Communications vs. Cultural Studies: Overcoming the Divide

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Kellner, Douglas. (19??) Communications vs. Cultural Studies: Overcoming the Divide. ??

Divisions within Communications

Field is unclear from the start

  • Liberal arts, humanities
  • Social sciences
  • Depts get all kinds of different names
  • ICA has many divisions

Disciplinary "crisis" is divide between:

  • Cultural studies
    • More humanities
  • Mass-mediated communication
    • More empirical

Frankfurt School, 1930s

Critical theory

  • Combined "political economy"
  • Audience reception, ideological effects
  • Analysis of "mass production: commodification, standardization, massification"
  • First systematic analysis, critique of mass-mediated culture

Culture industries

  • Adorno, Lowenthal, Herzog, Horkheimer
  • Pop music, soaps, radio drama, etc.
  • Oppressive agents of socialization
  • High/low cultural distinction
    • Low culture is always spectacular

Updating Frankfurt

  • Spectrum of culture rather than high/low
  • Agencial, active audience/reader
  • Reconstruction of culture industries argument (distraction)

Birmingham, British Cultural Studies, 1980s

Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, John Fiske

Attempts to bridge gaps that open in media/communication studies

  • Artifacts of the culture industries can be resources for resistance, change
  • Interdisciplinary
  • Theory of social production and reproduction
  • Uses Gramsci's model of hegemony/counterhegemony
  • Materialist, concerned with socio-historical conditions
    • Rather than idealist, textualist
  • Revising the Frankfurt "mass cult" critique

Popular culture

  • that which audiences make of and do with the commodities of culture industries
  • "risks blunting the critical edge of cultural studies"

Political agenda

  • Seeking "new agents of change" in post-1960s subcultures
  • Feminism
  • Race, ethnic studies

United States manifestation

  • "Too one-sided"
  • "Focusing too intently on cultural texts and audience reception"

Kellner's festish complaints:

  • Fetishism of the audiences
  • Fetishism of resistance
  • Fetishism of audience pleasure

Kellner goes deeper into a critique based on a simplistic version of Birmingham/Fiske

Kellner argues that political comments are essential and must be "progressive"

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