Cultural Studies and Schools: A Perspective

As we gradually move into the core of communication theories the whole discourse, we have observed, has been so far analyzed in terms of pluralist cultural dimensions both in macro [the social] and micro [the individual] aspects of life. In an almost inextricable relationship human cultural stance and its communicability are conjugally simulated about the emancipation of social and individual self toward rediscovering the society and the social. So the modernist discourse of development of ‘social’ had tried to elevate all the social indices like, national employment, national standard of living, minimize overall cost of living index, reducing poverty and unemployment in the national sector, uplift national integration and unity, and national socialism. Extensive surveys had been tried out to explore such indices toward formation of a social culture that would cater every individual. Structural semiology can define this progress as a determinate development of sign from its first order [denotivity] meaning to further meaning orders that would definitely replace the earlier meanings of that sign. If a photograph of a road in a context of a shiny horizon reflects the meaning of ‘journey to the life’ in its second order signification that would definitely mediate its audience the known traditional ‘social’ or ‘cultural’ and while identifying an ordered meaning the audience would then be rewarded doubtlessly for complying with the established social or cultural order.

But the notion of cultural studies came from the idea that such ‘signs’ and ‘sign-self’ must be liberated from its contextual determinacy and from the traditional ‘social’  that on the other hand dominates the context with a false consciousness of culture or social culture. If the capitalist class exploits the working class then may be they exploit female workers more than its male counterpart thus abusing the traditional separation of male and female empowerment or exploitation syndrome. Cultural studies thus release every sign from its traditional bondage but leave no sign unrecognized or undefined. So cultural studies not only develop communication context but giving a suitable identity justify it as an open-ended discourse. Noted theorist Douglas Kellner defines cultural studies as, ‘that project of approaching culture and society from a critical and multidisciplinary perspective...’ that rejects any binary oppositional means or parameters of communication or understanding between culture and the corresponding society. Cultural studies therefore moves into the core of a utopia like, slogan, or empowered statement, a caption, a myth [story-telling], an ordered connotation of signification [Barthes’ 1st or 2nd order of...], a traditional or social or cultural self and override them. Thus cultural studies while having rediscovered the independence of a text, at most recognize and promote the individual social praxis and justify so, the social order, instead of following it as a utopia. One of the most powerful proponents of cultural studies Raymond Williams has once stated that: the human energy of long revolution springs from the conviction that men can direct their own lives by breaking through the pressures and restrictions of older forms of society, and by discovering new common institutions [economy, polity]. However new but might be not common, institutions are being created somewhere replacing the older institutions, like feminism, dalit awareness, black awareness etc. Ioan Davis writes in this context, ‘the idea that revolution would be long depended on a sense that there were roots of a common culture that had to be nurtured to grow. It did not take into account the possibility that counter-revolutions happen overnight, and that when they happen they hack away at those roots.’

Thus the quintessence of cultural studies transcends categorically the utopian essence of commonality of culture and establishs on the other hand the multi-textual plurality and extension of ideological struggle. This extension of new left studies is as penetrative to analyzing the core of the growing complexities of life toward so called industrial development as it moves into the underlying facets of cultural identities of human being than the fancied sense of commonality.

Early Days:

However cultural studies theories had their common birthplace in Marxian studies womb though originated in different geo-social contexts, specially British cultural studies, French cultural studies and Frankfurt (German) cultural studies. Theorists had studied extensively the Marxian thought notionally having a natural transcendence, as they called, releasing it from the ‘reductionism, and economism of the base-superstructure metaphor’ [Hall, 1989]. Thus in the Marxian light of struggle for human identity, a new academic movement diaspora started based on education, literature, new theatre, race relations and science [Davis, 1996] in Britain following other schools specially Frankfurt and French cultural studies. They perpetrated a rope-balancing network between popular culture and popular style of writing and the theoretical ones. Quite naturally this movement fed quite effectively and essentially the intellectual middle class academia to make a very close to the reality of identity-struggle of human beings. But though stemmed from the core of Marxian theoretical outlook, almost all the roots cultural studies were suffered from a serious aristocratic national cultural syndrome. In between 1930s and early 1960s there were lots of new left journals emerged as very critical to the national culture and of course Communist ideologies, all of them were filled and fed by the intellectuals migrated from other European countries like Germany etc. to Great Britain. They mostly did a judgement about British culture in the light of Frankfurt critical theories, French poststructural theories, Italian Post-Gramscian Marxist theories.

In its first editorial, New Left Review, the pioneer journal of British cultural studies, wrote about not only the mere objective but the theoretical destination of cultural studies also: The labour movement is not in its insurrectionary phase: we are in our missionary phase. The Left Clubs and New Left Centres — the new left in general — must pioneer a way forward by working for socialism as the old missionaries worked:  as if consumed by fire that is capable of lighting the darker places in our society. We have to go out into the towns and cities, universities, and technical colleges, youth, clubs and Trade Union branches, and... make socialists there [New Left Review, 1960 1 (Jan-Feb): 2].

But in soon this movement was naturally dried up until the establishment of Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at University of Birmingham by Richard Hoggert along with Stuart Hall reassessed the essence of cultural studies in not only British society but for the world context. The whole new left outlook gradually was shifted to a notion where ‘culture’ is again possible and the theorists were duely appropriated by the British dominant culture and Knighthood. Thus movement in its very early stage became secondary to the state-empathy. Davis innately wrote that the ultimate problem was that cultural studies would move from being part of a social movement to being an appendix of academe, so institutionalized that it became simply a continuation of the classics and humanities traditions which had for long acted as the basis of a critique against the disciplinariness of the universities and government of traditionally older countries, just as classics had roots in the Church, Temples, Mosques and, as Davis mentioned, in the imperial civil service.

The later Narratives:

However later with the establishment of the Centre for Contemporary cultural studies the stream had to change its track from all kinds of patriarchy [the British Society] in the societies, academic disciplines and conventional wisdom (Davis, 1996) of media, empowered political and state apparatus etc. Later narratives of cultural studies defined culture and cultural praxis independent of the social structure and dominant social narratives. In this course theorists made Gramsci’s notion of counter-hegemony as point of action. They concentrated mostly on three notional themes:

Aesthetics: as they talk much about judgement and distinction of ‘text’;

Representation: as they speak of power and the reading of hegemony;

Popular culture: as speaking of politics of the everyday [Davis, 1996].

With the above streams and principal cultural studies theorists like Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, E.P. Thompson, and Perry Anderson, tried out the cultural studies on such a destructured base, in terms of socialization where the ‘feminist’ critique evolved independent of all sorts of male-dominated [structurally empowered] social requisites thus became known as the champion dissidents to the elites of the British culture. At this point cultural studies were very close to be affiliated by the works of French poststructuralists but initiated an alternative stream of praxis toward a plausible consequence and reaction. On the other hand at this same juncture they sharply but constructively criticized the Frankfurt cultural studies, i.e. critical theories also while alongside transcending classical Marxist economistic argument. However Stuart Hall while justifying cultural studies established this point of contention with Marxism: “the encounter between British cultural studies and Marxism has first to be understood as the engagement with a problem — not a theory, not even a problematic. It begins and develops through the critique of a certain reductionism and economism, which I think is not extrinsic but intrinsic to Marxism; a contestation with the model of base and superstructure, through which sophisticated and vulgar Marxism alike had tried to think the relationships between society, economy and culture. It was located and sited in a necessary and prolonged and as yet unending contestation with the profound Eurocentrism of Marxist theory...The only theory worth having is that which you have to fight off, not that which you speak with profound fluency”.

Narrative three: The Genealogy

Not only with the classical Marxism [Communism] on the one hand, cultural studies stood also against the American media effect studies, like, dependency to the media, uses & gratifications, as these were very much quantitative in category, content oriented and largely authoritarian in nature. So in all terms, both Frankfurt and British cultural studies though were committed grossly to the core Marxist perspective but made a sufficient extension of it combating the farthest extension of social power and all empowered narratives toward restoring individuality of concepts and narratives of life.

However the genealogy of cultural studies can be identified in the works of two different schools of philosophical thought, Institute of Social Research, University of Frankfurt, popularly known as Frankfurt cultural studies in the 1930-40s; and Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, under University of Birmingham in the 1960-70s. Both schools of thought essentially emphasized the critical studies, as opposed to the traditional developmental ones, while releasing perspectives [texts] of human lives from its dominant traditional one dimensional base, as it was determinated in Marxian studies by two binary opposed elements like ‘capitalist’ and ‘working class’.

According to the Marxian analytical overview, working class people sell their labour and of course surplus labour to the capitalist and become exploited to the core. Then they will revolutionize their future and would share a better life among the class members overriding private or uneven appropriation of wealth and property. This seminal political philosophy had doubtlessly shaped the political and social lives of Europe and other parts of the world in nineteenth and twentieth century though critical theorists of Frankfurt school and British cultural studies sharply criticized such formulation of social progress and proposed a number of pluralist models.

Frankfurt Critical Narratives

Resting on Marx’s core idea of mass production, revolution and emancipation of working class, critical theorists extended their analyses in another sense-making toward mass production of cultural goods [such as, media forms and contents] that changed the course of modern lives fundamentally and became far more divergent in twentieth century. The development of industrial capitalism in twentieth century challenged traditional patterns of life and assured deeper penetration into cultural life through newer forms of entertainment, leisure and communication techniques. Max Horkheimer and Theodre Adorno, two of the foremost proponents of critical theories, termed, while in their exile in America, this phenomenon ‘the culture industry’ which according to them as exploitative in nature as Marx’s conviction toward perpetration of exploitation in mass capitalist production. At that time they closely observed the concentration of ownership in Hollywood production centre and the mass cultural productions, American Press and Broadcasting (Lorimer, 1997). They successfully identified how media were dominating to its audience when moreover fed by revenues from advertising sources having thus least responsibility to the audience and the society. ‘Whether the products were popular songs, or broadcast soap operas, they were all the same: they were mass produced according to standard formulae and were vehicles for the promotion of capitalism’ (Lorimer, 1997). Mass audience could not resist the glossy appeal of the Hollywood movie, the stardom, the easy exploitation of emotions in melodramas or gangster movies (Horkheimer, 1972). They also had a strong opinion of implausibility of any mass resistance to such mass mediated culture. Rowland Lorimer argued, ‘most generally the Frankfurt school theorists saw these developments, along with the growth of monopoly capitalism (transnational corporations distributing their products all over the world) and of the strong, centralized, modern state, as tending to increase the domination of social institutions over individual lives. The culture industry in their view, destroyed individuality, created uniformity, and conformity, and made resistance well-nigh impossible’.

During the inter-war period Frankfurt school developed this transdisciplinary research specially to cultural and communication studies along with Marxian political economy, textual research and ideological rediscoveries. So by the term ‘culture industry’ they signified the industrialization of mass-production of cultural elements and commercial imperatives [Kellner, 1989] that provided ideological legitimation of capitalist societies and homogenization of individual cultural imperatives and praxis. But in this course of theoretical derivation Frankfurt theorists, chiefly Adorno, Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal, most importantly studied the commercial integration of working class into capitalist consumerist societies, sundering them from Marxist revolutionary struggle. Thus capitalist societies through technological revolution and industrialization found new strategic way-out for political and social change.

Douglas Kellner explained beautifully the genealogy the Frankfurt theoretical stance.  Victims of European Fascism, the Frankfurt school experienced first hand the ways that Nazi used the instruments of mass culture to produce submission to Fascist culture and society. While in exile in the United States the members of the Frankfurt school came to believe that American “popular culture” was also highly ideological and worked to promote the interests of American capitalism. Controlled by the giant corporations, the culture industries were organized according to the strictures of mass production, churning out mass produced products that generated a highly commercial system of culture which in turn sold values, life-styles, and institutions of “American way of life”.

However the critical theories were countered by Walter Benjamin, one of the associates of the Frankfurt school, who, in his book “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1969), found rather rediscovered the progressive or positivist aspects of new technologies and mass cultural productions. He established that new growth mass media replaced older forms culture and by mass reproduction through filming, recording, photography, an “aura” of the work of art of an earlier era of originality. While working with Bertolt Brecht on production of films, radio dramas, Benjamin argued that progressive cultural movements had have the power to reassure the ‘apparatus’[media, communication] of cultural production for intended political purpose. So they believed in progressive use of film, drama etc. that could also be used for social change.

Horkheimer and Adorno on the other hand answered Benjamin’s notion in their book “Dialectic of Enlightenment” (1948, 1972) that the system of mass cultural production [film, radio, newspapers, magazines] was ruthlessly dominated by the advertising corporations and commercial imperatives [Kellner]. This domination created a system of high consumerism creating a monolithic identity of the traditionally most divergent and dynamic working class.

Another most celebrated theorist Jurgen Habermas historicized Horkheimer and Adorno’s culture industry and mass production of cultural perspectives taking 18th and 19th centuries into consideration. He pointed out in his seminal work “The structural transformation of the public sphere” that the rise of bourgeois society in last two centuries as a public sphere between civil society and the state power and its transformation in the late 20th century from liberal identity to a media dominated public sphere what he has called “welfare state capitalism and mass democracy”. He basically established the domination of largest industrial corporations over the mediation and the public sphere thus justified Adorno and Horkheimer’s notion of culture industry.

Theorist Douglas Kellner elaborated that ‘the culture industry thesis described both the production of massified cultural products and homogenized subjectivities. Mass culture for the Frankfurt School produced desires, dreams, hopes, fears, and longings, as well as unending desire for consumer products. The culture industry thus produced cultural consumers who would consume its products and conform to the dictates and the behaviours of the existing society’.

Culture: Toward a definition of Cultural Power

How do we define or reconcile ‘culture’ however, if it is at all necessary in terms of communication research discourse or in terms of communication of a text in either a micro or macro social perspective? This question is a dubious one and invites a sense of indeterminacy whether to define it in terms of ‘high and low’ culture, ‘suit and street’ culture, ‘orthodox and popular culture’ and so on. All such senses assure an empowered cultural system that involves a long-drawn social hierarchy and domination. One plausible solution is that if ideology is taken off from political and dominant social logic, cultural praxis in micro social format would then be visible. But this specially in a capitalist exploitative society seems to be more evangelical than analytically derived one. But that also seems to be quite aristocratic as it does not care about struggling texts of the audience of underdeveloped countries. Most fundamentally the term ‘culture’ is structurally oppositional to the idea or the study of nature. This is a psychological figuration or pattern that involves ‘tradition’ [comprising of some overriding major proclaimed texts coverting plenty of common narratives], social beliefs [an empowered fall out of ethno-religious and political grand narratives], individual identity, and own territorial feeling [often merged into ethno-religiocity and many other social appearances].

So culture, as often contrarily conceived nowadays, can never be a universal term nor is it having any long historical line-up. Noted cultural theorist Raymond Williams in his “Civilization and Culture” stated culture ‘as a general process of inner development was extended to include a descriptive sense of the means and works of such development...’. Thus Williams strongly proposed the semantic development or transformations of social means or practices into human psychology. Noted Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci while in his note analyzing culture as a middle term between the world of art on the one hand and society and politics on the other.

However toward a plausible definition of culture, in a determinate periphery, one might have to accept overlapping of number of texts regularly happening in political or social frames that might deviate such grand narrative as ‘culture’, otherwise the term can hardly be definable. This is equally true in global frame also, where ‘global culture’ is closely a non-existent phenomenon unless becoming highly dominant and backed by new corporate hegemony. Then only individual audience would consume only information of culture and not the inherent meaning of cultural content or message.

Thus we gradually move on to certain distinctions between ‘popular’ culture and ‘mass’ culture: ‘popular’ when one likes that and ‘mass’ when one does not. But both distinctive features involve a powerful social narrative that accepts any one of the two and wait to its audience while downsizing any deviant approach. Cultural studies thus transcends such binary outlines of cultural distinction, i.e., as mentioned earlier, high and low, popular and mass, suit and street etc. though it must not be misunderstood that it overlooks traditional points of struggle between classes and cultural identities. It more plausibly looks for the atrocities perpetrated over such depressed and low-ordered classes of people. In this course of cultural studies they closely followed Marxian political notion of class and Gramsci’s notion of cultural identification but extended their analysis up to an excorporated emancipation of the exploited class until communist revolution occurs, as cultural studies never denounces such possibilities of revolution.

Raymond Williams (1962) however has provided the most comprehensive definition of culture, as a particular way of life shaped by values, traditions, beliefs, material objects and territory. Culture is a complex and dynamic ecology of people, things, world views, activities, and settings that fundamentally endures but is also changed in routine communication and social interaction [Lull, 1998]. Noted American theorist James Lull has carefully added to this definition that culture is a context. It is how we talk and dress, the food we eat, and how we prepare and consume it, the gods we invent, and the ways we worship them, how we divide up time and space, how we dance, the values to which we socialize our children, and all the other details that make up everyday life. This definition indicates clearly as Lull pointed out also complying with British notion that no culture is inherently superior to any other and that cultural richness by no means derives from economic standing. Culture as everyday life is a steadfastly democratic idea.

The above definition doubtlessly stultifies the textual determinist definition approach of culture and speaks of a complete transtextual stance which also on the other hand negates directly any possibility of political influence on culture thus basically nullifies also democratic institutions, like economy, polity, society, cultural praxis. He also on the other hand, like poststructuralists, has identified that culture is in many ways structured owing to differences in social class. According to Lull, such structuration does not allow variety and scope of culture. His notion of contention with earlier theorists [possibly modernist theorists] is that they ‘have in fact wrestled with the complex connection between social structure and culture for years. In sociology and communication, some theorists have tried to explain why people of various social classes prefer different genres within cultural domains such as art and music’. He continued arguing, why does a young Bengalee prefer Band music while another prefers popular Hindi songs? Does this difference [of taste] show or reveal any connection between ‘class’ and ‘culture’? American Sociologist Herbert Gans has termed such phenomenon as “Taste Culture” that might refer to cultural strata in a social structure. This taste culture has a definite and direct relations with the social class position. Thus the people of upper socio-economic class prefer classical music than that of lower socio-economic class [Gans, 1974]. However French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu tried to derivate the problematic relationship between cultural taste and social class positions. In his words, ‘social space is made in social practice, and practice is not determined by social structure. What a person learns culturally is influenced by, but not limited to, the tastes and everyday activities of people who occupy the same social class’.

But the definition of culture still hardly depends on the inferences of different cultural observatories which deal only some preferred cultural genres. So intertextual analyses cannot reach the core of such truth rather invites a neo-liberal counter-structural [mostly mediated] domination. If culture is an assemblage of a number of socio-cultural texts, then these must be released from its base social structures. But this release does not mean sundering between social structure and cultural texts. The most appropriate definition of culture lets these two have mutual responsibility to each other and have developmental relationship also between them. Then only social domination over the structure as “culture” can be avoided.

Culture and power:

Thus if the imperative is to take institutional intervention in cultural activities in a social context into account, the question of power and hegemony would then definitely come forward to shape the edifice of culture. Institutional domination rather intervention can be identified in various ways, like, economic power, political power, coercive power [militarization] that would determine the rules of social space. Structural theorists are interested in these powers and their domination over the signs and texts. But American sociologists have identified another notion of power, i.e., symbolic power, that can be defined, as ‘the capacity to use symbolic forms...to intervene in and influence the course of action or events’[Lull, 1998]. This power also can be institutionalized as mass media organizations, corporate communicative orgnizations. Lull points out beautifully that, the ‘symbolic power and its correlate cultural power, deriving from the tactical undertakings of social actors constructing their everyday lives, are not exercized solely by social institutions. Symbolic and cultural power are far more accessible and usable than are economic, political and other institutional coercive attempts. They are central to daily life, helping us to create, cope with, adapt to, and transform environments structured by forces of economic, political and military authority’. Mass media are the main players exerting cultural power. Cultural power, according to Lull, is the ‘ability to define a situation culturally. By cultural power individual or groups produce meanings to construct ways of life’.

As I have already pointed out that such identifications basically represent a counter hegemony or power alternative to traditional institutional power structures. However Lull, even not being over obsessively concerned to such power analysis, at the same time, has established also the legitimacy of the symbolic or cultural power.

However both Marxian studies, cultural studies [poststructural studies], and American symbolic analyses have expressed their concern to the growth of power culture empowered by homogeneous institutional domination. Marxian studies in its classical version rather communist orientation have strongly expressed about political emancipation of exploited working class toward establishment of dictatorship of the proletariat. Cultural studies have shown a lot more concern about the exploitation of individuality and organized terror against socio-cultural texts perpetrated by traditional institutions. On the other hand American symbolic analysis is also based on the development of neo-liberal outlook of symbolic-cultural texts that are supposed to achieve independence from any traditionalist power structure, though it is equally very keen to recognize unleashing growth of technology and corporate neo-liberalism in the world.

Both cultural and symbolic power contents have the single source of origin in neo-liberal mediation wherefrom people get these elements as a further [second order] empowered homogenized concept and ensure their optimal use. In this context some amount of indigenous traditional outlook toward those contents influence the production of meaning for the time being. These traditional outlooks are very much territory-specific in its character. A young beautiful Indian lady may be very much fond of funky dress codes and may alongside prefer white ‘saree’ during Durga Puja festival. Gans’s ‘taste culture’ theory can hardly explain such phenomenon whereas Lull’s ‘hybridization of culture’ is just a mere observation and Foucault’s culture is just a ‘causal expression’ but none of them look for the dynamic transformational development of such cultural texts overlapping one over another, and a complete deterritorialization of ‘self’ or ‘culture’ toward absolute consumerism would then be prevalent perpetually. Individual then would be least interested to get meaning of those contents, they rather prefer to consume the information only what is being incessantly communicated to them.

Howsoever the notion of cultural power involves how people use the mediated symbols and become compulsively identified as members of some sub-cultural identities, like, popular culture, street culture, suit culture or elite culture, proletariat culture, and by some opinions mass culture.

Culture and Power # II: Popular culture versus mass culture:

People often not able to identifying the underlying power exercise, think ‘mass’ culture same as popular culture. James Lull while defining ‘popular’ has stated that popular, in this sense, does not signify widespread, mainstream, dominant, or commercially successful. Popular cultural texts come from people and are developed from people’s creations, nor is it given to them for temporary or permanent use. James Lull again has stated very loosely that, “this perspective tears away at distinctions between producers and consumers of cultural artifacts, between culture industries and contexts of reception. We all produce popular culture. Constructing popular culture is an exercise in cultural power”. No point is required to counter this statement but lot of concern still is left to the growth of culture industries and dominant commercial elements that affect individual creativity and dynamic ecology of natural cultural elements. Individual creativity often becomes badly influenced by such dominant elements that definitely affect the course of natural creation and popular culture, as the traditional popular folk cultural forms and identities are the worst sufferers from the culture industries. Nowadays traditional string puppeteers of Bengal set puppet costumes, make-ups, screenplays concommitant to the mediated agenda of Mumbai or Kolkata film [culture] industries, thus try hard or fight a lost battle before getting completely extincted.

Now whatever be the fate of popular cultural creations, the definition, what Lull has attempted to produce, would remain perfect in contrast to the ‘mass’ culture. Mass culture basically is a derivated or fall out of some cultural aspects that are formally recognized as a ‘mainstream’, commercially viable, widely mediated, not widely supported but less opposed, ‘national’, ‘central’, etc. If the government builds a bridge or a flyover, often these are dedicated to the nation and the bridge becomes ‘national’ and, at the same time, may be a symbol of pride, power, development that all feed to the ‘national cultural power’ where the population [comprising of all strata, including lower middle class, poor, destitutes, remote dwellers, share croppers, landless farmers, rural unemlpoyeds, highly exploited female workers, industrial workers, refugees, homeless, raped, unemployeds, retrenched, looted, thieves, murderers, convicted, beggers, vagabonds, evicted alongside rich, super rich, educated elites, upper middle class, educated middle class etc.] largely becomes an ‘atomized mass’ irrespective of the plurality of their cultural identities or even class identities to some extent.

Theoretically mass culture do not possess or deserve any better theoretical categorization, but is existent as a subcultural form in any organized cultural power where powerful institutions always intervene in social process more as educator manner than developer, thus available almost in all the phases of modern history so far noticed.

Culture and Power # III: Cultural power and mediation:

American sociologists including media analysts strongly believe that mass media contribute to the process of popular [mass-]-cultural production by distributing cultural resources to oppressed individuals and subordinate groups [Lull, p73]. This is nothing but a sheer fabricated media-idealism that aptly discards the truth. Moreover such contribution of media were seen, in ex-colonial countries, in the developmental paradigmatic phase where media were centrally controlled and regulated. But this phase so far the developing countries had experienced, were by and large incomplete and they also innately felt for the autonomy of media, independent of state controlling. Subsequently media-market expanded to a large extent but squeezed to the oppressed and also the earlier promise of distributing resources to them. Media market becomes largely monolithic in terms of profit maximization [political eonomy] sundering developing countries not only from its traditional roots but from the contemporarity of cultural praxis also.

Edward Said’s narrative on America’s most unpopular war in Vietnam is most worth mentioning here. America’s defeat in Vietnam in mid-sixties has become most so-called popular cultural resource that let the term commercially alive “America’s war in Vietnam”. In India also, with such so-called popular mediated resource as, ‘India is shining’, ‘India: the upcoming superpower’, ‘the superpower of 21st century’ — global media conglomerates, operating in India, along with Indigenous films and other discursive pratices, have invented a very powerful discourse on ‘new’ India that is commercially suited and placed on a highest elite positioning. While Said strongly advocated Foucault’s open ended thought of power, how is power exercised and what are its effects — that set a basic ideation to the notion that ‘what is power and where does it come from?’ In terms of global mediation these questions have a homogeneous turn toward conglomeration of media institutions that is the prime source of power in the 21st century world terrorizing people’s [Foucauldian] right to hold power in contrast to that of the ruling class and media institutions. This is cultural power as James Lull stated, and people have the only option to imitate those mediated symbols. So this cultural power is negative and would outcast people’s creative power and ‘right’ to be productive, and encourage instead only packaging so to consume mass produced media content, regardless of its specificity of meaning. Baudrillard’s conclusion here is worth reading: “media practices have rearranged our senses of place and time. Television is ‘real world’; television is dissolved into life; and life is dissolved into television. The fiction is ‘realized’ and the real becomes fictions. Simulation has replaced production [medium is the message]...alas, our individuality, always in the spotlight, is that and only that, in the spotlight. The spotlight functionalizes the human being. The social limits of the spotlight and playing to the spotlight are the individual. The social framework and its communicative action are the self. There is no freedom beyond this activity. We are proletariatized regardless of class, a function of the spectacle...”.

Poststructuralist Communication: Dissolution of Communicative Space in Hypercommerciality of Media

when traditional signification of communication dissolves...

Noted Philosopher Jacques Derrida in his redefinition of communication argues,“...Is it certain that there corresponds to the word communication a unique, univocal concept, a concept that can be rigorously grasped and transmitted: a communicable concept? Following a strange figure of discourse, one first must ask whether the word or signifier “communication” communicates a determined content, an identifiable meaning, a describable value. But in order to articulate and to propose this question, I already had to anticipate the meaning of the word communication: I have had to predetermine communication as the vehicle, transport, or site of passage of a meaning, and of a meaning that is one. If communication had several meanings, and if this plurality could not be reduced, then from the outset it would not be justified to define communication itself as the transmission of a meaning, assuming that we are capable of understanding one another as concerns each of these words (transmission, meaning, etc.). Now, the word communication, which nothing initially authorizes us to overlook as a word, and to impoverish as a polysemic word, opens a semantic field which precisely is not limited to semantics, semiotics, and even less to linguistics”.

In this way poststructuralist theorists like Michael Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard et. al. have established infinite meanings can be produced and transmitted where no specific meaning is possibly achieved in communication of a message that may appear in any form. If the expectation or claim to have a definite or determinate meaning of a message is withdrawn from any level of social practices or if the concept of plurality can be extended to infinitely operative extent, communication then may achieve its highest possible limit of expansion. Thus structurality in communication or mass communication is, according the poststructuralists, is outright a superfluous issue to be discussed. Before to go into the deeper analysis on it, we must establish the basic tenets of poststructuralism:

In late 60s’ France, the notion of poststructuralism was to provide absolute emancipation of redears or recipients of the ‘Text’. The prime theoretical assumption was that recipients of a text in any form have the feel of emancipation to evaluate. The basic tenets can be articulated in the following ways:

(a) The Primacy of Theory

(b) The decentering of the subject

(c) The fundamental importance of the reader;

i.e. a text can be evaluated in infinite ways to get the meaning which a particular reader desires to achieve in terms of his / her cognitive attachment to that. According to Derrida, there is no particular structure of theorization involved to enrich the recipient with maximum possible output derived. Derrida has significantly pointed out that communicating a message doesn’t lead to the transmission of signification. Signification depends on the recipient of that message. In this way Derrida has discarded any possibility of convention or rule which may influence the signification. Only cultural aspiration of an individual recipient is needed which may reiterate any prior way of describing any similar kind of ‘text’. That is the reason why, according to Derrida, a novel / text has infinite opportunities to get read and followed even long after the death of the creator / communicator. Derrida even has discarded the option to describe or characterize a sign and even message as impoversihed to be ‘polysemic’. He has completely rejected any ideation of structuralist mode of cultural aspiration from the recipient’s end. Thus he has recommended complete dissolution of structures and ultimate liberalization of ‘text’ from any structural domination, even that be societal or cultural. He has pointed out certain distinctive features and non-features of communication. These are:

 Communication can never be definitive or determinate and uni-dimensional word to conceive any determinate meaning.

 Signifier cannot communicate any determinate or planned meaning; so communication cannot transmit any determinate meaning.

 So communication should not be defined only as the process of transmission of meaning.

 Communication is not dependent on semiosis or semio-linguistics. It rather depends on multi-dimensional use general or colloquial language which transcends traditional semiosis and semio-linguistics.

 Communication can be performed in even two different cultural contexts and perspectives and moreover in the cases of language differentiation, communication conveys no specific signification.

 So communication reveals or recognizes no semantic meaning or relationship between signs, i.e. a word cannot express any determinate meaning.

 Literal and specific meaning are the major sources of problems in the contemporary world.

 Conventional context is really a vague structure, but often used in communication analysis.

 Convention doesn’t exist; this is just the reiteration of the subject. Consensus may be achieved through continuous discussion.

 No suitable context can be produced for transmission of message, because what elements needed to produce a context are absolutely indeterminate “...are the prerequisites of a context ever absolutely determinable?”

 In written communication, the writer starts writing 

(a) when he / she intends to communicate something.

because (b) he / she represents his own idea.

(c) this representation becomes signified conveying his ideas.

(d) he / she can communicate well and through his writings, communicates incessantly to someone of the same grade. In this discourse he discovers writing as means of communication.

(e) As the process is continuous, it cannot produce any structure or meaning.

 The communicator can communicate the same subject through [non-verbal] gestures and postures.

 In written communication the recipient or addressee always remains absent. 

 Again even in absense of the communicator the message would be reproduced several times.

 Anyone can say that when I write the addressee is absent. Wouldn’t it represent the distance, belated, or any alternative idea?

 If this absense is the death of the addressee what then remain are the communicator and the writing. Even if everything is stopped the writer / communicator will go on writing. This process can only produce codes and is highly communicable even if the addressee or referent is absent.

 It is to be noted that this absense not only indicates a ‘continuous modification of presence’ but a departation or a complete alienation which deserves the possibility of deadly absense, i.e., while writing a creator transcends even the deadly absense of the addressee.

 Every context is thus a code, which rejects any possibility of conventional code or context.

 Like the absense of addressee, it is applicable for the addresser or communicator also, i.e., immediate after the transmission of message communicator also remains deadly absent. And the message is stored in a machine and can be reproduced ‘n’ times for which presence of the addresser is not required.

 So the absence of the addresser can be justified from practical outlook under following considerations:

(a) absense from conveying meaning or signification;

(b) absense of the intention to signify;

(c) absense from wanting to communicate;

 So it is evident that during communication both addresser and addressee remain totally absent.

 As it is already mentioned that signifier and signified are not at all existent excepting some inferior amount of presence which create crisis of meaning.

because, (a) communicator may manipulate the signs;

 Communication doesn’t have any specific signification.

 some message may possess some meanings but referent is not specific:

[Circle is a square]

the message signifies but the referent is absent.

 There are some messages which signify nothing. This can be called agrammaticality. These are:

[Abracadabra]

[Hocas Focas Gilli Gilli Gay]

These are all agrammatical and can only be justified by ‘Teleology’.

Jean Baudrillard:

Another French theorist Jean Baudrillard has also done seminal work on poststructural approach of communication.

 McLuhun conceptualized the revolution of technology would also explode geo-existence of human being. In this discourse he postulated the concept of ‘global village’. With the explosion of geo-social identity, ‘local’ becomes smaller and tend to be personal toward the implosion of self. This causes massive increase of information flow and the people are induced to consume more and more commodities. But the truth is that people consume the information first as essential commodity. As more information is available people show less interest to consume ‘meaning’. Thus ultimately explosion of information devalues the utility of information.

 Information doesn’t only produce or reveal meaning. Mass media as being flooded by excess information have inevitably deconstructed the traditional unitary concept of social perspective and practices.

 Communication is a derived process. So in this process ‘Brand’ is distinguishably precious. So in the contemporary age ‘packaging’, which an represent brand is a very important element of message. It is further to be remembered that such packaging even transcends the production of meaning of the message. Nowadays packaging is more important than the product or the commodity. So transmission of information for packaging has mopped up the necessity of meaning. In other words, the issue of ‘production of meaning in communication’ has become least important.

 So in mass mediated information the ideas like, ‘social perspective’, ‘social context’ of information are no longer evident. It can be defined as “catastrophe of meaning”. We have no other options but to remain in this situation. So out of neutralization of meaning, beyond meaning, and imploded meaning the concept of “fascination” comes in.

 Thus people have no other option but to think about his / her personal or individual self. People want implosion in quest of better interpretation, heterogeneity among the things in the world. Only mass media provide such heterogeneity.

 Media practices have rearranged our senses of place and time. No distinction of hierarchies, hyperreality dissolves the old oppositions; the more real than the real has become the only existence. Media have deleted all the public places, so destroyed the differences between the external and internal world.

 More information and more information, lesser and lesser meaning and finally rejection of meaning are the elements of communication.

 Mass media have elevated our senses. Television is the real world; Life is dissolved into television and television is dissolved into life. The fiction is the reality and the reality is the fiction.

 The personality of an individual can best be expressed as an object in accordance with the economic necessity or consideration. The basis of such expression, as articulated by the media, is to establish that a person can act as a free agent in the world who is not associated with any society, state, even with any given option of life pattern and other givens.

 Without mass media people or mass cannot make any sense of culture. Culture is taken out of the hands of the masses. People or the mass is no longer the source of culture but is inspired by the mediated culture.

 Mass is not considered by what people think about it. It is rather justified by how people actively participate to accept the transmission of mediation process and of course the information.

 Thus social perspective of communication means the development of self identity. No concept of emancipation is possible beyond this development.

 So we are proletariatized regardless of class, a function of the spectacle. This is doubtless to be the postmodernity where people watch media content and forget but never associate themselves with that.