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Panopticon's Subject Index Cc
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Cc Capitalism & cult. theory
Cheers
Commodification
Communications
Convergence
CAPITALISM AND CULTURAL THEORY
Closely related to concepts associated with commodification and the culture industry (see below).
Capitalism in the mid-20th century was defined by an era known as Fordism, marked by intense relationships between governments, unions, international capital; this type of economics still under state control. WWII gave a boost to industries that required mass production (chemicals, steel, etc.), and Fordism's heyday was between 1945 and 1973.
Since the 1970s, Fordism has given way to post-Fordism, characterized by:
1) Business switch from industry to service;
2) New patterns of industrial distribution;
3) Intensifying globalization: a) global capital floats all over the world, states often lose control (e.g., Black Wednesday).
b) fewer and fewer people control more and more production.
4) Weakened power of trade unions, less secure jobs, increase in low-paid jobs, etc.;
5) Contemporary capital is hypermobile and hyperflexible;
Critiques of Capitalism
One of the first in-depth critiques of capitalism's inequities was by Karl Marx. Marxism was a Hegelian-inspired philosophy that concentrated on political economy, calling attention to unequal power relations between classes in capitalist society. It was an economic-deterministic perspective of the world. Marx's base-superstructure theory (economic base provided for cultural superstructure) was later elaborated by theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, who elborated post-Marxist theories of hegemony.In the 1920s, the Frankfurt School developed as a German Marxist critique of capitalism in ideological terms (as opposed to economic terms). The Frankfurt School's position broadly was that people are easily fooled by capitalism and the culture industry. An analysis of Freud's work can be one way of understanding why. (Mass psychology of Marxism.) Reality was that created by bourgeois society in capitalism - culture is processed through culture industry. (This is quite different from Enlightenment ideas of affirmative culture, harmony, authenticity, encompassing the best of the people when authentically free.)
See also:
The school looked at Ideology as characterizing distortions of reality -its purpose is to camoflage and legitimate unequal power relations. The work of the Frankfurt School laid the basis for many more recent critiques of capitalist-inspired mass culture.
- Commodification
- Culture Industry
- Economics and cultural theory
- Enlightenment
- Globalization
- Hegemony
- Karl Marx
- Post-Fordism
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Sherry Turkle, in many ways echoing Baudrillard, talks about television as part of the postmodern "culture of simulation," where we learn to identify with the simulated world of television more readily than we do with the "real" world around us. She uses the bar in the hit 1980s TV show Cheers to illustrate this:
The bar featured in the television series Cheers no doubt figures so prominently in the American imagination at least partly because most of us don't have a neighborhood place where "everybody knows your name." Instead, we identify with the place on the screen, and most recently have given it some life off the screen as well. Bars designed to look like the obe on Cheers have sprung up all over the country, most poignantly in airports, our most anonymous of locales. Here, noone will know your name, but you can always buy a drink or a souvenir sweatshirt (Turkle, 235).
Interestingly, Baudrillard would probably call the fake airport Cheers a fine example of a fourth order simulacrum, a pure simulation of something without an original.
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(cf. Jameson's "Late Capitalism;" Adorno's "Culture Industry.")
See also:
Commodification in the postmodern era: -- Since 1970s, things that were practical parts of everyday life and not normally part of "culture" now are cultural products to be commodified (eg. town planning, international cuisine, etc.). This diversifies capitalism by turning social activities into economic ones.
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This sounds like the bottom-line question: what is communication?
Well, naturally, communication is any act whereby one actor communicates with another person or persons . . . only it's more complicated than that, of course. More to come . . .
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In relation to new media, convergence refers to the widely touted tendency of most of the mass media - television, radio, newspapers, etc. - to converge to a common electronic format similar to that which is currently utilized by the Internet. So when you read an online newspaper on the Web, or listen to a baseball game or a rock concert on your computer via streaming audio (such as RealAudio), you are experiencing convergence in action.
8/97
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An approach to the study of art, culture, communications, etc. that concentrates on the impact of communications/cultural texts on society as a whole. The concept of critical theory, or critical analysis, is most closely associated with the German Frankfurt School, which tried to fuse Marxist and Freudian ideas into a cohesive strategy to critically analyze twentieth-century modern society. To cut a long story short, the concept is inherently suspicious of the ideology of modern, capitalist-oriented society, and its hegemonic tendency to exploit and subjugate both individuals and culture in the effort to make as much money as possible for a lucky few capitalists at the top.
Critical theory has since developed as a catch-all concept that now includes, roughly speaking, such diverse areas as anthropology, sociology, communications, hermeneutics, feminist theory, literary theory, and film studies. In fact, its impact has been felt keenly across all the social sciences and humanities.
However, critical analysis should not be thought of simply as a negative or destructive knee-jerk reaction to the capitalist status quo. Rather it is a more holistic, or hermeneutic attempt to understand the real underlying forces at work in the world. ("Holistic" just means a much broader, more complete, "whole" analysis of things.) As such, the approach is critical in that it is concerned with broader questions, problems, and perspectives than, say, traditional empirical social-scientific analysis, which usually limits itself to an investigation of narrow facts. By questioning the way the world works in a much broader way, critical analysts hope to uncover many more of the false assumptions, myths, or outright lies at work in the world -- the sorts of things which we assume to be "normal" or "common sense." This isn't negative or destuctive, but ultimately liberating, if it helps the general public to see how they are often manipulated by the powers-that-be. Someone needs to do this.
So, for example, critical analysts will generally view such developments as the Gulf War, globalization, and concentration of ownership in a quite different way from traditional empiricicts, who might only look at a very narrow number of factors leading to such developments. Critical theorists will tend to look at the situation as a whole (and often be critical of it).
Critical analysts, such as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, are inevitably critical of the mass media, which they see as representing only narrow commercial interests rather than the democratic interests of all people and groups in society. (More to come.)
See also:
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Term linked with the studies done by the Frankfurt School, and Theodor Adorno in particular.
This includes, in media terms all mass media (in 1920s, 1930s, newspapers, magazines, the movies, radio) plus most other means of cultural production (theater, opera, artistic exhibitions, etc.). Applied to the present day, it could of course cover all the other mass media in society, such as television and the Web. (See also under subject index C)
1.) All these forces of media/cultural production are intertwined: a system.
2.) Culture industry is intricately linked with the present-day dominant models of the economy/culture; e.g. capitalist production, distribution, exchange, consumption. So culture is produced in just the same way as, say, automobiles or refrigerators.
3.) Media serve only to maintain culture industry (as below).
production >>>>>>(artistic) composition
distribution >>>>>>reproduction
Exchange >>>>>>>culture creation
consumption >>>>>reception
(Note: Think about the role of the individual author in all this. Is the author the creator of a unique individual work -- the Classical liberal/Romantic idea -- or is s/he simply reproducing the ideas and values of a system over which s/he has no control?
4.) The masses are thus systematically manipulated and progressively unable to criticize their society effectively; they may have some authentic types of cultural expression, but the mass media/cultural industries prevent culture from being effectively communicated in any authentic form -- unless it has first been commodified and changed to fit the capitalist system.
5.) The culture industry thus commodifies and standardizes art (music, fashion, etc.) then fools people into thinking it's "original" in order to sell it.
6.) The only people left who can still meaningfully critique Enlightenment ideas, capitalism and the culture industry are the avant-gardes (i.e., the artistic elites -- could be anything from James Joyce to rap music).
7.) But even "authentic" culture (as defined by bourgeoisie) has difficulty surviving against capitalism; avant garde expression tends to quickly get swallowed up by society and become commodified itself.
~ Food for thought? ~
Think about how you can apply the ideas of the Frankfurt School scholars to more recent articulations of cultural expression, such as rock 'n' roll, punk, or rap/hip-hop music, or the Hippie movement in the 1960s. Are these examples of "avant-garde" or "authentic" cultural production that have simply been gobbled up by consumer society and "commodified"? What other examples can you think of?
Other notes:
1.) Culture industry is intricately linked with the present-day dominant models of the economy/culture; e.g. production/composition, distribution/reproduction, exchange/culture industry, consumption/reception (see Walter Benjamin).
2.) Benjamin argued for a relatively positive view of the culture industry -- that because of mechanical reproduction, art loses its authenticity, is democratized and politicized.
3.) Adorno -- disagrees with this because he believes capitalism undermines true culture by commodifying it. A negative view of the culture industry.
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See also Virtual Reality.
The electronic computer realm within which we can communicate and interact. When you talk to other people by e-mail or usenet group, or stick on a VR helmet and start interacting therein, you are in cyberspace. The idea of a human "jacking in" directly to this new electronic universe (such as in, say, the movie Lawnmower Man or the novel Neuromancer) can be seen as an analog of McLuhan's concept of electronic media becoming an extension, or prosthesis, of our nervous systems -- our eyes, ears, etc.First coined by William Gibson, the concept of cyberspace is itself really an extension of Ivan Sutherland's original idea of a form of immersive display that supplies information to all the human senses in an interactive environment.
Or as Wooley (123) puts it: "[C]yberspace is becoming the new final frontier, and virtual reality is the Enterprise".
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Basically, the cyborg is part-human, part-machine, an entity that displays physical and cognitive elements of both humans and machines. If that sound familiar, just think about RoboCop or The Terminator; they're both fictional depictions of cyborgs -- and there are plenty of other examples.
So how does this relate to cultural theory and computing? Well, the concept of the cyborg has become more popular among scientists and cultural theorists (e.g., Katherine Hayles, Claudia Springer, Donna Haraway) to describe the increasingly complex interplay between people and machines in the late modern/postmodern technological world, as well as the implications for such topics as feminist studies. In some sense, the increasing integration of machines in our lives is turning us all into cyborgs.
The cyborg is a problematic concept for many because it's not certain whether its development is a good thing for us. Some theorists (like David Levy) think that the next stage in human evolution will be a new "race" of cyborgs or super computers. But are we ready for that? And what if this new "race" turns on its old creators and tries to eliminate us? (Think about the plot of The Terminator, for example, or even the early 1980s movie Wargames). These are fears that seemingly run deep in the human psyche -- the fear that we shall create a monster that will come back to haunt us or destroy us (as in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, for example). As Claudia Springer puts it: "At the same time that the cyborg represents the triumph of the intellect, it also signifies obsolescence and the dawn of posthuman, postEnlightenment age" (Electronic Eros, 1996, p. 19).
See also:
CT. Subject Index Cc
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Last Updated: Feb. 20, 2001