Transcript Cultural Studies 3: Consumer as an Example Key Concepts and Subject

Cultural
Studies 3:
Key Concepts and Subject
Positions–
Consumer as an Example
1.
2.
3.
Main issues: Literary Studies vs. Cultural Studies
Major Theories and Methodologies
Key Concepts and Subject Positions
Outline
Chap 12 outline
Starting Questions
Consumption: Marxist Views
Consumption: Cultural Studies
1.
2.
3.
Populist Views –Michel de Certeau
Stuart Hall – Encoding, decoding
Articulation
Other Views of Consumption Desire: Combining
Marxism and Psychoanalysis


Production of Desire -- Slavoj Zizek
Desiring Machine: Deleuze and Gattari
Another example
Next Time
Chap 12 outline
Chap 10. from a lit. perspective,
chap 11. history and methods,
chap 12. key concepts
Cultural Studies defined p. 7 – interdisciplinary, objects:
culture as a whole way of life and its forms of power,
institutions in higher ed which form connections with those
outside.
Culture as signifying practices
Representation—produced, enacted, used and understood
in specific social ocntexts
Materialism and Non-reductionism (to class or economic
factors)  Articulation (later)
Pervasive Power, (control by consent) ideology, hegemony
in Popular Culture
Text and reader (later)
Subjectivity – product of discourses
Marxism –mode of production, capitalism, commodification,
alienation, fetishism, economic determinism vs agency
Please comment:
The plot of romantic love in 瓊瑤‘s novels constructs
weak women with dreamy eyes and no contact with
economic reality, which become an object of fantasy or
identification for female reader of that historical period.
“Morning” and Notes on a Scandal partly explain and
reflect the high rate of divorce in our society.
Violent films lead to violent behavior in teenagers.
The sensationalism on TV news program appeals to and
results in the audience’s interest in and gossip over 八卦
news．
In “Madness of Love,” Williams’ concept of romantic love
comes from the operas he loves.
Contemporary inventions of telecommunication (e.g. Walkman,
E-games, cell phone, the Internet) leads to human isolation.
手機對消費者的主體建構有二：鈴聲召喚、漏接焦慮（張小
虹）．
Consumption:
Marxist Views (1)
regulation of consumption: e.g.

Penopticon/surveillance (Foucault; e.g. market
survey; our identity defined in terms of numbers.)
production of consumption/consumers: e.g.

1)
2)
Culture industry and massification of consumers
(Frankfurt school)
Parts interchangeable  pseudo identity -- (no
“real” human contact in Internet chatrooms; cell
phone and identity–e.g. next page.)
creation of a false need – (Walkman—a recorder
without recording functions; endless versions of
Windows)
Cell Phone -Parts
interchangeable with
different surfaces
Youtube—7610 和顏
悅色 pink version
Nokia 7610 Affair
Consumption:
Marxist Views (2)
production of consumption/consumers:
e.g.


interpellation (Althusser e.g. “natural”
response to identification with the rings of
cell phones, the exchange values of
commodities sold in ads);
subject positions in discourse (Foucault;
e.g. identifying with the protagonists in 瓊
瑤‘s novels)
Cultural Studies (1):
M. de Certeau
The Practice of Everyday Life
Dominant culture and the producers –
cumbersome, powerful strategies of control;
Consumption



主動的再創造 ("active re-creation" Poster 102);
Provisional, fragmentary and invisible re-writing
and theft of the power imposed on him/her 機動
性、零碎的、不明顯的改寫或竊取, 利用「加於
她身上的力量」在一個不屬於自己的地方「再創
造」。
tactics of evasion, resistance, disruption,
opposition.
Cultural Studies (2):
Stuart Hall
(image source)
Verbal Communication as a
Speech Event (Jacobson)
“Encoding and Decoding”
Communication as a highly
structured, asymmetrical
and non-equivalent
process.
-- "meaning structure 1"
and "meaning structure 2"
may not be the same.
Encoding &
Decoding
Implications: behaviorism and textual determinism
rejected; a more interactive view of audience
reception.
Code-- e.g. Televisiual code –audio-visual sign;
Encoder: The production structures – production team,
production companies, TV stations, sponsors, TV
rating-- within the wider socio-cultural and political
structure (where ideologies are from)
Encoding process: (using Roland Barthes) denotation 
(signified emptied out) connotation  myth
* There are encoders and decoders in each of the five
levels of production, circulation/regulation,
consumption, representation and identification
Cultural Studies (2)
Three positions in decoding of communication :
(Stuart Hall)
 the dominant-hegemonic -- “preferred”
meaning
 the negotiated code,
 the oppositional code -- at the oppositional
code level viewers/listeners/readers
“detotalize the message in the preferred
code in order to retotalize the message
within some alternative framework of
reference” (1980: 138).
(http://www.sociology.org/content/vol006.002/vannini_myers.html )
From Marxism to
Cultural Studies (2)
三種解碼的可能 (32)
優勢解讀（dominant-hegemonic position）：完
全且直接地接收媒體訊息(preferred meaning)，
順應編碼者的意圖。
協商解讀（negotiated position）：Hall 認為大
部分閱聽人會採取此種解碼形式，閱聽人透過
自身的處境條件與媒體的論述進行協商。
抗拒解讀（oppositional position）：採取此一立
場的閱聽人很清楚媒體的論述希望引導閱聽人
採取順應的解碼方式（preferred code），因此
閱聽人選擇另一種與之對立的解讀方式詮釋媒
體的訊息。(袁 )
The Practice of
Everyday Life e.g.
Walkman (by extension cell phone) -- criticized for its
“anti-social, atomizing effects,” blocking off the world and
the “valuable.” e.g. “As long as they have the
Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great
tradition [Shakespeare, the Bible and so on] has to
say.”
two functions of Walkman – “escape” (individualism:
dominant reading) and “enhancement” (negotiated
position)
1.
2.
possible choices: pop music, audio books,
background music”;
“when I’m listening to the Walkman I’m not just
tuning out. I’m also tuning in a soundtrack for the
scenery around me.”
(du Gay 89-93)
Cultural Studies (3):
Articulation
articulation (“expressing/representing”
and “putting together” textbook p. 9)
 articulation of contradictory
interpellations/subject positions.
Other Views of Consumption
Combining Marxism and
Psychoanalysis:
Slavoj Zizek -- use Lacan to analyze
popular culture
 Deleuze and Guattari –against
Oedipus complex.

Production of Desire –
Slavoj Zizek
Fundamental homology between Marx’s and
Freud’s analysis of commodity fetishism and
of dreams (the logic of abstraction and
symbolization)
Dream: manifest content  latent thought
 the unconscious desire
Commodity: chancy determination of
commodity’s value  determination by labortime (a secret)  the unconscious desire
Commodity
Fetishism
1. ‘a definite social relation between men, that
assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a
relation between things’ (Marx 1974, 77)
2. A misrecognition [of] what is really a
structural effect of the network of relations
between elements (exchange value or price)
[as] “an immediate property of one of the
elements” (commodity) (Sizek 23-24)  to
avoid the Real of our desire.
Production of Desire –
Slavoj Zizek
Latent content of dream//that of ideology.
Desire: The sublime object of desire: [the Other]
that which we most desire but cannot have  we
are the barred subject. S
Ideology: “What [we] overlook, what [we]
misrecognize, is not the reality but the illusion
which is structuring [our] reality, [our] real social
activity.”
Popular culture as Fantasy –false attempts to
integrate the ‘impossible’ in the Symbolic, which
actually avoids ‘the Real’ of our desire.
e.g. Hitchcock’s films– revelation and purging of
the viewers’ Oedipus complex.
D/G vs. Marxism
Marxism:
production 
distribution 
consumption
Exchange value =
use value
Against desire as lack.
Against oedipalization,
which is supported by
Capitalism. The
prohibited = the desired.
Desire = a flow prior to
representation and
reproduction
Desiring Machines and
Nomadic Subject
Deleuze and Guattari:
Oedipalization & Capitalism
[Capitalism] reduces all social relations to commodity
relations
 1) deterritorializes desire by subverting(decoding) all territorial groupings such as the church,
the family, local community, etc.
2) It also reterritorializes desire by channeling(recoding) all production into the narrow confines of the
equivalence-form (logic of exchange value); within the
state, family, law,commodity logic, banking systems,
consumerism, psychoanalysis and other normalizing
institutions. (Cf. Bogue 88; Kellner 89)
Our Body as Desiring Machine
“It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at
times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it
heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to
have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines. . . “
produces a flow of desire;
Connected with or interrupted by the other
machines;
e.g. organ-machine & an energy-machine; the breast;
the mouth a machine coupled to it. (The mouth of the
anorexic.) Hence we are all handymen: each with his
little machines.
Desiring Machine
the production of production: continually
producing production, of grafting producing
onto the product,
e.g. A painting by Richard Lindner, 'Boy with
Machine,' shows a huge, pudgy, bloated boy
working one of his little desiring-machines,
after having hooked it up to a vast technical
social machine--which, as we shall see, is what
even the very young child does.
Composed of heterogeneous and independent
parts.
Richard Lindner,
'Boy with
Machine‘
(1954, oil on canvas)
(source)
The body
without organs
Not an organless body, but body without
organization, or the deterritorialized body; an
interconnected system of flows and forces.
“a body that breaks free from its socially
articulated, disciplined, semioticized, and
subjectified state (as an ‘organism’), to
become disarticulated, dismantled, and
deterritorialized, and hence able to be
reconstituted in a new way” (Kellner 90-91)
Nomadic subjects
multiple personalities
1.consumption
2.when social codes [e.g. Oedipus] break
down in their channelling of desire, then the
nomadic subject is possible, traversing the lines of
the desiring machines inscribed on the body w/o
organs
Model of the giant egg traversed by lines
with a wandering point of pure intensity
Another example
為什麼台灣總是有時髦商品熱？
中共的威脅、打壓  閹割焦慮 否認機制
（disavowal）: 不能說清楚，不能講明白 政
治焦慮轉移到商品消費
1998 年夏天：葡式蛋塔滿足口腔期的匱乏．
社會集體式的領聖餅．
1999 年夏天：凱蒂貓收藏熱．收藏：肛門期
的心理退化．
張：既承認也否認泛政治化．
References
Deleuze and Guattari. Ronald Bogue. London New York :
Routledge , 1989
Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reappraisal. Elizabeth Wright.
Polity,1998.
Postmodern theory : critical interrogations. Steven Best and
Douglas Kellner. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire : Macmillan ,
1991
du Gay, Paul, et al. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of Sony
Walkman. Culture, Media and Identities series. London: Sage, 1997.
張小虹． 《在百貨公司遇見狼》． 聯合文學, 2002.
《時尚消費、名人效應的閱聽人接收分析》 by
袁千雯 Thesis
Next Time
The Group’s Texts (at EngSite) –(with a
focus on第肆章 閱聽人、媒體與名人效
應… 53
第一節 閱聽人時尚相關知識如何影響名
人相關效應之詮釋 54 )
《20.30.40》
“The Loveliness of the Long-Distance
Runner” – 1.5 in total. 