AbirChattopadhyay: মানবসত্তার অভিপ্রায়ঃ দ্বন্দ্বের নানা মুখ

Cultural Studies #8

Adaptive Structuration theory

This is a perfect sequel of Anthony Giddens’ Structuration or Socialization theory, which tries out human behaviour producing or reproducing social systems through some given rules and resources. Naturally AST points out group and organizational interaction. In this discourse the theory discards techno-centric view and emphasizes on social aspects in spite of recognizing the existence of information technology important for interaction. AST is widely used to describe how the social systems like radio, television, internet influence societies and in turn become motivated to update themselves.

Cultural Studies #7

Ideology

Categorization of idea[s] that refers to both individual identity and mass political identity also. Ideology constructs human identity through codification. Raymond Williams (1977) defines: the set of ideas which arises from a given set of material interests or more broadly from a definite class or group. Stuart Hall while defining politics of signification argues that ideology can no longer be seen as a dependent variable, a mere reflection of a pre-given reality in the mind. Nor are its outcomes predictable by derivation from some simple determinist logic. The depend on the balance of forces in a particular historical conjuncture; on the politics of signification.

Cultural Studies #3

Consumption: Toward a definition

Consumption is as active exchange as production. In consumption there is an active appropriation of signs, not the simple destruction of an object. What is consumed is not simply a material object that satisfies an all too rational need, but a symbolic meaning in which the consumer places himself in a communication structure where an exchange occurs which is profoundly tied to the whole system of political economy. In order for the system to be reproduced there must be not simply the reproduction of labour power but the continuous reproduction of the code.

Cultural Studies #2

Extension of Marxism: politics of signification

Marx theorized the origin of political economy as a transformation of the mode of production and relations of production. But there has been a second decisive change in political economy that involved a “process of social abstraction” that refers not to the commodity but to the “sign” following the central logic of signification.

Important is to articulate a critique of the political economy of the sign which is the dominant social form of advanced capitalism. Political economy had generated its mode of signification from the outset, during renaissance, but Marxian theorization did not move up to the radically new form of social exchange. Global postmodern mediation of the 21st century can only be understood through the understanding of the politics of signification.

Cultural Studies #1

Baudrillard Reading: The System of Objects: crisis of classification

How can we hope to classify a world of objects that changes before our eyes and arrive at an adequate system of description? There are almost as many criteria of classification as there are objects themselves: the size of the objects; its degree of functionality; the gestures associated with it (rich or impoverished? Traditional or not?); its form; its duration; the time of day at which it appears; the material that it transforms; the degree of exclusiveness or sociability attendant upon its use (private, general or public use?) and so on. Indeed all such means of categorization may seem- when they are applied to an ensemble, such as the set of objects, that is undergoing a continual mutation and expansion barely less contingent than the order of the letters of the alphabet.

Each object corresponds to an operation, often a tiny or heteroclite operation, but nowhere is any system of meanings even touched upon. So instead of getting objects as defined by their functions or by the categories into which they might be subdivided for analytic purposes, important is to note how people relate to them and with the systems of human behaviour and relationships that result therefrom.

AbirChattopadhyay

Sunday, April 22, 2018

মানবসত্তার অভিপ্রায়ঃ দ্বন্দ্বের নানা মুখ

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