the world according to John Fiske

The term culture, as used in the phrase "cultural studies," is neither aesthetic nor humanist in emphasis, but political. Culture is not conceived of as the aesthetic ideals of form and beauty found in great art, or in more humanist terms as the voice of the "human spirit" that transcends boundaries of time and nation to speak to a hypothetical universal man (the gender is deliberate - women play little or no role in this conception of culture).

Culture is not, then, the aesthetic products of the human spirit acting as a bulwark against the tide of grubby industrial materialism and vulgarity, but rather a way of living within an industrial society that encompasses all the meanings of that social experience.

Legs, Stunet? Hah! Strap yourself in...

Blowie, you'll need a few more schooies...well, more than usual...

Cultural studies is concerned with the generation and circulation of meanings in
industrial societies...
They start with the belief that meanings and the making of them (which together
constitute culture) are indivisibly linked to social structure and can only be explained in
terms of that structure and its history. Correlatively, the social structure is held in place
by, among other forces, the meanings that culture produces; as Stuart Hall says, "A set of
social relations obviously requires meanings and frameworks which underpin them and
hold them in place." These meanings are not only meanings of social experience, but also
meanings of self, that is, constructions of social identity that enable people living in
industrial capitalist societies to make sense of themselves and their social relations.
Meanings of experience and meanings of the subject (or self) who has that experience are
finally part of the same cultural process.

Also underlying this [cultural studies] work is the assumption that capitalist societies are divided societies. The primary axis of division was originally thought to be class, though gender and race have now joined it as equally significant producers of social difference. Other axes of division are nation, age group, religion, occupation, education, political allegiance, and so on. Society, then, is not an organic whole but a complex network of groups, each with different interests and related to each other in terms of their power relationship with the dominant classes. Social relations are understood in terms of social power, in terms of a structure of domination and subordination that is never static but is always the site of contestation and struggle.

Social power is the power to get one's class or group interest served by the social structure as a whole, and social struggle - or, in traditional Marxist terms, the class struggle - is the contestation of this power by the subordinate groups. In the domain of culture, this contestation takes the form of the struggle for meaning, in which the dominant classes attempt to "naturalize" the meanings that serve their interests into the "common-sense" of society as a whole, whereas subordinate classes resist this process in various ways and to varying degrees and try to make meanings that serve their own interests.

The attempt of the dominant classes to naturalize their meanings rarely, if ever, results
from the conscious intention of individual members of those classes (though resistance to
it is often, though not always, both conscious and intentional). Rather, it must be
understood as the work of an ideology inscribed in the cultural and social practices of a
class and therefore of the members of that class. And this brings us to another basic
assumption: culture is ideological.

The cultural studies tradition does not view ideology in its vulgar Marxist sense of
"false consciousness," for that has built into it the assumption that a true consciousness is
not only possible but will actually occur when history brings about a proletarian society.
This sort of idealism seems inappropriate to the late twentieth century [early twenty first?], which appears to have demonstrated not the inevitable self-destruction of capitalism but its unpredicted (by Marx) ability to reproduce itself and to incorporate into itself the forces of resistance and opposition. History casts doubt on the possibility of a society without ideology, in which people have a true consciousness of their social relations.

Structuralism, another important influence on British cultural studies, also denies the
possibility of a true consciousness, for it argues that reality can only be comprehended
through language or other cultural meaning systems. Thus the idea of an objective,
empirical "truth" is untenable. Truth must always be understood in terms of how it is
made, for whom, and at what time it is "true." Consciousness is never the product of truth
or reality but rather of culture, society, and history.

Althusser and Gramsci were the theorists who offered a way of accommodating both
structuralism (and, incidentally, Freudianism) and the history of capitalism in the
twentieth century with Marxism.

For Althusser, ideology is not a static set of ideas imposed upon the subordinate by the dominant classes but rather a dynamic process constantly reproduced and reconstituted in practice - that is, in the ways that people think, act, and understand themselves and their relationship to society.

He rejects the old idea that the economic base of society determines the entire cultural superstructure. He replaces this base/superstructure model with his theory of over-determination, which not only allows the superstructure to influence the base but also produces a model of the relationship between ideology and culture that is not determined solely by economic relations.

At the heart of this theory is the notion of ideological state apparatuses (ISAs),
by which he means social institutions such as the family, the educational system,
language, the media, the political system, and so on. These institutions produce in people
the tendency to behave and think in socially acceptable ways (as opposed to repressive
state apparatuses such as the police force or the law, which coerce people into behaving according to the social norms).

The social norms, or that which is socially acceptable, are of course neither neutral nor objective; they have developed in the interests of those with social power, and they work to
maintain their sites of power by naturalizing them into the commonsense - the only -
social positions for power. Social norms are ideologically slanted in favor of a particular
class or group of classes but are accepted as natural by other classes, even when the
interests of those other classes are directly opposed by the ideology reproduced by living
life according to those norms.

Social norms are realized in the day-to-day workings of the ideological state apparatuses.
Each one of these institutions is "relatively autonomous," according to Althusser,
and there are no overt connections between it and any of the others - the legal system is
not explicitly connected to the school system nor to the media, for example - yet they all
perform similar ideological work. They are all patriarchal; they are all concerned with the
getting and keeping of wealth and possessions; and they all endorse individualism and
competition between individuals. But the most significant feature of ISAs is that they all
present themselves as socially neutral, as not favoring one particular class over any other.

Each presents itself as a principled institutionalization of equality: the law, the media,
and education all claim, loudly and often, to treat all individuals equally and fairly. The
fact that the norms used to define equality and fairness are those derived from the
interests of the white, male, middle classes is more or less adequately disguised by these
claims of principle, though feminists and those working for racial and class harmony
may claim that this disguise can be torn off with relative ease.

Althusser's theory of overdetermination explains this congruence between the
"relatively autonomous" institutions by looking not to their roots in a common,
determining economic base but to an overdetermining network of ideological interrelationships among all of them. The institutions appear autonomous only at the official level of stated policy, though the belief in this "autonomy" is essential for their
ideological work. At the unstated level of ideology, however, each institution is related to
all the others by an unspoken web of ideological interconnections, so that the operation
of any one of them is "overdetermined" by its complex, invisible network of interrelationships with all the others. Thus the educational system, for example, cannot
tell a story about the nature of the individual different from those told by the legal
system, the political system, the family, and so on.

Ideology is not, then, a static set of ideas through which we view the world but a
dynamic social practice, constantly in process, constantly reproducing itself in the
ordinary workings of these apparatuses. It also works at the micro-level of the individual.
To understand this we need to replace the idea of the individual with that of the subject.

The individual is produced by nature, the subject by culture. Theories of the individual
concentrate on differences between people and explain these differences as natural.
Theories of the subject, on the other hand, concentrate on people's common experiences
in a society as being the most productive way of explaining who (we think) we are.

Althusser believes that we are all constituted as subjects-in-ideology by the ISAs, that
the ideological norms naturalized in their practices constitute not only the sense of the
world for us, but also our sense of ourselves, our sense of identity, and our sense of our
relations to other people and to society in general. Thus we are each of us constituted as a
subject in, and subject to, ideology.

The subject, therefore, is a social construction, not a natural one. A biological female can have a masculine subjectivity (that is, she can make sense of the world and of her self and her place in that world through patriarchal ideology). Similarly, a black person can have a white subjectivity and a member of the working classes a middle-class one.

The ideological theory of the subject differs in emphasis, though not fundamentally,
from that developed in psychoanalysis by placing greater emphasis on social and
historical conditions, particularly those of class. Althusser drew upon Freudian theory to
develop his idea of the subject. As Ann Kaplan notes, feminists too have used psychoanalytic theory, though much more sophisticatedly, to theorize the gendered
subject. This gendered subject is more rooted in psychological processes, the ideological
subject of Althusser in historical and social ones.

But both theories stress the role played by the media and language in this constant
construction of the subject, by which we mean the constant reproduction of ideology in
people.

Althusser uses the words interpellation and hailing to describe this work of the
media. These terms derive from the idea that any language, whether it be verbal, visual,
tactile, or whatever, is part of social relations and that in communicating with someone
we are reproducing social relationships.

In communicating with people, our first job is to "hail" them, almost as if hailing a
cab. To answer, they have to recognize that it is to them, and not to someone else, that we
are talking. This recognition derives from signs, carried in our language, of whom we
think they are. We will hail a child differently from an adult, a male differently from a
female, someone whose status is lower than ours differently from someone in a higher
social position. In responding to our hail, the addressees recognize the social position our
language has constructed, and if their response is cooperative, they adopt this same
position. Hailing is the process by which language identifies and constructs a social
position for the addressee. Interpellation is the larger process whereby language
constructs social relations for both parties in an act of communication and thus locates
them in the broader map of social relations in general.