Assignment 5

Cultural studies: Mall culture and media cultural

Name: Emisha Ravani

Paper: 205 Cultural Studies 

Roll no. 07

Enrollment no: 4069206420210031

Email id: emisharavani3459@gmail.com

Batch: 2021-2023(M.A Sem 3) 

Submitted to: S. B. Gardi Department of English, maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

 

 

        

                                                                             

Introduction:

Arising from the social turmoil of the 1960-s, Cultural Studies is an academic discipline which combines political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, art history/ criticism etc. to study cultural phenomena in various societies. Cultural Studies researches often focus on how a particular phenomenon relates matters of ideology, nationality, ethnicity, social class and gender.

Discussion on Cultural Studies have gained currency with the publication of Richard Hoggart’s Use of Literacy (1957) and Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society (1958), and with the establishment of Birmingham Centre for is Contemporary Cultural Studies in England in 1968.

Since culture is now considered as the source of art and literature, cultural criticism has gained ground, and therefore, Raymond Williams’ term “cultural materialism”, Stephen Greenblatt’s “cultural poetics” and Bakhtin’s term “cultural prosaic”, have become significant in the field of Cultural Studies and cultural criticism.

In other words, the field of cultural studies seeks to understand how and why culture is organised and created, and how those elements change over time. The field is important because it helps shed insight into societal social structures, behaviours, and attitudes, and encourages critical thinking. Understanding how culture develops and is created can potentially help make the future better for more people.

In order to understand the changing political circumstances  of class, politics and culture in the UK, scholars at the CCCS turned to the work of Antonio Gramsci who modified classical Marxism in seeing culture as a key instrument of political and social control. In his view, capitalists are not only brute force (police, prison, military) to maintain control, but also penetrate the everyday culture of working people. Thus the key rubric for Gramsci and for cultural studies is that of cultural hegemony. Edgar and Sedgwick point out that the theory of hegemony was pivotal to the development of British Cultural Studies. It facilitated analysis of the ways in which subaltern groups actively resist and respond to political and economic domination.

Cultural Studies views everyday life as fragmented, multiple, where meanings are hybridized and contested; i.e., identities that were more or less homogeneous in terms of ethnicities and patterns of consumption, are now completely hybrid, especially in the metropolis. With the globalization of urban spaces, local cultures are linked to global economies, markets and needs, and hence any study of contemporary culture has to examine the role of a non-local market/ money which requires a postcolonial awareness of the exploitative relationship between the First World and the Third World even today.

Mall Culture

Mall is a space of display where goods are displayed for maximum visual display in such a fashion that they are attractive enough to instill desire. Spectacle, attention- holding and desire are central elements of shopping experience in the mall. Hence mall emerges primarily as a site of gazing and secondarily as a site of shopping. The mall presents a spectacle of a fantasy world created by the presence of models and posters, compounded by the experience of being surrounded by attractive men and women, cosy families and vibrant youth — which altogether entice us to unleash the possibilities of donning a better identity, by trying out / consuming global brands and cosmopolitan fashion.

The mall invites for participating in the fantasy of future possibilities. Thus, the spectacle turns into a performance that the customer/ consumer imitates and participates in. It is also a theatrical performance that is interactive, in which the spectacle comes alive with the potential consumer. The encircling vistas, long-spread balconies and viewing points at every floor add to the spectacle, by providing a “prospect” of shopping.

Eclecticism is yet another feature of the mall, where, “the world is under one roof”- where a “Kalanjali” or “Mann Mantra” share space with “Shoppers Stop” or “Life Style” and “Madras Mail” shares space with “McDonald’s” and multiplexes, imparting a cosmopolitan experience. Thus, eclecticism and a mixing of products, styles and traditions are a central feature of the mall and consumer experience.

Further, “the mall is a hyperreal, ahistorical, secure, postmodern-secular, uniform space of escape that takes the streets of the city into itself in a tightly controlled environment where time, weather, season do not matter where the “natural” is made through artificial lighting and horticulture, and ensuring that this public space resembles the city but offers more security and choice”

Media Culture

Media studies and its role in the construction of cultural values, circulation of symbolic values, and its production of desire are central to Cultural Studies today. Cultural Studies of the media begins with the assumption that media culture is political and ideological, and it reproduces existing social values, oppression and inequalities. Media culture clearly reflects the multiple sides of contemporary debates and problems. Media culture helps to reinforce the hegemony and power of specific economic, cultural and political groups by suggesting ideologies that the audience, if not alert, imbibes. Media culture is also provocative because it sometimes asks us to rethink what we know or believe in. In Cultural Studies, media culture is studied through an analysis of popular media culture like films, TV serials, advertisements etc.- as Cultural Studies believes in the power of the popular cultural forms as tools of ideological and political power.

Cultural Studies of popular media culture involves an analysis of the forms of representation, such as film; the political ideology of these representations; an examination of the financial sources/sponsors of these representations (propaganda advertisements by Coke after the report on pesticides in Coca Cola); an examination of the roles played by other objects / people in the propagating ideology (Amir Khan in the Coca Cola ad, after patriotic films like Lagaan, Mangal Pandey and Rang de Basanti). Cultural Studies also analyses whether the medium (say, film), presents an oppressive/unequal nature of institutions, like family, education etc. or glorify them; the possible resistance to such oppressive ideologies; the audience’s response to such representation and the economic benefits and the beneficiaries of such representations.

Contemporary Culture Studies of media culture explores what is called “media ecologies”, the environment of human culture created by the intersection of information and communications technologies, organizational behaviour and human interaction.

Cultural studies insists that culture must be studied within the social relations and system through which culture is produced and consumed, and that thus study of culture is intimately bound up with the study of society, politics, and economics. Cultural studies show how media culture articulates the dominant values, political ideologies, and social developments and novelties of the era. It conceives of U.S. culture and society as a contested terrain with various groups and ideologies struggling for dominance (Kellner 1995). Television, film, music, and other popular cultural forms are thus often liberal or conservative, or occasionally express more radical or oppositional views.

Cultural studies is valuable because it provides some tools that enable one to read and interpret one's culture critically. It also subverts distinctions between "high" and "low" culture by considering a wide continuum of cultural artefacts ranging from novels to television and by refusing to erect any specific cultural hierarchies or canons. Previous approaches to culture tended to be primarily literary and elitist, dismissing media culture as banal, trashy, and not worthy of serious attention. The project of cultural studies, by contrast, avoids cutting the field of culture into high and low, or popular against elite. Such distinctions are difficult to maintain and generally serve as a front for normative aesthetic valuations and, often, a political program (i.e. either dismissing mass culture for high culture, or celebrating what is deemed "popular" while scorning "elitist" high culture).

Cultural studies allows us to examine and critically scrutinize the whole range of culture without prior prejudices toward one or another sort of cultural text, institution, or practice. It also opens the way toward more differentiated political, rather than aesthetic, valuations of cultural artifacts in which one attempts to distinguish critical and oppositional from conformist and conservative moments in a cultural artifact. For instance, studies of Hollywood film show how key 1960s films promoted the views of radicals and the counterculture and how film in the 1970s was a battleground between liberal and conservative positions; late 1970s films, however, tended toward conservative positions that helped elect Ronald Reagan as president (See Kellner and Ryan, 1988).  

Because of its focus on representations of race, gender, and class, and its critique of ideologies that promote various forms of oppression, cultural studies lend itself to a multiculturalist program that demonstrates how culture reproduces certain forms of racism, sexism, and biases against members of subordinate classes, social groups, or alternative life-styles. Multiculturalism affirms the worth of different types of culture and cultural groups, claiming, for instance, that black, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, and lesbian, and other oppressed and marginal voices have their own validity and importance. An insurgent multiculturalism attempts to show how various people's voices and experiences are silenced and omitted from mainstream culture and struggles to aid in the articulation of diverse views, experiences, and cultural forms, from groups excluded from the mainstream. This makes it a target of conservative forces who wish to preserve the existing canons of white male, Euro-centric privilege and thus attack multiculturalism in cultural wars raging from the 1960s to the present over education, the arts, and the limits of free expression.

Work cited:

“Cultural Studies.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., www.britannica.com/topic/cultural-studies#:~:text=cultural%20studies%2C%20interdisciplinary%20field%20concerned,the%20United%20States%20and%20Australia.

Mambrol, Nasrullah. “Cultural Studies.” Literary Theory and Criticism, 11 Apr. 2021, literariness.org/2016/11/23/cultural-studies/.

“Take Online Courses. Earn College Credit. Research Schools, Degrees & Careers.” Study.com | Take Online Courses. Earn College Credit. Research Schools, Degrees & Careers, study.com/learn/lesson/cultural-studies-overview-theory.html.