9375_016783ch1

8/12/2019 9375_016783Ch1

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/9375016783ch1 1/12

Radio, television, film, and the other products of media cultureprovide materials out of which we forge our very identities; our sense

of selfhood; our notion of what it means to be male or female; our senseof class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, of sexuality; and of “us” and“them.” Media images help shape our view of the world and our deepestvalues: what we consider good or bad, positive or negative, moral or evil.Media stories provide the symbols, myths, and resources through whichwe constitute a common culture and through the appropriation of whichwe insert ourselves into this culture. Media spectacles demonstrate whohas power and who is powerless, who is allowed to exercise force and vio-lence, and who is not. They dramatize and legitimate the power of theforces that be and show the powerless that they must stay in their placesor be oppressed.

We are immersed from cradle to grave in a media and consumer soci-ety and thus it is important to learn how to understand, interpret, and criti-cize its meanings and messages. The media are a profound and oftenmisperceived source of cultural pedagogy: They contribute to educating us

how to behave and what to think, feel, believe, fear, and desire—and whatnot to. The media are forms of pedagogy that teach us how to be men andwomen. They show us how to dress, look, and consume; how to react to

◆ 9

1

◆ Douglas Kellner

CULTURAL STUDIES,

MULTICULTURALISM,

AND MEDIA CULTURE

8/12/2019 9375_016783Ch1


members of different social groups; how tobe popular and successful and how to avoidfailure; and how to conform to the domi-nant system of norms, values, practices, andinstitutions. Consequently, the gaining of

critical media literacy is an importantresource for individuals and citizens inlearning how to cope with a seductive cul-tural environment. Learning how to read,criticize, and resist socio-cultural manipula-tion can help empower oneself in relation todominant forms of media and culture. Itcan enhance individual sovereignty vis-à-vismedia culture and give people more powerover their cultural environment.

In this chapter, I will discuss the poten-tial contributions of a cultural studies per-spective to media critique and literacy. Inrecent years, cultural studies has emerged asa set of approaches to the study of cultureand society. The project was inauguratedby the University of Birmingham Centre forContemporary Cultural Studies, whichdeveloped a variety of critical methods forthe analysis, interpretation, and criticism of cultural artifacts.1 Through a set of internal

debates, and responding to social strugglesand movements of the 1960s and the1970s, the Birmingham group came tofocus on the interplay of representationsand ideologies of class, gender, race, ethnic-ity, and nationality in cultural texts, includ-ing media culture. They were among thefirst to study the effects of newspapers,radio, television, film, and other popularcultural forms on audiences. They alsofocused on how various audiences inter-preted and used media culture differently,analyzing the factors that made differentaudiences respond in contrasting ways tovarious media texts.

Through studies of youth subcultures,British cultural studies demonstrated howculture came to constitute distinct forms of identity and group membership. For cul-tural studies, media culture provides thematerials for constructing views of the

world, behavior, and even identities. Thosewho uncritically follow the dictates of mediaculture tend to “mainstream” themselves,

conforming to the dominant fashion,values, and behavior. Yet cultural studies isalso interested in how subcultural groupsand individuals resist dominant forms of culture and identity, creating their own

style and identities. Those who obey rulingdress and fashion codes, behavior, andpolitical ideologies thus produce their iden-tities within the mainstream group, asmembers of specific social groupings(such as white, middle-class conservativeAmericans). Persons who identify with sub-cultures, like punk culture, or black nation-alist subcultures, look and act differentlyfrom those in the mainstream, and thus cre-ate oppositional identities, defining them-selves against standard models.

Cultural studies insists that culture mustbe studied within the social relations andsystem through which it is produced andconsumed and that thus study of culture isintimately bound up with the study of soci-ety, politics, and economics. Cultural stud-ies shows how media culture articulates thedominant values, political ideologies, andsocial developments and novelties of the

era. It conceives of U.S. culture and societyas a contested terrain with various groupsand ideologies struggling for dominance(Kellner, 1995). Television, film, music, andother popular cultural forms are thus oftenliberal or conservative, although they occa-sionally articulate more radical or opposi-tional positions and are often ideologicallyambiguous, combining various politicalpositions.

Cultural studies is valuable because itprovides some tools that enable one to readand interpret one’s culture critically. It alsosubverts distinctions between “high” and“low” culture by considering a wide con-tinuum of cultural artifacts ranging fromnovels to television and by refusing to erectany specific cultural hierarchies or canons.Previous approaches to culture tended to beprimarily literary and elitist, dismissingmedia culture as banal, trashy, and not

worthy of serious attention. The project of cultural studies, by contrast, avoids cuttingthe field of culture into high and low, or

10 ◆ A Cultural Studies Approach

8/12/2019 9375_016783Ch1


Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture ◆ 11

popular against elite. Such distinctions aredifficult to maintain and generally serve asa front for normative aesthetic valuationsand, often, a political program (i.e., eitherdismissing mass culture for high culture, or

celebrating what is deemed “popular”while scorning “elitist” high culture).

Cultural studies allows us to examineand critically scrutinize the whole range of culture without prior prejudices toward oneor another sort of cultural text, institution,or practice. It also opens the way towardmore differentiated political, rather thanaesthetic, valuations of cultural artifacts inwhich one attempts to distinguish criticaland oppositional from conformist and con-servative moments in a cultural artifact. Forinstance, studies of Hollywood film showhow key 1960s films promoted the views of radicals and the counterculture and howfilm in the 1970s was a battlegroundbetween liberal and conservative positions;late 1970s films, however, tended towardconservative positions that helped electRonald Reagan as president (see Kellner &Ryan, 1988).

There is an intrinsically critical and polit-ical dimension to the project of culturalstudies that distinguishes it from objectivistand apolitical academic approaches to thestudy of culture and society. British culturalstudies, for example, analyzed culturehistorically in the context of its societal ori-gins and effects. It situated culture within atheory of social production and reproduc-tion, specifying the ways that cultural formsserved either to further social dominationor to enable people to resist and struggleagainst domination. It analyzed society as ahierarchical and antagonistic set of socialrelations characterized by the oppression of subordinate class, gender, race, ethnic, andnational strata. Employing Gramsci’s(1971) model of hegemony and counter-hegemony, it sought to analyze “hege-monic,” or ruling, social and cultural forcesof domination and to seek “counterhege-

monic” forces of resistance and struggle.The project was aimed at social transfor-mation and attempted to specify forces of

domination and resistance in order to aidthe process of political struggle and emanci-pation from oppression and domination.

For cultural studies, the concept of ideo-logy is of central importance, for dominant

ideologies serve to reproduce social rela-tions of domination and subordination.2

Ideologies of class, for instance, celebrateupper-class life and denigrate the workingclass. Ideologies of gender promote sexistrepresentations of women and ideologies of race utilize racist representations of peopleof color and various minority groups.Ideologies make inequalities and subordi-nation appear natural and just, and thusinduce consent to relations of domination.Contemporary societies are structured byopposing groups who have different politi-cal ideologies (liberal, conservative, radical,etc.) and cultural studies specifies what, if any, ideologies are operative in a given cul-tural artifact (which could involve, of course, the specification of ideological con-tradictions). In the course of this study, Iwill provide some examples of how differ-ent ideologies are operative in media cul-

tural texts and will accordingly provideexamples of ideological analysis andcritique.

Because of its focus on representationsof race, gender, and class, and its critique of ideologies that promote various forms of oppression, cultural studies lends itself to amulticulturalist program that demonstrateshow culture reproduces certain forms of racism, sexism, and biases against membersof subordinate classes, social groups, oralternative lifestyles. Multiculturalismaffirms the worth of different types of cul-ture and cultural groups, claiming, forinstance, that black, Latino, Asian, NativeAmerican, gay and lesbian, and otheroppressed and marginal voices have theirown validity and importance. An insurgentmulticulturalism attempts to show howvarious people’s voices and experiences aresilenced and omitted from mainstream cul-

ture and struggles to aid in the articulationof diverse views, experiences, and culturalforms, from groups excluded from the

8/12/2019 9375_016783Ch1



mainstream. This makes it a target of conservative forces who wish to preservethe existing canons of white male,Eurocentric privilege and thus attack multi-culturalism in cultural wars raging from the

1960s to the present over education, thearts, and the limits of free expression.

Cultural studies thus promotes a multi-culturalist politics and media pedagogy thataims to make people sensitive to how rela-tions of power and domination are“encoded” in cultural texts, such as those of television or film. But it also specifies howpeople can resist the dominant encodedmeanings and produce their own criticaland alternative readings. Cultural studiescan show how media culture manipulatesand indoctrinates us, and thus can empowerindividuals to resist the dominant meaningsin media cultural products and to producetheir own meanings. It can also point tomoments of resistance and criticism withinmedia culture and thus help promote devel-opment of more critical consciousness.

A critical cultural studies—embodied inmany of the chapters collected in this

reader—thus develops concepts and analy-ses that will enable readers to analyticallydissect the artifacts of contemporary mediaculture and to gain power over their cul-tural environment. By exposing the entirefield of culture to knowledgeable scrutiny,cultural studies provides a broad, compre-hensive framework to undertake studiesof culture, politics, and society for the pur-poses of individual empowerment andsocial and political struggle and transfor-mation. In the following pages, I willtherefore indicate some of the chief components of the type of cultural studiesthat I find most useful.

◆ Components of aCritical Cultural Studies

At its strongest, cultural studies contains athreefold project of analyzing the production

and political economy of culture, culturaltexts, and the audience reception of thosetexts and their effects. This comprehensiveapproach avoids too narrowly focusing onone dimension of the project to the exclu-

sion of others. To avoid such limitations, Iwould thus propose a multiperspectivalapproach that (a) discusses production andpolitical economy, (b) engages in textualanalysis, and (c) studies the reception anduse of cultural texts.3

PRODUCTION ANDPOLITICAL ECONOMY

Because it has been neglected in manymodes of recent cultural studies, it is impor-tant to stress the importance of analyzingcultural texts within their system of pro-duction and distribution, often referred toas the political economy of culture.4

Inserting texts into the system of culturewithin which they are produced and dis-tributed can help elucidate features andeffects of the texts that textual analysis

alone might miss or downplay. Rather thanbeing antithetical approaches to culture,political economy can actually contributeto textual analysis and critique. The systemof production often determines what sort of artifacts will be produced, what structurallimits there will be as to what can and can-not be said and shown, and what sort of audience effects the text may generate.

Study of the codes of television, film, or

popular music, for instance, is enhanced bystudying the formulas and conventions of production. These cultural forms are struc-tured by well-defined rules and conven-tions, and the study of the production of culture can help elucidate the codes actuallyin play. Because of the demands of the for-mat of radio or music television, forinstance, most popular songs are three tofive minutes, fitting into the frames of thedistribution system. Because of their control

by giant corporations oriented primarilytoward profit, film and television produc-tion in the United States is dominated by

8/12/2019 9375_016783Ch1



specific genres such as talk and gameshows, soap operas, situation comedies,action/adventure series, reality TV, and soon. This economic factor explains whythere are cycles of certain genres and sub-

genres, sequelmania in the film industry,crossovers of popular films into televisionseries, and a certain homogeneity in prod-ucts constituted within systems of produc-tion marked by rigid generic codes,formulaic conventions, and well-definedideological boundaries.

Likewise, study of political economy canhelp determine the limits and range of polit-ical and ideological discourses and effects.My study of television in the United States,for instance, disclosed that takeover of thetelevision networks by major transnationalcorporations and communications con-glomerates was part of a “right turn”within U.S. society in the 1980s wherebypowerful corporate groups won control of the state and the mainstream media(Kellner, 1990). For example, during the1980s all three networks were taken overby major corporate conglomerates: ABC

was bought out in 1985 by Capital Cities,NBC was absorbed by GE, and CBS waspurchased by the Tisch Financial Group.Both ABC and NBC sought corporatemergers and this motivation, along withother benefits derived from Reaganism,might well have influenced them to down-play criticisms of Reagan and to generallysupport his conservative programs, militaryadventures, and simulated presidency.

Corporate conglomeratization has inten-sified further and today AOL and TimeWarner, Disney, and other global mediaconglomerates control ever more domainsof the production and distribution of cul-ture (McChesney, 2000). In this global con-text, one cannot really analyze the role of the media in the Gulf war, for instance,without analyzing the production and polit-ical economy of news and information, aswell as the actual text of the Gulf war and

its reception by its audience (see Kellner,1992). Likewise, the ownership by conserv-ative corporations of dominant media

corporations helps explain mainstreammedia support of the Bush administrationand their policies, such as the 2000 U.S.presidential election (Kellner, 2001).

Looking toward entertainment, one can-

not fully grasp the Madonna phenomenonwithout analyzing her marketing strategies,her political environment, her cultural arti-facts, and their effects (Kellner, 1995). In asimilar fashion, younger female pop musicstars and groups such as Mariah Carey,Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, or N’Syncalso deploy the tools of the glamour indus-try and media spectacle to make certainstars the icons of fashion, beauty, style, andsexuality, as well as purveyors of music.And in appraising the full social impact of pornography, one needs to be aware of thesex industry and the production process of,say, pornographic films, and not just dwellon the texts themselves and their effects onaudiences.

Furthermore, in an era of globalization,one must be aware of the global networksthat produce and distribute media culture inthe interests of profit and corporate hege-

mony. Yet political economy alone does nothold the key to cultural studies and impor-tant as it is, it has limitations as a singleapproach. Some political economy analysesreduce the meanings and effects of texts torather circumscribed and reductive ideologi-cal functions, arguing that media culturemerely reflects the ideology of the ruling eco-nomic elite that controls the culture indus-tries and is nothing more than a vehicle forcapitalist ideology. It is true that media cul-ture overwhelmingly supports capitalist val-ues, but it is also a site of intense strugglebetween different races, classes, gender, andsocial groups. Thus, in order to fully graspthe nature and effects of media culture, oneneeds to develop methods to analyze the fullrange of its meanings and effects.

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

The products of media culture requiremultidimensional close textual readings to

8/12/2019 9375_016783Ch1



analyze their various forms of discourses,ideological positions, narrative strategies,image construction, and effects. There havebeen a wide range of types of textual criti-cism of media culture, ranging from quanti-

tative content analysis that dissects thenumber of, say, episodes of violence in atext, to qualitative study that examinesimages of women, blacks, or other groups,or that applies various critical theories tounpack the meanings of the texts or toexplicate how texts function to producemeaning. Traditionally, the qualitativeanalysis of texts has been the task of for-malist literary criticism, which explicatesthe central meanings, values, symbols, andideologies in cultural artifacts by attendingto the formal properties of imaginativeliterature texts—such as style, verbalimagery, characterization, narrative struc-ture and point of view, and other formalelements of the artifact. From the 1960s on,however, literary-formalist textual analysishas been enhanced by methods derivedfrom semiotics, a critical approach forinvestigating the creation of meaning not

only in written languages but also in other,nonverbal codes, such as the visual andauditory languages of film and TV.

Semiotics analyzes how linguistic andnonlinguistic cultural “signs” form systemsof meanings, as when giving someone arose is interpreted as a sign of love, or get-ting an A on a college paper is a signof mastery of the rules of the specific assign-ment. Semiotic analysis can be connectedwith genre criticism (the study of conven-tions governing established types of culturalforms, such as soap operas) to reveal howthe codes and forms of particular genresfollow certain meanings. Situation come-dies, for instance, classically follow a con-flict/resolution model that demonstrateshow to solve certain social problems by cor-rect actions and values, and thus providemorality tales of proper and improperbehavior. Soap operas, by contrast, prolif-

erate problems and provide messages con-cerning the endurance and suffering neededto get through life’s endless miseries, while

generating positive and negative models of social behavior. And advertising showshow commodity solutions solve problemsof popularity, acceptance, success, and thelike.

A semiotic and genre analysis of the filmRambo (1982) for instance, would showhow it follows the conventions of theHollywood genre of the war film that dra-matizes conflicts between the United Statesand its “enemies” (see Kellner, 1995).Semiotics describes how the images of the villains are constructed according to thecodes of World War II movies and how theresolution of the conflict and happy endingfollows the traditional Hollywood classicalcinema, which portrays the victory of goodover evil. Semiotic analysis would alsoinclude study of the strictly cinematic andformal elements of a film like Rambo, dis-secting the ways that camera angles presentRambo as a god, or slow-motion images of him gliding through the jungle code him asa force of nature. Semiotic analysis of the2001 film Vanilla Sky could engage howCameron Crowe’s film presents a remake

of a 1997 Spanish film, and how the use of celebrity stars Tom Cruise and PenelopeCruz, involved in a real-life romance, pro-vides a spectacle of modern icons of beauty,desire, sexuality, and power. The sciencefiction theme and images present semioticdepictions of a future in which techno-science can make everyone beautiful andwe can live out our culture’s dreams andnightmares.

The textual analysis of cultural studiesthus combines formalist analysis with cri-tique of how cultural meanings convey spe-cific ideologies of gender, race, class,sexuality, nation, and other ideologicaldimensions. Ideological textual analysisshould deploy a wide range of methods tofully explicate each dimension and to showhow they fit into textual systems. Each criti-cal method focuses on certain features of atext from a specific perspective: The per-

spective spotlights some features of a textwhile ignoring others. Marxist methodstend to focus on class, for instance, while

8/12/2019 9375_016783Ch1



feminist approaches will highlight gender,critical race theory spotlights race and eth-nicity, and gay and lesbian theories expli-cate sexuality.

More sophisticated critical Marxism,

feminisms, or semiotics articulate theirown method with the other approaches todevelop multiperspectivist positions. Yeteach critical methods on its own hasits particular strengths and limitations,with specific optics and blindspots.Traditionally, Marxian ideology critiqueshave been strong on class and historicalcontextualization and weak on formalanalysis, while some versions are highly“reductionist,” reducing textual analysisto denunciation of ruling class ideology.Feminism excels in gender analysis and insome versions is formally sophisticated,drawing on such methods as psychoanaly-sis and semiotics, although some versionsare reductive and early feminism oftenlimited itself to analysis of images of gen-der. Psychoanalysis in turn calls for theinterpretation of unconscious contentsand meaning, which can articulate latent

meanings in a text, as when AlfredHitchcock’s dream sequences in films likeSpellbound (1945) or Vertigo (1958)project cinematic symbols that illuminatehis characters’ dilemmas, or when theimage of the female character in Bonnieand Clyde (1967) framed against the barsof her bed suggests her sexual frustration,imprisonment in lower-middle-class familylife, and need for revolt.

Of course, each reading of a text is onlyone possible reading from one critic’s sub-ject position, no matter how multiperspecti-val, and may or may not be the readingpreferred by audiences (which themselveswill be significantly different according totheir class, race, gender, ethnicity, ideolo-gies, and so on). Because there is a splitbetween textual encoding and audiencedecoding, there is always the possibility of amultiplicity of readings of any text of media

culture (Hall, 1980b). There are limits to theopenness or polysemic nature of any text, of course, and textual analysis can explicate

the parameters of possible readings anddelineate perspectives that aim at illuminat-ing the text and its cultural and ideologicaleffects. Such analysis also provides the mate-rials for criticizing misreadings, or readings

that are one-sided and incomplete. Yet tofurther carry through a cultural studiesanalysis, one must also examine how diverseaudiences actually read media texts, andattempt to determine what effects they haveon audience thought and behavior.

Audience Reception ◆

and Use of Media Culture

All texts are subject to multiple readingsdepending on the perspectives and subjectpositions of the reader. Members of distinctgenders, classes, races, nations, regions,sexual preferences, and political ideologiesare going to read texts differently, and cul-tural studies can illuminate why diverseaudiences interpret texts in various, some-

times conflicting, ways. It is indeed one of the merits of cultural studies to havefocused on audience reception in recentyears and this focus provides one of itsmajor contributions, though there are alsosome limitations and problems with thestandard cultural studies approaches to theaudience.5

A standard way to discover howaudiences read texts is to engage in ethno-graphic research, in an attempt to deter-mine how texts affect audiences and shapetheir beliefs and behavior. Ethnographiccultural studies have indicated some of thevarious ways that audiences use andappropriate texts, often to empower them-selves. Radway’s (1983; see also herchapter in this volume) study of women’suse of Harlequin novels, for example,shows how these books provide escapismfor women and could be understood as

reproducing traditional women’s roles,behavior, and attitudes. Yet they can alsoempower women by promoting fantasies of

8/12/2019 9375_016783Ch1


8/12/2019 9375_016783Ch1



studies (tradition of) reception researchdistinguish between dominant and opposi-tional readings (Hall, 1980b), a dichotomythat structures much of Fiske’s work.“Dominant” readings are those in which

audiences appropriate texts in line with theinterests of the hegemonic culture and theideological intentions of a text, as whenaudiences feel pleasure in the restoration of male power, law and order, and social sta-bility at the end of a film like Die Hard ,after the hero and representatives of authority eliminate the terrorists who hadtaken over a high-rise corporate headquar-ters. An “oppositional” reading, by con-trast, celebrates the resistance to thisreading in audience appropriation of atext; for example, Fiske (1993) observesresistance to dominant readings whenhomeless individuals in a shelter cheeredthe destruction of police and authority fig-ures, during repeated viewings of a video-tape of Die Hard .

Although this can be a useful distinction,there is a tendency in cultural studies to cel-ebrate resistance per se without distinguish-

ing between types and forms of resistance (asimilar problem resides with indiscriminatecelebration of audience pleasure in certainreception studies). For example, resistanceto social authority by the homeless evi-denced in their viewing of Die Hard couldserve to strengthen brutal masculist behav-ior and encourage manifestations of physi-cal violence to solve social problems.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, andHerbert Marcuse, among others, haveargued that violence can be either emanci-patory, when directed at forces of oppres-sion, or reactionary, when directed atpopular forces struggling against oppres-sion. Many feminists, by contrast, or thosein the Gandhian tradition, see all violenceas forms of brute masculist behavior andmany people see it as a problematical formof conflict resolution. Resistance and plea-sure cannot therefore be valorized per se as

progressive elements of the appropriation of cultural texts, but difficult discriminationsmust be made as to whether the resistance,

oppositional reading, or pleasure in a givenexperience is progressive or reactionary,emancipatory or destructive.

Thus, while emphasis on the audienceand reception was an excellent correction

to the one-sidedness of purely textualanalysis, I believe that in recent years cul-tural studies has overemphasized receptionand textual analysis, while underemphasiz-ing the production of culture and its politi-cal economy. This type of cultural studiesfetishizes audience reception studies andneglects both production and textual analy-sis, thus producing populist celebrations of the text and audience pleasure in its use of cultural artifacts. This approach, taken toan extreme, would lose its critical perspec-tive and would lead to a positive gloss onaudience experience of whatever is beingstudied. Such studies also might lose sightof the manipulative and conservative effectsof certain types of media culture and thusserve the interests of the cultural industriesas they are presently constituted.

A new way, in fact, to research mediaeffects is to use the databases that collect

media texts such as Nexis/Lexis, or searchengines like Google, and to trace the effectsof media artifacts like The X-Files, Buffythe Vampire Slayer, or advertising corpora-tions like Nike and McDonald’s, throughanalysis of references to them in the media.Likewise, there is a new terrain of Internetaudience research that studies how fans actin chat rooms devoted to their favorite arti-facts of media culture, create their own fan-sites, or construct artifacts that disclosehow they are living out the fantasies andscripts of the culture industries. Previousstudies of the audience and the reception of media privileged ethnographic studies thatselected slices of the vast media audiences,usually from the site where researchersthemselves lived. Such studies are invariablylimited and broader effects research canindicate how the most popular artifacts of media culture have a wide range of effects.

In my book Media Culture (1995), I studiedsome examples of popular cultural artifactsthat clearly influenced behavior in audiences

8/12/2019 9375_016783Ch1



throughout the globe. Examples includegroups of kids and adults who imitatedRambo in various forms of asocial behav-ior, or fans of Beavis and Butt-Head whostarted fires or tortured animals in the

modes practiced by the popular MTVcartoon characters. Media effects are com-plex and controversial and it is the merit of cultural studies to make their study animportant part of its agenda.

◆ Toward a Cultural Studies Approach That

Is Critical, Multicultural,

and Multiperspectival

To avoid the one-sidedness of textualanalysis approaches, or audience and recep-tion studies, I propose that cultural studiesitself be multiperspectival, getting at culturefrom the perspectives of political economy,text analysis, and audience reception, asoutlined above. Textual analysis should uti-

lize a multiplicity of perspectives and criti-cal methods, and audience receptionstudies should delineate the wide range of subject positions, or perspectives, throughwhich audiences appropriate culture. Thisrequires a multicultural approach that seesthe importance of analyzing the dimensionsof class, race and ethnicity, and gender andsexual preference within the texts of mediaculture, while studying as well their impacton how audiences read and interpret mediaculture.

In addition, a critical cultural studiesattacks sexism, racism, or bias against spe-cific social groups (i.e., gays, intellectuals,and so on), and criticizes texts that promoteany kind of domination or oppression. Asan example of how considerations of pro-duction, textual analysis, and audiencereadings can fruitfully intersect in culturalstudies, let us reflect on the Madonna phe-

nomenon. Madonna first appeared in themoment of Reaganism and embodied thematerialistic and consumer-oriented ethos

of the 1980s (“Material Girl”). She alsoappeared in a time of dramatic image pro-liferation, associated with MTV, fashionfever, and intense marketing of products.Madonna was one of the first MTV music

video superstars who consciously craftedimages to attract a mass audience. Her earlymusic videos were aimed at teenage girls(the Madonna wanna-be’s), but she soonincorporated black, Hispanic, and minorityaudiences with her images of interracial sexand multicultural “family” in her concerts.Madonna also appealed to gay and lesbianaudiences, as well as to feminist and aca-demic audiences, as her videos becamemore complex and political (i.e., “Like aPrayer,” “Express Yourself,” “Vogue,” andso on).

Thus, Madonna’s popularity was inlarge part a function of her marketingstrategies and her production of musicvideos and images that appealed to diverseaudiences. To conceptualize the meaningsand effects in her music, films, concerts,and public relations stunts requires that herartifacts be interpreted within the context

of their production and reception, whichinvolves discussion of MTV, the musicindustry, concerts, marketing, and the pro-duction of images (see Kellner, 1995).Understanding Madonna’s popularity alsorequires focus on audiences, not just asindividuals but as members of specificgroups, such as teenage girls, who wereempowered in their struggles for individualidentity by Madonna, or gays, who werealso empowered by her incorporation of alternative images of sexuality within pop-ular mainstream cultural artifacts. Yetappraising the politics and effects of Madonna also requires analysis of how herwork might merely reproduce a consumerculture that defines identity in terms of images and consumption. It would make aninteresting project to examine how formerMadonna fans view the evolution andrecent incarnations of the superstar, such as

her second marriage and 2001 DrownedWorld tour, as well as to examine how con-temporary fans view Madonna in an age

8/12/2019 9375_016783Ch1



that embraces younger teen pop singers likeBritney Spears or Mariah Carey.

In short, a cultural studies that is criticaland multicultural provides comprehen-sive approaches to culture that can be

applied to a wide variety of artifacts frompornography to Madonna, from MTV toTV news, or to specific events like the2000 U.S. presidential election (Kellner,2001), or media representations of the2001 terrorist attacks on the United Statesand the U.S. response. Its comprehensiveperspectives encompass political economy,textual analysis, and audience researchand provide critical and political perspec-tives that enable individuals to dissect themeanings, messages, and effects of domi-nant cultural forms. Cultural studies isthus part of a critical media pedagogy thatenables individuals to resist media mani-pulation and to increase their freedom andindividuality. It can empower people togain sovereignty over their culture and to beable to struggle for alternative cultures andpolitical change. Cultural studies is thus notjust another academic fad, but can be part

of a struggle for a better society and abetter life.

◆ Notes

1. For more information on British cultural

studies, see Hall (1980b), Hall et al. (1980),

Johnson (1986/1987), Fiske (1986), O’Conner

(1989), Turner (1990), Grossberg (1989), Agger

(1992), and the articles collected in Grossberg,

Nelson, and Triechler (1992), During (1992,

1998), and Durham and Kellner (2000). I might

note that the Frankfurt school also provided

much material for a critical cultural studies in

their works on mass culture from the 1930s

through the present; on the relation between the

Frankfurt school and British cultural studies, see

Kellner (1997).

2. On the concept of ideology, see Kellner

(1978, 1979), Centre for ContemporaryCultural Studies (1980), Kellner and Ryan

(1988), and Thompson (1990).

3. This model was adumbrated in Hall

(1980a) and Johnson (1986/1987) and guided

much of the early Birmingham work. Around

the mid-1980s, however, the Birmingham group

began to increasingly neglect the production and

political economy of culture (some believe thatthis was always a problem with their work) and

much of their studies became more academic,

cut off from political struggle. I am thus trying

to recapture the spirit of the early Birmingham

project, reconstructed for our contemporary

moment. For a fuller development of my con-

ception of cultural studies, see Kellner (1992,

1995, 2001).

4. The term political economy calls atten-

tion to the fact that the production and distribu-

tion of culture take place within a specific

economic system, constituted by relations

between the state and economy. For instance, in

the United States a capitalist economy dictates

that cultural production is governed by laws of

the market, but the democratic imperatives of

the system mean that there is some regulation

of culture by the state. There are often tensions

within a given society concerning how many

activities should be governed by the imperatives

of the market, or economics, alone and howmuch state regulation or intervention is desir-

able, to assure a wider diversity of broadcast

programming, for instance, or the prohibition of

phenomena agreed to be harmful, such as ciga-

rette advertising or pornography (see Kellner,

1990).

5. Cultural studies that have focused on

audience reception include Brunsdon and

Morley (1978), Radway (1983), Ang (1985,

1996), Morley (1986), Fiske (1989a, 1989b),

Jenkins (1992), and Lewis (1992).

References ◆

Agger, B. (1992). Cultural studies. London:

Falmer.

Ang, I. (1985). Watching Dallas. New York:

Methuen.

Ang, I. (1996). Living room wars: Rethinking media audiences for a postmodern world .

London and New York: Routledge.

8/12/2019 9375_016783Ch1



Brunsdon, C., & Morley, D. (1978). Everyday

television: “Nationwide.” London: British

Film Institute.

Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

(1980). On ideology. London: Hutchinson.

de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everydaylife. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Durham, M. G., & Kellner, D. (Eds.). (2001).

Media and cultural studies: Keyworks.

Malden, MA, and Oxford, UK: Basil

Blackwell.

During, S. (1992). Cultural studies. London and

New York: Routledge.

During, S. (1998). Cultural studies (2nd ed.).

London and New York: Routledge.

Fiske, J. (1986). British cultural studies and tele-

vision. In R. C. Allen (Ed.), Channels of

discourse (pp. 254-289). Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press.

Fiske, J. (1987). Television culture. New York

and London: Routledge.

Fiske, J. (1989a). Reading the popular. Boston:

Unwin Hyman.

Fiske, J. (1989b). Understanding popular

culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman.

Fiske, J. (1993). Power plays, power works.

London: Verso.Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison

notebooks. New York: International.

Grossberg, L. (1989). The formations of cultural

studies: An American in Birmingham.

Strategies, 22, 114-149.

Grossberg, L., Nelson, C., & Treichler, P.

(1992). Cultural studies. New York:

Routledge.

Hall, S. (1980a). Cultural studies and the

Centre: Some problematics and problems.

In S. Hall et al., Culture, media, language

(pp. 15-47). London: Hutchinson.

Hall, S. (1980b). Encoding/decoding. In

S. Hall et al., Culture, media, language

(pp. 128-138). London: Hutchinson.

Hall, S. et al. (1980). Culture, media, language.

London: Hutchinson.

Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual poachers.

New York: Routledge.

Johnson, R. (1986/1987). What is cultural

studies anyway? Social Text , 16, 38-80.

Kellner, D. (1978, November-December).

Ideology, Marxism, and advanced capital-

ism. Socialist Review, 42, 37-65.

Kellner, D. (1979, May-June). TV, ideology, and

emancipatory popular culture. Socialist

Review, 45, 13-53.Kellner, D. (1990). Television and the crisis of

democracy. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Kellner, D. (1992). The Persian Gulf TV war.

Boulder, CO: Westview.

Kellner, D. (1995). Media culture. Cultural stud-

ies, identity, and politics between the mod-

ern and the postmodern. London and New

York: Routledge.

Kellner, D. (1997). Critical theory and British

cultural studies: The missed articulation. In

J. McGuigan (Ed.), Cultural methodologies

(pp. 12-41). London: Sage.

Kellner, D. (2001). Grand theft 2000. Lanham,

MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Kellner, D., & Ryan, M. (1988). Camera polit-

ica: The politics and ideology of contempo-

rary Hollywood film. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press.

Lewis, L. A. (1992). Adoring audience: Fan

culture and popular media. New York:

Routledge.McChesney, R. (2000). Rich media, poor

democracy: Communications politics in

dubious times. New York: New Press.

Morley, D. (1986). Family television. London:

Comedia.

O’Connor, A. (1989, December). The problem

of American cultural studies. Critical Studies

in Mass Communication, pp. 405-413.

Radway, J. (1983). Reading the romance.

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Press.

Staiger, J. (1992). Film, reception, and cultural

studies. Centennial Review, 26(1), 89-104.

Thompson, J. (1990). Ideology and modern cul-

ture. Cambridge, UK, and Stanford, CA:

Polity Press and Stanford University Press.

Turner, G. (1990). British cultural studies: An

introduction. New York: Unwin Hyman.

9375_016783ch1

Documents