copy of cultural theory and practice hs 214 lect 1

Cultural Theory and Practice

Dr Liza DasAssociate Professor

Department of Humanities and Social SciencesIndian Institute of Technology Guwahati

HS 214 2009

• “For man the unexamined life is not worth living”

-- Socrates

• “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,

The proper study of mankind is man.”

-- Alexander Pope

QIP CD Cell Project IIT Guwahati 2009-10

Have you ever asked yourselves: Why do we live the kind of life that we live?

In Cultural Studies this question is framed as

“How are we produced as subjects?”

• What is culture?• Why should we investigate culture? • Can it be studied systematically? • If yes, what are the tools with which we may approach such

a vast subject?

• Here we study the life that we live -- and the reasons

thereof -- through a variety of lenses, and all the various lenses may not agree with each other.

• Such is the difficulty of studying the lives that we live, our beliefs, our choices and our loves and our despairs.


Course Objectives

• It provides a theoretical introduction to the field of Cultural Studies which has emerged as the most comprehensive and interdisciplinary field in the humanities and social sciences today.

• It incorporates both the views of culture as a way of life and as a contested site for human discourse and action.

• Knowledge of key concepts and approaches will equip students to understand and articulate themselves as cultural beings and not simply technologists

Theory and Practice

• Cultural Studies is a body of theory generated by thinkers who regard the production of knowledge as a political practice.

• Knowledge is never a neutral or objective phenomenon but a matter of positionality, of the place from which one speaks, to whom, and for what purposes.


Praxis

“Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.“

(Marx)

Praxis is a synthesis of theory and practice in which each informs the other

Knowledge• The Problem of ‘Knowledge’: Cultural studies and the

problematisation of knowledge. Knowledge is always already provisional, always already contaminated.

• Knowledge game amounting to ‘edifying conversation.’ Knowledge is power and constituted by power.

• Approximate knowledge is all we have. Approximate knowledge is enough. One does not have to know something absolutely in order to know something well enough to live well, to make choices, to act, to understand.

• Approximate knowledge can be effectively evaluated. Knowing how well we knew something was more valuable that simply knowing it.

Epistemology

• Epistemology, from the Greek words episteme (knowledge) and logos (word/speech).

• The branch of philosophy that deals with the nature, origin and scope of Knowledge. Much of this debate has focused on analysing the nature and variety of knowledge and how it relates to similar notions such as truth and belief. Much of this discussion concerns the justification of knowledge claims.

• The way that knowledge claims are justified both leads to and depends on the general approach to philosophy one adopts. Thus, philosophers have developed a range of epistemological theories to accompany their general philosophical positions.

• One implication of this definition is that one cannot be said to "know" something just because one believes it and that belief subsequently turns out to be true.

• An ill person with no medical training but a generally optimistic attitude might believe that she will recover from her illness quickly, but even if this belief turned out to be true, the patient did not know that she would get well, because her belief lacked justification.

• Knowledge, therefore, is distinguished from true belief by its justification, and much of epistemology is concerned with how true beliefs might be properly justified.

a priori versus a posteriori knowledge

• a priori knowledge is knowledge gained or justified by Reason alone, without the direct or indirect influence of any particular experience.

• a posteriori knowledge is knowledge the attainment or justification of which requires reference to Experience. This is also called empirical knowledge.

Epistemologists (further study)

• Rene Descartes• Immanuel Kant• David Hume• John Locke• George Berkeley (alleged inspiration behind The Matrix)

• Bertrand Russell

Political Nature


• It has the objective of understanding culture in all its complex forms and of analysing the social and political contexts in which culture manifests itself.

• Cultural Studies has a commitment to an ethical evaluation of modern society and to a radical line of political action.

The CULT STUDS

‘Old’ Cultural Studies


Culture is the best that has been thought and known in the world.

Matthew Arnold (19th C)

That complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.

E. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1871

Anthropological focus

• Culture is the basis of communal life. It is a way of life transmitted from generation to generation.

• Civilisation: The ability of a culture to express itself well, especially in writing, and to organise itself thoroughly as a social, economic and political entity.

‘New’ Cultural Studies

• Culture is the webs of significance* spun by man that he is suspended in.

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973

* Webs / networks of meaning and value


Professor Stuart Hall

• By culture I mean the actual grounded terrain of practices, representations, languages and customs of any specific society.

• I also mean the contradictory forms of common sense which have taken root in and helped to shape popular life


In how many different ways can you study yourself as a cultural being?

Interdisciplinary scope:

Philosophy: How do we understand reality? Kant: Noumenon and phenomenon. How do we attribute meaning to our existence through our value and belief systems?

Language: How does language construct our perception of reality? Consider symbols, naming, concepts, the ‘he’ norm.

Economics: How does wealth and its distribution determine our lives? Std of living, QoL, Health and longevity



Sociology: Why do we have the social systems and arrangements that we do? Casteism, class-bias, racism, marriage, living-in.

Psychology: Why do we think in certain ways? What does it mean to be a cognitive agent? Evolution, Brain systems, cognition, self/other, self-esteem.

Science and Technology: How does technology affect our way of life?Churchill: We design our buildings and then our buildings design us.

Literature, media: Why are the media and literature so powerful as cultural products? How are we ‘constructed’ by the media?

History: How has culture evolved and changed thorough different times?How should we study history?

1. Science: Human Evolution and the beginnings of culture

2. Psychology: Evolutionary Psychology, Theory of Memetics

3. Political Economy: Marxism

4. Modernism and Postmodernism


Key concepts and guiding statements of the course:

1.Culture is not a given. It is constructed and hence can be studied systematically.

2. Culture is not absolute or static but changing and dynamic.

3. There are reasons and forces (eg. political economy) behind cultural changes.

4. Power is the chief arbiter of the kind of lives we lead.


Theory: considerations

How do we theorise culture? Theory is an intellectual activity in which people interpret, critique and draw generalisations about how and why the social world spins the economic, cultural, political and institutional webs.

Theory has the ability to make sense of all levels of our everyday lives.

Cultural practices are always underlined by theoretical assumptions and perspectives. The theory constructed is not merely a system but an instrument for change.

Practice: Not theory vs practice; theory as practice.

Epistemology: Theory of knowledge, its origins, sources, assumptions and limits.

How do we have knowledge and what are its means? Problematisation of knowledge


THEORY

• A general idea that explains a large set of factual patterns.

• A comprehensive explanation of a given set of data that has been repeatedly confirmed by observation and experimentation and has gained general acceptance within the academic community.

• A statement or set of statements used to explain a phenomenon. A theory is generally accepted as valid due to having survived repeated testing.

• A scientific theory is an established and experimentally verified fact or collection of facts about the world. Unlike the everyday use of the word theory, it is not an unproved idea, or just some theoretical speculation. The latter meaning of a 'theory' in science is called a hypothesis.


copy of cultural theory and practice hs 214 lect 1

Documents

approximate knowledge

variety of knowledge

production of knowledge

problematisation of

scope of knowledge

knowledge of key concepts

knowledge game amounting

greek words episteme