class notes

townsend center's newsletter - roundhouse of talks
institute for european studies
institute for race & gender

Orienting Pre-amble
- a look at cultural studies thinking both about nature of populism and nature of resistence
- what cultural studies is
- structure of feeling -> take an analytic tact on it

Cultural Studies
- Marxist, post-Marxist or structuralist desires by scholars who work on culture
- concerned about the limits of a reductionist line of a Marxist analysis [orientation on social life that explains things through an economic determinism; reduces people's behavior to analysis of their class position]
- leftist sensibility... throughout the world there were a variety of social movements that couldn't be explained through a class position
- so many working class or economically marginalized people do not vote with their economic interests, so something else must be going on
- stands in for interdisciplinary humanities, taking a position on mass culture, breaking down high/low art, feminism, anti-racist paradigms
- take much more seriously the realm of the super-structural to consider how its functions in some ways are quite basic

Stuart Hall
- culturalism
- analysis of social beings that doesn't go first to economics entirely or explains away their behavior through a class analysis, but takes seriously how those individuals express, orient themselves.. not necessarily pummeled in a unidirectional way by economic circumstances
- have power of resistance and agency within a constrained economic and social circumstance.
- take seriously they way people view themselves
- Distinctions have to be undone (public and private, work vs leisure)
- work life & tv life -> participates at the same time as things we're used to seeing as separate. public was seen as more important, private as less so
- 80s/90s
- working within and against a definition of resistance... became cyclical. pockets and limits of agency
- linguistics structure, discourse
- turn to the people's experience was posited in some views as a way of invoking experience as an ultimate ground of authority that didn't recognize whatever statements people make about how they interpret the world might not only be the unfettered appearance of experience... discourse analysis
- when hall says that they may be ideology or not just ideology
- about understanding discourse in material practices
- discourse analysis is the method for the structuralist
- within a culturalist approach, there are readings still norm... just read as the expressions of the people
- a good culturalist may also analyzing their expression through interviews

- takes resistance seriously but doesn't underestimate the significance of power
- realizes language, but doesn't take them out of the practices where language exchange occurs
- takes individuals seriously but doesn't overestimate the volition of people

what does a performance imagination say to these goals? turn from theatre to performance theory parallels a turn from literary studies to cultural studies
- rhetoric, performance studies have gone in the direction of cultural studies
- what are the stakes? shared goal.

material practices
- think about corporeal performance, realm of gesture, walking, dancing

brings back questions of role of critique

thinking about certain movements as populist, different way of analyzing a social movement than its rightness or leftness

PUBLIC v PRIVATE
it wasn't just the exerted context that signified public or private, but the individual and their behavior constituted the context. they decided that something was public or a private space, or a public/private context
- public/private not so bounded
- walker has a sense of the city