Media, Cultural Studies and Human Rights

Lecture delivered at the UGC Sponsored Course on Human Rights

What does ‘cultural studies’ refer to as human rights?

Human Rights as commonly referred to the rights written in both national and international constitutions, memoranda and some achieved by conventions otherwise, are those categories/structures which an individual associates with his/her identity. So it may include any extent of individual association with any event up to his/her satisfaction.

‘Human Rights’ beyond national or international declarations therefore is that ‘unconscious category’ of [an] individual[s] that comes after the immediate conscious or experience at the time of communication. So ‘human rights’ is that mental affair or judgement which an individual gives verdict on any act of communication in social peripheries. ‘Human rights’ therefore largely reminds those rights which are only in problem or crisis and precisely easy to measure and understand through empirical methodologies and can be represented through statistical figures. This easy-to-measure approach helps authorities and NGOs to initiate proper legal action.

But the problem with Human Rights academic approach is that the measuring of ‘events and primary experience’ are being regularly performed empirically through lots of survey methodologies which can only set some cases for further investigation. This would largely identify the perpetrators under the purview of law.

But compared to the violators of human rights there are many more victims remained undernourished and undertreated in all respects which empirical studies can identify but cannot represent properly. The above so called behaviourist approach of human rights discourse cannot move beyond that keeping the rest to be performed by the state despite being aware that it won’t do anything for some stray cases unless it gets huge mass attention. So ‘mass attention’ becomes an imperative to validate and arrange proper representation for any such case of violation in social space.

So there is an inevitable gap between the human rights violations as empirically determined facts and statistical figurations and those affected identities that suffer huge pain and loss through a profoundly ‘unconscious route’ which people or any institutions are largely unaware of. On this construction ‘human rights’ is such a process that behind our backs, produces and structurates our consciousness in such ways we are not really aware of. Human rights then are those rights which are enlisted in all declarations of statements to be violated by the perpetrators but do not in real terms include my autonomy to make a judgement on it.

The common route to handle or describe ‘human rights’ is the cases and experiences so far been acknowledged either by the state, human rights organizations and NGOs. Now to analyze further those acknowledged cases of violations of human rights which has already been taken care of by the judiciary means to make a critique largely on whether the agents democracy have performed their duties or not.

So even after exploring the factual incidents and a mapping of human rights violations in different nations and also internationally, the empirically driven information and judgements on that, the whole human rights studies or academic approach becomes largely insufficient to catch up the real foundation or the reasoning of that in terms of heavy loss of individuality.

The ‘idea’ behind this approach is not to invoke any unnecessary commentary against the performances of the agents but to establish the insufficiency of empirical approaches that would hardly say the ‘sociology’ of the ruled and victims. The state and NGOs and their people must take some initiatives to discover that unconscious route of pain and loss of human rights of an individual even if it appears difficult to implement. It would then form a new politics and a new dream of movement that may locate the broader area of human rights violations and the notion of at least what our human rights are, under whatever professions and identities we work and live.

Anyone therefore may learn how to acknowledge the human rights violating acts, and international guidelines of what human rights are but he/she has also to learn the ideology of human rights which human being lives life within. For that, some traditional processes and views must be reshaped and revised so that a real alternative human rights movement can be started not just to launch protest against the perpetrators but to discover and address the unconscious route of human sufferings and loss which statistical figures and other forms of empirical information do not really represent.

Media and Human Rights:

Now when we attach or install media in human rights academics it would give you a further mode of representation of your society that originally represents the same arguments and empirical impositions of aspects of human rights violations and also to investigate whether agents of democracy have performed their duties properly.

So installation of media in human rights approach would therefore appear to be just a mode of representing not the society only but they have also to establish some amount of integrity to the ruling establishments for their own sustenance.

Media are supposed to perform certain degree of representation in general:

(a)  To investigate the acts of human rights violations;

(b)  To investigate whether agents of democracy have performed their duties;

(c)  To represent the victims objectively as per information or representing voice available;

(d)  To represent both agents and institutions to prepare opinion of the civil society; if so, public opinion;

(e)  To cover in favour of or opposition to the establishment;

(f)     To safeguard the culture industry, in terms of the ruling entertainment market, as much as possible; because for majority of cases people and civil society members often hold entertainment boom as responsible for human rights violations on the other side of traditional problems like illiteracy, ethno-religious superstitions, economic underdevelopment etc. etc.

(g)  Finally, to establish the claim of representing the unknown and undifferentiated mass;

But apart from the above mandatory representations media are also supposed to be critical to the social inequalities among masses in general. So despite keeping the side of advertisers and culture industry media have enough space to criticize any violation of ‘human rights’ in terms of news, soap operas, reality shows, talk shows, and news magazines such as ‘Satyameva Jayate’.

Media and its behaviourist approaches:

Media in the contemporary phase of international political alignment under US-led version of democracy and growth of human rights concepts largely promote US behaviourist approaches. These mass media approaches basically promote a common axiomatic condition, i.e. people’s consent. People both in individual and mass forms are considered to be assertive and proactive to everything that media promote, propagate, initiate, formulate, show, and represent.

Media therefore perform certain functions:

(a)  Priming;

(b)  Framing;

(c)  Agenda Setting;

(d)  Gatekeeping;

And in every step of media operation media houses generate enough space to cover certain amount of human right awareness reports in terms of its violation and also certain initiatives or human rights movements. But before this empirical information let us know a bit detail of the above mediation activities. While performing these functions media treat individual people firstly as audience; then mass audience and nothing more than that. So media can create a powerful opinion representing certain empirical data of human rights violations and clips of some moves but can never be a ‘partner’ of the suffering till that ends. Instead media would prefer to be partner of any programme representing culture industry.

Growth of Human Rights and Journalism:

In this all pervasive behaviourist approach of media operation and analysis journalism profession almost becomes a complementary category of the authorities across disciplines. The statement does not entail any quantitative survey to establish that there is no sign of independent journalism anywhere in the world. But it is also a fact that journalism particularly covering human rights violation issues faces a massive political and authoritarian challenge across national boundaries. The so called independence of the profession becomes a less debated topic nowadays— very few are interested to initiate a startling debate on it, as it intrudes unknowingly interests of immediate authorities.

The very first paragraph of report on ‘Journalism Media and Challenge of Human Rights Reporting’ reveals interestingly the base of human rights reporting. ‘International Council of Human Rights’ grounds certain questions:

How well do the media report human rights issues? How should journalists and editors

themselves judge the quality of their reporting in this area? What pressures and constraints do

they face and how might they be managed better?

The basic three questions focus ideological queries on media operation which, I consider, give us any suitable answer. The perspective on which these queries are being put forward is also very interesting:

Human rights have become increasingly prominent in recent years. Governments and political

leaders refer to international human rights standards more frequently, both in formal definitions

of policy and in public speeches. Public awareness has similarly evolved. Human rights are

understood to be near the heart of many international news issues, from Afghanistan to

Palestine, Colombia to Sierra Leone — and increasingly linked to discussions of international

debt and trade, education and health. Coverage of human rights in the media is therefore likely to continue to grow — and it is appropriate increasingly to expect journalists and broadcasters to

report them accurately.

Courtesy: © 2002, International Council on Human Rights Policy

You can add some more countries in the list as we are all aware of basic political reason why or the politics behind the listing. Now we are supposed to re-explore human rights in those regions on the debris on human rights where human beings are denied of getting basic needs of life almost a decade ago. Palestine people are still denied of getting food and shelter, and we are talking about sending relief there and not initiate a movement against the US-Israel pact that causes such a blockade for years.

The relief is the conscious route of political development; but the movement against the reason is the unconscious route of politics where sufferings and loss ask for the real foundation of relief. You can measure empirically how many relief operations are being held there or any other areas but it is really difficult to measure the suffering and the real cause of it. Journalism seldom does this operation. If it does we all remember those reports, like Watergate scandal, Tehelka, Wikileaks, Bofors Scam etc. Some other revelations like 2G scam, Coal mine scam are also to be remembered.

Media however operating in different regions often disclose many issues that cause serious harm to the human rights like infant foeticide, child marriage. These revelations get hardly any mass appeal unless any popular category like Amir Khan renders his presence for these.

Findings of the Report:

(i)                  Media, since 1990s, make reference to human rights in their coverage more often and more systematically;

(ii)                Many human rights issues are underreported by the media; although journalists have expanded coverage of human rights issues;

(iii)               Media do not explain and contextualize human rights information as well as they might; In general, data on human rights violations and on human rights standards are not lacking. However, the impact of this information on the public is not as great as might be expected. The media miss human rights stories because they do not pay attention to the specific legal and policy implications they have. Often, they do not have adequate knowledge of human rights and its relevance to the material they are covering. The media frequently also miss the context of human rights stories. These shortcomings diminish the professional quality of reporting, and hamper the communication of information that is sometimes essential for understanding.

(iv)             News is all-pervasive. The news output of the dominant providers is standardised. There is little difference in content between the information given by different providers. In practice, the large media corporations do not question one another’s journalistic values or priorities — even though they are in fierce competition for audience. Newsgathering operations have reduced serious analysis. Programmers adapt programme content to appeal to the largest audiences.

(v)              Human rights issues become ‘human interest stories’,forced to adhere to certain emotional clichés. Since the content of news programmes is very similar, competition between providers leads them to focus on presentation more than content.

The Editorial Process:

(i)                  Reporting is essentially reactive. The breaking news culture undermines editorial and ethical reflection, which is crucial to human rights reporting.

(ii)                The selection of news is event-driven.the news-driven information culture focuses on political and military events rather than social and economic processes, and as a result ignores or under-reports many human rights issues.

(iii)               The media determine what is newsworthy where press freedom exists.

(iv)             The editorial environment is information-loaded. Human rights news competes for the attention of journalists and editors with vast amounts of other information.

(v)              The relationship between reporter and editor is crucial. Reporters and editors are both involved in deciding what stories are identified and selected, and how they are covered.

Conclusion:

The conclusion of this lecture is thus again to explore the unconscious route to reach the core of the real foundation of human rights reporting so that real public awareness accompanied by a real movement can rule the order of the day.

Role of Media as an agent of Social Change

Prof. Swapna Mukherjee Memorial Lecture

Women’s College, Kolkata

29th November, 2011

The subject, assigned to me, deliberately affirms the contemporary media operation toward a definite social change. The referent or external area of the subject i.e. ‘social’ or precisely ‘social change’ assures multi-dimensional emergence of facets in our ‘social’ lives caused chiefly by the media operation or at least defined in such a manner. If we watch the revolutionary upsurge in Egypt and other neighbouring West Asian nations, a very popular note still reigns in popular psyche almost a ruling that the Facebook posts of someone Asma Mahfooz initiated the upsurge. Whatever the actual base would be, this very popular notion hits the global attention quite easily through popular mediation. So what we see here that the notion mediated becomes more catchy attractive and reduced than the actual upsurge and many such parallel reasons or connotations. And this very catchy, attractive and reduced notion becomes a slogan in popular media, which beyond proper reasoning have made it a ‘public opinion’. It now makes you believe that the Facebook posts by Lady Mahfooz created the upsurge that ended the 30 years of tyranny and dictatorship in Egypt. It appears like a headline of a news story which often in most cases comes down to be arbitrarily produced by the journalists according to his/her house policy than readers’ choice. Here my point is by any means not to establish the absurd ‘readers’ choice’, but the journalists’ policy that is not also one of readers’ very own. So making of social or social change happens and you expect me to tell you the story of how assuredly media do this change. I will tell you the story accordingly.

Before moving into details of the stories let me ask you a very old and unpopular question; what do media do to its people? Denis McQuail has quite interestingly identified some categories of functioning that media perpetrate for its audience. These are:

(i) media exert power and inequality;

(ii) national integration;

(iii) social change;

(iv) controlling mass;

You can now safely remove the tag of ‘national integration’ from all global media houses operating in India. Gone are those days of public service broadcasting with Akashbani and Doordarshan and ‘Mile Sur Mera Tumhara’. Media at that time at least for a decade until 1990 never worked as an ‘agent’ but its being was well acclaimed as a developmental tool for Indian people.

Media as an agent…

Do we really have an idea of our media to be acting as an agent? What does an agent do specially to its society or social? Does this ‘agent identity of media’ mean everything but responsibility? Commonly a human or an institutional agent looks after everything professionally without having any emotional, ideological, or cultural attachment to the society or institution. Cultural Anthropology defines ‘agent’ as a concept related mostly to the power…deployed between individual and social structures…act for power. 

Did we mean such a functioning of media? Your subject then clearly suggests that mass media perpetrates the social change as just an agent not as a pillar of democracy or your very own and old friend as fourth estate or watch dog. Why the media is to be treated as a confirmed agent of social change…for its affirmed freedom? 

As and when we try to build an appropriate understanding with media in terms of its operation in our region or national territory, it always becomes our sacred duty to affirm the freedom of media, educating value of media, as an instrument of making public opinion, our agenda-setter, and our cultivator. Do we have any space remaining to accept media in other way as our very own? Do we nevertheless see media from public sphere? 

We do always better to portray our past relationship with media which commonly describes a very social relationship with our own mass media, sometimes as a family member. But difficulty arises when it comes to the contemporary media operation. If media acts as an agent, we have a functional relationship with it, may be a needful relationship. Now for a needful and empowered media it is subsequently very easy to organize any form of social change as it anyway appears to be more powerful, authoritative, and maker of popular opinion. Objectivity of news is now an index of not just mere social credibility but a commercial credential of every media house for simply to sustain as a corporate identity to its political and corporate authority. 

It is however very difficult to judge whether media or popular media act as a social agent although a mass consent would affirm every media house as an empowered corporate body that produces news story and other contents for its targeted audience or consumers to earn and maximize profit. Some quotes may however endorse my point:

(i) We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.

— Michael Eisner, CEO, The Walt Disney Co., (Internal Memo). Quoted from Mickey Mouse Monopoly-Disney, Childhood & Corporate Power

(ii) We are here to serve advertisers. That is our raison d'etre.

— the C.E.O. of Westinghouse(CBS), Advertising Age, February 3, 97

I can also recall a very interesting quote a media representative on a television channel during 2006 Cricket World Cup: We don’t serve people; we only have a professional relationship with the advertisers to run the programme for revenue.

You may safely differ and rule out my opinion. You may even conform to the notion that media do much to us as an agent and we do not expect media doing something more than this. This is the way to initiate critical media studies and debate on operational philosophy of the contemporary media.

Social Change…

Now what do we mean by social change? Is it something related to the social transformation? In media and cultural studies, we have two types of social change:

(i) major or macro social change that often appears to be revolutionary, as earlier seen in socialist revolutions; but recently in 

(a) Egypt and other West Asian nations including newly born South Sudan;

(b) Obama’s win over many traditional rifts and questions within US territory;

(c) significant socio-political change in many Latin American countries, like, Brazil, Nicaragua, Uruguay;

(d) demolition of Iraq and Afghanistan in the name and tag-line of liberation; and 

(e) live telecast of Gulf War;

(f) massive religious upsurge;

(g) ethnic and subaltern political outbursts as seen in UP and many other Indian states etc. 

(h) information revolution through social networking sites and media; complete dissolution of information, its institutional base, and the notion of public opinion; as we can count people voting on an opinion and hardly sustain.

(ii) minor or micro social change that appears to be quite subtle but can exert enough power to change the existing social order. Minor social changes often deal with ethnicity, individuality, social and cultural categories like, languages, emotions, conventions, rituals, hierarchies, deliberate praxis, exterior and interior behavioural expressions, milestones, traffic signals and all possible mundane exercises that affect life.

Mass media through programmes like mega soap operas, reality shows, news bulletins put a control over the above minor but significant categories that subtly cause a social change. Media were however also directly involved in disclosure of Watergate scam in late 70s, Jessica Lall murder case some years back and many such issues of investigation.

How do media perpetrate social change…

It is now quite interesting to watch that media mostly deal with all minor categories of social change to influence its audience except in some regional cases where media are seen quite polarized to a specific political stance. 

In all repetitive contents, like, news bulletins, mega soap operas, newer reality shows media while reiterating selective social categories cultivate its audience to change the behaviour in the long run. Noted communication theorist George Gerbner stated that “television acts as a ‘socializing agent’ that educates viewers on a separate version of reality. The concrete base behind the cultivation theory states that viewers tend to have more faith in the television version of reality the more they watch television. ‘Television world dramatically overemphasizes the prevalence of law enforcement jobs in the real world (Chandler).

So if now the cultivation power of media is instrumental to how media perpetrate social change, it involves certain procedural aspects or features media usually perform. It should also be noted at the same time that now we are not talking about the traditional developing agenda of mass media as a state machinery or organ. We are now in a situation where media conglomerates control the global media operation from phone tapping to providing necessary political backing. In such a situation all pervasive media operation leaves a very scant space for people’s participation in public sphere.

From the initial phase of global media operation with the collapse of Soviet Union people had an opportunity to observe the live media operation in the first Gulf War in 1990. Noted media theorist Douglas Kellner rediscovered the whole story behind the war declaration. US’s foremost official channel CNN publicizing two satellite photographs claimed that an ‘amass of 100,000 Iraqi soldiers gathered at the Qatar border. President George Bush in no further delay declared the deadliest war against Iraq. Later within two months it was further discovered that the yellow stretch was actually a line of sand bags and other materials delimitating the Iraq-Qatar border. An unprecedented social change comprising not only the destruction of a nation and huge public property but an afresh reach of global media through it also.

Media however, as analyzed so far, perform certain chronologically structured functions for every genre of its contents or programmes. US media theorists though found media audience very much willing to accept all media operations, have nevertheless restructured all aspects of media effect toward both major and minor social change. These are: 

(i) Priming: propagating before context;

(ii) Framing: how to prepare the message capsule;

(iii) Agenda Setting: short term media effect on both individual and mass audience; media set people’s agenda;

(iv) Media Cultivate: media in the long run change audience’s behaviour and ideology;

And in this manner media perform its duty to change the socio-political or socio-economic order.

Media spectacle and package…

But things are gradually becoming very complicated in the contemporary global mediation. With the growth of mediation and the globalization of media mass consumption of media contents is becoming the social order that has outlined the traditional notion of development. Today’s world and region receive mediational development much before territorial development. They receive advertisement of a product much before the produced one. Most of our population even does not have that opportunity to see the product for buying although they have enough exposure through popular media. But all industrial attentions converge to the centre of capital accumulation thus marginalizing peripheries and thus creating a havoc social change in favour of affordability and affluent exposure.

Media contents, i.e. advertisements, news, reality shows, mega soaps have gradually become distinct packages that broadcast everything but the truth of the product-message. A massive fictionalization of all above contents moves beyond the common head and judgements. Noted French theorist Jean Baudrillard comments interestingly: media practices have rearranged our senses of place and time. Television is the real world; television is dissolved into life and life is dissolved into television. The fiction is realized and the real becomes fiction…no freedom beyond this activity. We are proletariatized regardless of class, a function of the spectacle.

To my Blog-viewers

All viewers of my Blog are welcome to put forward any question, if they have in mind, related to my posts. It would indeed enrich our understanding of cultural studies and communication.

Deterritorialization of Culture

This newer term corresponds to a newer cultural space [chiefly under western and also in developing countries’ industrialization strategies] that has been created because of deterritorialization of traditional cultural spaces. It even appears to be mandatory along with the natural institutional growth toward modernization. According to Garcia Canclini, this notion refers to ‘the loss of the natural relation between culture with geographic and social territory [including] relocalizations of new and old forms of symbolic production’. Basically with the industrial [technological] modernization, random inflow of popular cultural elements and forms are deterritorializing traditional cultural spaces and releasing cultural signs from any fixed time and space. Noted analyst James Lull has stated that ‘deterritorialization is the [partial] disintegration of human and symbolic constellations and patterns... it is a consequence of the cultural disjuncture... it is one indication of the cultural change that the disjunctures stimulate’.

But theorists interestingly while further deriving the term ‘deterritorialization’ have time and again exemplified the migration of third world people into ‘more developed’ specially western territories. Naturally this migration causes severe uprooting of the traditional cultural base and major disruption of its valuation that compulsively drives individuals to adapt desirably [or undesirably] new cultural base elements for leading a better cultural life. Prof. Lull exemplified this kind of deterritorialization that the African and Asian slave trade in colonial North America, Brazil, and the Carribbean countries ago...and illegal immigrant Mexican farm workers in United States’. In India also such migrations [though within the national territory but in such a vast location, migration often results in the transportation of individual belongings more than 2000 kilometers from one part to another corner of the country] had been a major occurrence always, both in its colonial and post colonial times, from less developed areas to the bit more affluent places. But theorists like Canclini, Lull in this context do not usually accept any definition of newer cultural codification as they desire to identify this phenomenon as quite natural and inevitable as well. They leave it as purely a ‘human matter’.

But the deterritorialization of culture howsoever occurs in human mind, under any circumstance, through only physical migration from any kind of ‘less to affluent’, this theoretical proposition has been reduced to an idealized end that ‘culture never dies, even in conditions of orchestrated repression’. But this is also an open ended conclusion that people from most of the developing countries, while migrating to a better place for enhanced living, invariably opt out the root cultural praxis to make room for adopting better cultural elements and newer praxis. Only thing may be left alive that people would perform some codes of their root cultural practices superficially that would never percolate to the next generations, e.g., organizing Durga Puja festival by the non resident Bengalee people. This global festival is performed quite differently across regions and settlements outside Bengal keeping the rituals almost unchanged. Here this festival can’t make a course of life along with other popular codifications of that region. Baudrillard once very interestingly quoted that ‘we don’t want nature, we want parks; we similarly don’t want exact course of religion but the Durga Puja as festival only. So it is quite naturally discursive and so deterritorialized. We can also argue that a person migrating more than thousand miles for, say, knitting cut piece cloths from far east of India to the farthest west, say, Gujarat, this migration definitely would cause a severe damage to the cultural practices as the person would have to adopt newer cultural praxis as common or essential cultural interfaces and of course along with some superficial ethno-religious practices, what Lull has nucleated as complete root ‘culture’. In terms of social mediation this phenomenon, across traditional class limitations, in the long term would definitely affect individual’s ideology toward his own life pattern. Therefore he has become completely deterritorialized.

Arjun Appadurai argues in this context, ‘...deterritorialization...sometimes...creates exaggerated and intensified senses of criticism or attachment to politics in the home state. Deterritorialization, whether of Hindus, Sikhs, Palestinians, or Ukranians, is now at the core of a variety of global fundamentalisms, Islamic and Hindu fundamentalism...’. But this example does not ensure common people’s disorientation toward such, if we at all say fundamentalism in general, because apart from fanatic religious outbreaks, or counter political outbreaks, fundamentalist principles, even after killing innocent mass, still comfortably exist both peripheries in common psyche of general people who do not at all participate in any such practices.

Thus deterritorialization analysis must accept the theoretical process of discourse analysis so that the signification of ‘deterritorialization’, ‘fundamentalism’, ‘symbolic power’ and many other terms can be perpetrated and understood appropriately. However deterritorialization of culture should not claim any importance in a determinate cultural space because ‘class’ analysis even can perform here better than deterritorialization. But on the other hand such deterritorialization motion can well initiate an important debate on globalization of culture. It is not really the postmodernism in the alternative or any such related elitist theories what can rescue popular culture from being either dominated by the nationalist force or transcorporate ‘global’ force. The prime question here to be raised is the people’s struggle and the resultant cultural practice which is completely independent of any given format. If it is political or cultural it would then initiate ideology, as Hall argues, ‘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. They depend on the balance of forces in a historical conjuncture: on the politics of signification...’.

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...”.

Popular Culture as Postmodern Culture: I Shop Therefore I Am

The Film Run Lola Run: Life on a crossroad

Popular culture is being widely defined in recent years in terms of postmodernity incidentally by the urban civil identities of many ambitious third world nations precisely Indian social centres. With the adventurous growth of global mediation the gross definition of popular ‘social’ culture has evidently been fragmented into certain inter-temporal but globalist symbolic cultural artifacts as newer codifications of life patterns. The postmodernity of culture in a certain periphery is therefore guided by an imposition of those symbolic globalist cultural artifacts on the locally operative cultural space. Postmodernity can thus be worked out as a post-theoretical condition that overrules traditional cultural contours i.e. ruling culture, deviant culture, oppositional culture and even grossly the popular culture. It also transcends all kinds of traditional social and cultural identity demarcations, like authentic culture, suite culture, street culture, commercial culture etc. But alongside the known elements of regional popular culture one must have a clear idea about what is postmodernism or postmodernity and its association with the popular or contemporary culture.

Immediately after the second world war lots of research works were organized in the United States that challenged all moots of traditional modernist development of society, literature, and of course the popular culture. Number of theorists has worked so far on postmodernism and postmodern culture, notably Fredric Jameson, Jean Francois Lyotard et.al. towards a definable, notional release of individual identity from all possible social and political dominations.

Defining Postmodernity

However Jean Francois Lyotard in his “The condition of postmodernity” (1979, translated in English, 1984) has defined postmodern condition as, ‘a crisis in the status of knowledge in western societies’ that overrule all metanarrative apparatus of legitimation, rejecting all totalizing frameworks from telling universalist stories (metanarratives), Marxism, Liberalism, Christianity etc. [Storey, 2001]. Postmodernism according to Lyotard thus rejects all such metanarratives used to dominate, homogenize other voices, opinions, discourses, and other forms of plurality in the name of universal principles. In postmodern condition, heterogeneity or plurality thus rules over the universality and homogeneity of narratives i.e. values, ‘ism’s, ‘logy’s etc.

The annulations of metanarratives as grand narratives in postmodernity however reveals something more than what is commonly understood in terms of the fragmentation of grand narrative. Postmodernity unlike the French Poststructurality here prescribes a plausible post-semiotic outcome of every such critique of the modernist references. This is the most problematic and viscid area of the understanding of postmodernity anywhere other than literary creations. Postmodernity cannot rest in a poststructural indeterminacy but needs a postcommercial or hyperreal space to render the mediated form of the signified of a text.

Lyotard argues that all aspects of modern societies depend on such metanarratives as grand narratives. The basic tenets of postmodernity therefore reveals that every attempt to create an “order” always calls for an alternative creation of a “disorder,” of an equal dimension, but a “grand narrative” shadows such constructive disorders. Postmodernism while rejecting such metanarratives as grand narratives, welcomes thus “micro-narratives,” micro-stories that explain individual praxis, events, rather than Universalist or globalist concepts. Postmodern “micro-narratives” are always situational, provisional, contingent, and temporary, making no claim to universality, truth, reason, or stability (Sarup).

In terms of ‘post-codification’ postmodernity can be quite well differentiated from ‘cultural studies’ though both deal with individuality and its cultural developments. Individuality, in cultural studies, largely takes the form of a counter-hegemonic to the modernist institutional legacy of domination but does not ignore the possibility of political unification of the mass. Their counter-hegemony though rejects structural metanarratives or grand narratives, involves a greater installation of plurality in popular cultural praxis. 

But postmodernity on the other hand not only rejects Universalist metanarratives but gives also a plausible and at the same time quite utopian end of a ‘disorder’ wherein reality, according to them, may occasionally exist. The counter hegemonic individual does not prefer postmodern ‘disorderly chaos’ that needs support of hyperreal ‘postconsumerism’ to establish itself. Cultural studies inherits ‘ideology’ independent of any political metanarrative, say, ‘base and superstructure’ but indeed political and further directs people to organize struggle.

Genealogy of postmodernity

While tracing out the genealogy of postmodernist thought one must rediscover and redefine the course of historicism that tells us outright development of modernism along with massive optimistic development of science and of course social science. ‘Modernist thought had its successful origins and developments in the European Enlightenment period. This era was sharply demarcated by a celebration of the liberating potentials of the social sciences, the materialistic gains of capitalism, new forms of rational thought, due process safeguards, abstract rights applicable to all, and the individual it was a time of great optimism (Milovanovic, 1992a, 1994a; Dews, 1987; Sarup, 1989; Lyotard, 1984; Baker, 1993).

Postmodernists are fundamentally opposed to such modernist thought. Sensitized by the insights of some of the classical thinkers, ranging from Marx, to Weber, to Durkheim, Freud, and the critical thought of the Frankfurt School, postmodernist thought emerged with a new intensity in the late 1980s and early 1990s. “Let us wage a war on totality” stated one of its key exponents (Lyotard, 1984: 82). Most of the key concepts of modernist thought were critically examined and found to be wanting. Entrenched bureaucratic powers, monopolies, the manipulative advertisement industry, dominant and totalizing discourses, and the ideology of the legal apparatus were seen as exerting repressive powers. In fact, the notion of the individual free, self-determining, reflective, and the center of activity was seen as an ideological construction, nowhere more apparent than in the notion of the juridical subject, the so-called reasonable man in law. Rather than the notion of the individual, the centered subject, the postmodernists were to advocate the notion of the decentered subject’ (Dragan Milovanovic).

Baudrillard on postmodernity

According to one of the most vibrant theorists of poststructurality, Jean Baudrillard, postmodernity is not simply a culture of sign, rather it is a culture of ‘simulacrum’, i.e., introspective identical copy that transcending the original text determinacy, on what Walter Benjamin has reiterated that, mechanical reproduction has destroyed the ‘aura’ of the work of art. Baudrillard’s notion was the long drawn distinctions between original and the copy has now been virtually destroyed, and so the geo-social space and the relative metanarratives. This, according to Baudrillard, is the simulation process. Basically, as simulation is expressed, all the recorded contents, like film, music, are nothing but a copy without the original. John Storey has added that a film is a construction made from editing together film footage shots in different times and spaces. Baudrillard’s simulation is the hyperreal regeneration of a reality text in absense of its original identity and hyperrealism is the characteristic mode of postmodernity, where in its realm the distinction between simulation and the ‘real’ implodes in which real and imaginary gradually collapse into each other (Storey, 2001). Also in this way French poststructuralism merged into the conditions postmodernity. What is still important here is to note that, according to Baudrillard, simulation is getting more and more real than the real. It can perform even better than what the real does. This is also where media operate so powerfully, because it leads people to simulate the real more importantly than the event. So even been badly defeated in Vietnam war in Sixties, American film industry could still manage to let the simulation alive in favour of US Army in number of Hollywood productions over years.

Baudrillard then made simulation analyses forward to rediscover ‘Disneyland’ that justified postmodern culture quite effectively but left a great utopian space activated also. In his words, ‘...Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the society in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real’.

Another one of the most influencial analysts of postmodernity, Fredric Jameson, in his Postmodernism and Consumer Society, has pointed out postmodernity as a condition where the erosion occurred in the older distinctions between high culture and mass culture or popular culture. Thus postmodernity transcends the traditional vested interest that has been preserved in the realm of high culture. According to Jameson in the realm of moderity [high modernity] popular culture has been brutally influenced institutionally toward high cultural praxis. Postmodernism according to Jameson, breaks any particularity or form of popular culture. It thus releases all popularly emerged texts from traditional or conventional motivation and pressure. Jameson argues these cultural texts as a ‘periodizing concept’ and is dominant in the neo-liberal economic and cultural paradigm what he has termed ‘postmodernism: the cultural logic of late capitalism’ that connotes neo-liberal transnational development of capitalism in the contemporary age of globalization. In this context Ernest Mandel’s trial of three stages of development of capitalism is to be considered: ‘market capitalism’, ‘monopoly capitalism’, ‘late or multinational or transnational capitalism’. Jameson while referring these stages of capitalist development into his cultural schema ‘Realism’, ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’, argues that capitalism in its last category puts forward the purest form of capital into the uncommodified areas (Storey, 2001).

The question of historical transformation toward postmodernity:

Now to reach the core of such transformation of historical periods either from market to transnational orientation of capitalist development or from cultural ‘realism’ to ‘postmodernism’ a plausible alternative schema is needed other than typical historical metanarratives. Here in this context postmodernism differs sharply from cultural studies. Even though traditionally empowered historical metanarratives are being rejected by both postmodernism and cultural studies, there is a major difference between these rejections. For Raymond Williams the transformation of historical periods does not entail complete structural destruction of previous cultural codes and installation of a new one. It simply may cause a paradigmatic shift of ‘relative cultural codes’ that may involve a massive transformation of ruling of popular culture what we can denote different phases of dominant codes. Jameson in this context argues that postmodern condition is basically ‘the cultural dominant’ of late or transnational or neo-liberal [economic] capitalism that along with the free movement of capital delimiting newer cultural boundaries across national borders, calls for emancipation of cultural texts welcomes indeterminacy which is independent of its traditional signification process. But what is still worth mentioning about Jameson’s notion in this context is that postmodern dominant culture belongs to the western capitalist societies which have achieved hierarchy in both economic and popular cultural praxis, otherwise postmodernism and postmodern culture has also been characterized in many ways, such as, ‘Pastiche culture’, ‘culture of quotations’, culture of flatness or depthlessness, superficial in most literate sense, i.e. free from meaning etc. However, according to Jameson, postmodernity or postmodern culture is hopelessly a commercial culture typically promotes consumerist capitalism.