Download - 7. Critical Theory
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7. Critical Theory and the Rise of
the Cultural Industries
Cmns130, Spring 2012
Kathleen Cross
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Lecture Outline Today
Housekeeping
Recap last lecture (media effects research)
Critical Theory intro
Enlightenment
Frankfurt School
Standardized culture Commodity fetishism
Critical theory in context
Lecture Outline
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Media effects in Lib. Pluralism
Changed over time:
Hypodermic Needle Model Mass society concerns
War of the Worlds, propaganda,1930s - 40s
Two Step Flow theory Minimal political effects, 1950s -
Uses and Gratifications theory Audience control, advertising &
industry research
Consumer soveriengty
1970s -3
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ADVERTISING
Related to consumer culture
Prevalence of Audience Research
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Timeline of Dominant Views
1700-1800s 1900s - 1940s - 1960s -80s 1985- 2012
Neo-Liberal/Enlightenment
- ModernityLiberal Liberal
Pluralist
Liberal
Pluralist
Liberal Pluralist
Critical CulturalStudies
Critical Theory/
Cultural Studies
Critical Theory/
Cultural Studies
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Enlightenment / Modernity
(1550) 1770 1800s
CRITICAL
(MARXIST NEO MARXIST
LIBERAL
LIBERAL PLURALIST
CRITICALPOLITICAL ECONOMY
CULTURAL
STUDIESNEO-LIBERAL
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Enlightenment
Age of Reason
New humanism based on logic and thescientific method (empiricism)
Influence of other emerging sites of power:merchant class, early capitalists, educatedelites, industrialists.
Massive upheaval from agrarian toindustrial society.
Enlightenment: an intellectual approachbased on scientific and rational view of theworld, established the ideologicalfoundations for modern democracy andfree press.
Cross/Cmns130/SFU
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Enlightenment cont.
Origins ofmodernity a profound revolution in social thoughtin 18th C.
Secular movement, dedicated to freeing people fromignorance and blind religious faith, through application ofscience and reason
Emancipatory movement
Notions ofuniversal, natural, individual rights, &representative democracy
Education, and communications methods to bring reason tocivil society
Specific role of the state to safeguard rights and provideservices for the public good.
Cross/Cmns130/SFU
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Cross/Cmns130/SFU 9
Three key concepts of Enlightenment
(Classical Liberalism)
1. Assumption that humans arerational, capable of making choicesand governing ourselves
2. Liberty, all men are created equaland have unalienable rights.Freedom from authoritariangovernments
3. Truth is discoverable through reason.
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Critical Perspectives
Concerned that democracy/freedommovements were not being realized
Concerned with unequal relations of power,especially economic power
Frankfurt School
Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter
Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and later
others... Who holds the power in media? Karl Marx
1818 - 1883
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Frankfurt School
Culture Industry: Enlightenment As
Mass Deception (1944)
Progressive technical domination
Rationality through technology
Max Horkheimer
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The Cultural Industry Thesis
Adorno and Horkheimer used the ironic term cultureindustry
Refers to the process of the industrialization of massproduced culture
The industrial assembly line based model of work nowpervades leisure (Fordism)
Leisure has the same rhythms, pace, simplifications andillusions of work
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Industry
A mode of organization to produce, and
distribute something in capitalist economies
Defines institutions and their
interrelationships in networks of commerce
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mass deception critique
Issues of:
Standardization
Pseudo-individualism
Commodification
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COMMODITY FETISHISM
the result of taking the
commodity as being an almost
magical object, rather thanbeing the result of a set of
social relations
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Cultural Industries
Ifculture= the signifyingsystem through which socialorder is communicated,reproduced, experienced andexplored (Hesmondhalgh,p11)
Then cultural industries are
those institutions which aredirectly involved in theproduction of social meaning
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Hesmondhalghs Definition
Based on Raymond Williams narrower definition:
- The signifying system through which necessarily a socialorder is communicated, reproduced, experiences andexplored (page 11)
- Thus, cultural industries are those institutions which aremost directly involved in the production of socialmeaning.
Industries which produce SYMBOLIC MEANING
Centered on the creation oftexts
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Why do Cultural Industries matter?
- Make and circulate texts
- Manage and circulate
creativity- Are agents of economic,
social and cultural change
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Core Cultural Industries
Those that deal with industrial production andcirculation of texts/products/services:
Broadcasting
FilmMusic
Print/Book and magazine publishing
Advertising*
Video games
Internet
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Key Concepts in Critical Perspectives
SOCIETY is divided or stratified - the illusion ofconsensus is maintained in the midst of inherentand structural conflicts of interest.
POWER is concentrated, unevenly distributedwithin certain elites or structures of dominance
MEDIA, are both constituting and the resultof
these differential power relations media has a role in shaping the whole ideological
environment in legitimizing the social order
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Two general streams of Critical Theory
Cultural Theory
Frankfurt School
Cultural Industries
Focus on ideological
analysis
Critical Political Economy
Herman & Chomsky
McChesney
Focus on economic
analysis
Convergences between the two, eg: Gramsci
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Next week...
Neo-liberalism
Proposal due in tutorial