of the economic, political, and ideological. This is given form by producers and audiences.

1. The encoding/decoding model indicates that the work of mainstream media producers is influenced by said producers consumption of ideologies, social norms, cultural labor, economic constraints, and imagined constructions of the audience.
2. The model assumes producers hold their own ideologies and thus their work is characterized by ideological struggle.
3. Audiences are seen as decoders and encoders of media representations. By media messages being composed of a set of ideologies, the audience is able to have a wide range of interpretive possibilities.

Since Hall's publication of of this model, it has given new meaning to the field of communication and its applications towards producers, content, and audiences.

Limitations

The limitations of Stuart Hall and his cultural studies can be categorized in two separate groupings. The limitations of Stuart Hall's cultural studies and the limitation of cultural studies it self. The limitations of cultural studies starts in the difficulty that the studies are never politically neutral. For usually the is always a dominate and culture above the one being analyzed causing politically skewed views. Cultural studies do allow us to see a multitude of cultures in many cultural angles giving a wide variety of ways to view and experience cultural anomalies, however this produces a normalization of culture collecting and culture fetishizing. Culture studies must focus regionally and applied to those specific regions or take concepts from there areas and apply them quite broadly.

These limitations on cultural studies reflect in Stuart Hall's cultural studies in the same manner. Hall's main studies where in the U.K where he talked a lot about the experience that he faced could be broadly applied to other cultural studies, for example Dr. Runyararo Sihle Chivaura talks about his cultural studies of African immigrants in Australia and mentions that Hall's studies are applicable but leave out the fact that culture definition is being challenged by multiple cultural communities and an individual can belong to multiple cultural communities. Dr.Chivaura talks about how Hall's work thought of culture was comprised of two distinct factors. That it was something which is deeply subjective and personal and is a structure you live. Hall's work definitely has its limitations although his work led to expanding culture studies to others.

Strengths

At the forefront of today's society is social justice and equal representation in the media. Because of Stuart Hall and his cultural studies, he introduced the study of media representation when it comes to anything political, economical, and cultural. This is extremely important and relevant because of the power the media has especially in today's society. Hall believed that in a free society, culture does not respond to a higher power in government, but it embodies a sense of the values we share as humans, and what we believe in life to be right or wrong. Hall highlights the importance of media representation as well as what groups are or are not represented and the ways the media portrays those subgroups. Hall emphasizes the importance of cultural studies avoidance of portraying a one-to-one correlation between subgroups and tries to eliminate the idea that there is one true singular ideology for these subgroups. With this being said, Hall is eradicating stereotypes and increasing attention for the equal representation in the media for all.

One of the most important strengths of this theory is its evolution over time. When Hall began his studies, he was unaware of the impact it would have for decades to come. His cultural studies work has influenced numerous elements of today's political, economic, and cultural aspects of society. The importance of his work is shown through the prominence of the mainstream media and he built a path for equal representation for all. Hall altered how we give our lives meaning and how we recognize and understand today's media representation of different cultures. The emphasis of this theory in the past and today's culture shows how this theory stands the test of time. The evolution of Hall's work allows societies to flourish and there is numerous ways to grow over time which is the true strength of this theory.

Past and Future Applications

Over time, backlash calling for more accurate ethnic and racial representations in media have sparked ideological debates on that authenticity or representational truth. Issues such as whitewashing, type-casting, and controversial stereotyped depictions of members of particular ethnic groups have pervaded medias including mainstream television and movies. Discussions about cultural studies concepts have proven to be vital to the ability to explain the overarching issues of inequality, difference, and power, and to understand the nuances of the audiences perception of these issues. Contemporary instances of ethnic and racial representation in the media can help provide insight and explain the way people approach the issue in general. Analyzing specific instances of Hall's cultural studies theory in action can help critique and fix the issues that are prevalent in the media and encourage discourse on the subject.

Issues in Pop Culture

• In 2013, a biopic following the life of black icon Nina Simone sparked outrage due to its casting of light-skinned Zoe Saldaña as the dark-skinned Simone. This viral debate and Saldaña's identification as biracial, being both Black and Latina, was a great representation of the issues that persist in reception of popular film and television such as the lack of roles being offered to dark-skinned Black Americans and Latinas due to bias and typecasting.
• In 2017, controversy ensued following the casting of Scarlett Johansson in an Asian-American role in the remake of Ghost in the Shell. This film was a live action remake of an anime novel and the casting of Johannson sparked a massive discussion on social media regarding the white-washing of films and other issues with Asian representation in Western film box offices.