Class I : Basic Concepts- what is culture

What is culture (and what is not)?
Raymond Williams (1976), Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society
- Europe 17th-18th : “human tending direct” & “extension of particular processes to a general process”
- “civilization” /“cultivation”: government as a social process > tradition and nation emphasis non-material (esp industrial) establishment
- modern sense: 1. a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development; 2. indicate a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group; 3. works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity
- Raymond Williams: “whole form of our common life”; T.S. Eliot: “a whole way of life”

During, “Going global”
“Culture is not a thing or even a system: it’s a set of transactions, process, mutations, practices, technologies, institutions, out of which things and events are produced, to be experienced, lived out and given meaning and value to in different ways within the unsystematic networks of differences and mutations from which they emerged to start with.” (p. 6)
- site of culture: state (e.g.訪故宮林曼麗院長), market, civil society

中文：文化
- 辭海：「文治教化」 『聖人之治天下也，先文德而後武力。凡武之興為不服，也文化不改，然後加誅』(漢‧劉向《說苑‧指武》) (另可參：邸永君「文化一詞之由來」 http://www.studytimes.com.cn/txt/2005-07/27/content_5925992.htm )

Mulhern Culture/Metaculture-Familiar: “culture as a storehouse of essentially human or essentially national values.”
-Radical: “the ordinary social, historical world of sense, of “symbolic” or meaning-bearing activity in all its forms.””

-Metaculture: reflective, being themselves a part of what they speak of > culture speak of itself, generality of sense-making activity, investigation into social-historical conditions

-Value (European): normative value (Matthew Arnold 1860s): critique- standard marking, the BEST/ humanity (Johann Gottfired von Herder 1774): human-ness, historical relative- “culture-as-national -value”
-Anthropology: ‘a whole way of life’ (T.S. Eliot); learned rather than instinctive behaviour
-Cultural studies: egalitarian ethic – WHY? “revoke the historic privileges of culture with a capital C and vindicate the active meanings and values of the subordinate majority as core elements of a possible alternative order.”> political ! > culture is the object & the subject of discourse, i.e. what I see (decode) and speak/ do (encode)


What is Identity?
During, “Debating Identity”
- self as social being (there is no identity if there is no human society)
- collective >< individual (compromise of oneself, e.g. cigarettes break)
- constant & relational: (ds. instinct, natural born, e.g. gender, race)
- partial: 1.selective external features; 2. multiple identities (e.g.香港人 中國人；張惠妹因台獨傾向杭州個唱取消)
- ascribed: meaning of terms determined by others (e.g. nigger/ Negro 鬼佬 queer)
- identification (as a process): dis/connection to ascribed identity> psychic damage (男人婆 / 女人型) ( ~ subject position e.g. 靚女)
> framework of life (happiness/ punishment霸王別姬-男兒郎/女嬌娥/ 中學集體暴力/ 女工) / inherited/ chosen: corporeality
- exclusive: others(左傳‧成公四年「非我族類 其心必異」 ); difference & classification (Woodward)

Woodward: Identity and Difference“ […] the signifying practices and symbolic systems through which meanings are produced and which position us as subjects. Representations produce meanings through which we can make sense of our experience of who we are […] what we are and what we can become. Representation as a cultural process establishes individuals and collective identities and symbolic systems provides possible answers to the questions: who am I? ” (p.14)

Woodward , Identity and Difference- signifying practices and symbolic systems through which meanings are produced and which position us as subjects
- through which we can make sense of our experience and of who we are
- identification: imagination of what one “feels like” when occupy a subject position (esp. in advertisement)
- Benedict Anderson -“imagined community” (> nationalism) / Hall: histories and shared past (and re-writing of history), “re-telling of the past […] thus it’s belongs more to the future than to the past” (> social movements)
(pic: )
Hall: Cultural Identity and Diaspora- Colonization: power/ knowledge – dominate discourse (Foucault); pre-empt of history (Fanon)
- Difference & continuity: meanings always in deferral
> “Cultural identities are the points of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made, within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence but a positioning.” (pp. 226)

Politics and Power: Who’s afraid cultural studies, who’s afraid of politics? - worldliness, responsibility and interdisciplinary
- “study of culture itself belongs to culture” (During., p.7)
During, “Debating Identity”- identity politics
- 70s American civil movements, feminist, ethnic minorities (African American), sexual minorities…> respect, social visibility, social justice
- norm: white middle class male- subject of the human universe, enlightenment: centre of the Earth (Christianity), bearer of Reason (pic: 中國農民穿西裝褸)
- context: post WWII- decline of European colonial power, industrialization and economic power of women, Holocaust, contraception, suburbanization & subculture in inner city
~ problematic of identity politics: “post-identity”, internal differences, essentialism, exclusivity, over-look of everyday life reality, fragmentation, exploitation
~ contribution: “Hybridity” (Homi Bhabha), “unities in difference” (Stuart Hall) (Robert Young critique: oppositional logic)
~ conclusion: culture is constructed reality

During, “Going global”
“[…] a will to interpret the culture within the protocols of academic knowledge […] as well as a (political) drive to connect with everyday life as lived outside the academy, and especially as lived by those with relatively little power or status.” (pp.8-9)

“engaged study of culture”- “a field of power-relations involving centres and peripheries, status hierarchies, connections to norms that impose repressions or marginalisation. But I also mean a commitment to celebrating or critiquing culture forms, to produce accounts of culture that can be fed back into cultural production and / or to producing new connections between various cultural forms and people in ‘ordinary life’. ”/ it is thus a humanities subject than social science (p.9)(humanistic approach to design, see: Victor Papnaek, “The green imperative: ecology and ethics in design and architecture”, London: Thames & Hudson, 1995)
- being intellectual and critical as well as self-reflective and ordinary-sensible

Readings:
Introduction to class I & II:
*Kathryn Woodward ed., “Introduction”, Identity and Difference, Sage: 1997, pp.8-19. (Textbook-like easy introduction)
* Hall, Stuart (1997b): “The Work of Representation,” in Stuart Hall ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: SAGE Publications, pp.15-74. (at least, conclusion, pp.61-62)
Francis Mulhern, “Introduction”, Culture/ Metaculture, London: Routledge, 2000, pp. xiii-xxi.
Stuart Hall, “Who Needs ‘Identity’?” and ” “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, Questions of Cultural Identity, Thousand Oaks & New Delhi: Sage, pp.1-17, pp. 222-237.
Chris Jenks, “Cultural studies: what is it?”, Culture, London: Routledge, 1993, pp.151-158. (Easy reference on the establishment of the discipline.)
陶東風：《文化研究》，桂林：廣西師範大學出版社，2006年。(Textbook-like easy introduction)

Reading for class III (2Feb) tutorial discussion:
*Kathryn Woodward ed., “Introduction”, Identity and Difference, Sage: 1997, pp.8-19. (Textbook-like easy introduction)
*Simon During, “Going global”, Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge, pp.5-13.

Reading for class IV (9Feb)tutorial discussion:
* John Fiske, “Communication, Meaning and Signs”, Introduction to Communication Studies, London & New York: Routledge, 1990, pp.39-63.

Some reading tools:
A good dictionary!
Macey, David, The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory, London ; New York : Penguin Books, 2001.
廖炳惠編：《關鍵詞200：文學與批評研究的通用辭彙編》，台北：麥田出版，2003。

*必讀！