SLIDE
Cultural studies
Understanding Media Cultures
Social Theory and Mass Communication
By Nick Stevenson
 British Marxist perspectives still have much to contribute
to our understanding of media cultures
 Raymond William made considerable attempts to learn
from democratic liberalism by asking what a system of
free communication might look like. P.9
 Through a debate with post structuralism, Stuart Hall
sought to explain symbolic modes of domination that are
not rooted in social class
 Glasgow University Media Group offers empirical
examples of bias towards class perspectives in news
production.p.9
 Two central themes through contemporary debates
within British Marxism on the theme of mass
communication : the patterns of ownership and control
evident within the cultural industries and their role in the
formation of cultural content and subjectivity.
 The question of political economy remains crucial to
critical attempts to develop a theory of mass
communication.p.9
 The study of modern media cultural forms, …,
presupposes an analysis of the institutional
manoeuveres have sought to investigate structured
relations of power embedded within relations of
ownership and control, place these material relations
within a historical context, and unravel the impact of
commercial and public institutions upon discursive
practices (Golding and Murdock, 1991). P. 10
 Mass communications research should articulate a
political economy of the cultural industries. Such an
approach would attend to the global relationships
between the economy and state formations
 For this approach to be considered critical, and building
on the writing of Raymond Williams, more research
needs to be done into how the principles of democracy
could be applied in global settings.
 The concepts of hegemony and ideology remain e
 The writings of the GUMG and Stuart Hall are important
contributions to the ideology debate, they should be
reconnected with concerns related to political economy
and the interpretative horizons of the audience.
Common to the writings of Williams, GUMG and Hall is a
certain tendency to overstate the incorporating power of
ideology.
 P.46
 The rediscovery of ideology in media studies…has
reintroduced a notion of power and more critically
addressed the construction of the real. The most
important intellectual and theoretical resource in the turn
to ideology is structuralism.
Althusser
 The production of ideology…has perhaps two distinctive
characteristics. First, while ideology was tied to an
institutional analysis it could not be conceived of as the
inversion or reflection of the real. Rather ideology, in
Althusser’s memorable words, ‘represents the imaginary
relationship of individuals to their real conditions of
existence’ (1984 : 36)
 Secondly, ideology not only constitutes our symbolic
relation with the real, but converts human beings into
subject. Ideology lets individuals mistakenly recognise
themselves as self determining agents, whereas in fact
subjects are formed through linguistic and psychic
processes. The subject misrecognises her self as a
unique individual, rather than as an identity constructed
through the social. Althusser’s emphasis upon the
formation of the self through ideological discourses had
a formative impact on Hall.37
Stuart Hall
 His theoretical writing is closely bound up with the
themes of culture, ideology and identity
 He offers a sophicticated reinterpretation of some of the
central thinkers within post structuralism, his main
intellectual touchstone remains Gramsci.
 In mass communication research, Hall’s specific
contribution has been to link ideologically coded cultural
forms to the decoding strategies.
Cultural Communication
Cultural Communication
By Gerry Philipsen, dalam
Handbook of international and intercultural communication
William B. Gudykunst
Bella Mody
 Cc, as a named field of study, was proposed by
Philipsen in an essay titled “The Prospect for Cultural
Communication”, which was articulated in 1981 but not
published until 1987. p52
 There were in the communication studies discipline
several important lines of research and pedagogy that
treated communication from a cultural standpoint.
 “the etnography of communication” was a call for and
realization of a program of descriptive comparative study
of cultural ways of speaking (see Hymes, 1962 ;
Philipsen, 1975 ; Murray, 1993)
 Intercultural Communication” emphasized the study of
misunderstandings between who use different cultures
from each other (Condor ; & Yousef, 1975 ; Leeds—
Hurwitz, 1990 ; Samovar & Porter, 1972)
 The study of “cultural communication systems”
emphasized the role of communication as a practical
resource in facilitating consensus about institutions
among members within social groups (Cushman &
Craig, 1976).
 Communication and critical “cultural studies” (Hall, 1980)
treated communicative practices as a site and resource
for the expression and maintenance of cultural
domination by some people over others, thus
problematizing the consensus model of cultural
communication systems explicated by Cushman and
Craig. P. 53
 Philipsen (1981, 1987) proposed cultural communication
as a distinctive approach to the study of culturally
situated communication, one that is related and indebted
to, but distinctive from, such approaches as cultural
communication systems, intercultural communication,
critical studies of communication and culture, and the
ethnography of communication.
 Cultural communication, as proposed by Philipsen,
brought together two important strands of earlier
research on culture and communication. These two
strands are (1) differences across groups in termas of
communicative practices and (2) the role of
communication as a resource in managing discursively
the individual communal dialectic.p.53
Cultural studies
• American cultural studies have tended to adopt a
consensual framework ;
• Carey (1983) has commented on the “frequent and
telling criticism that cultural studies in the United States,
undercut as it is by the cheery optimism of pragmatism,
inescapably fails to consider power, dominance,
subordination, and ideology as central issues” (p. 313)
• Source : p. 344, Myth, Chronicle and Story : Exploring
the Narrative Qualities of News, S. Elizabeth Bird and
Robert W. Dardenne, dalam Social Meanings of News,
• Cultural studies is not helpfully seen as ‘a fixed body of
thought that can be transplated from one place to
another and which operates in similar ways in diverse
national or regional contexts’
• The place and relevance of cultural studies varies from
context to context, and has to be related to the specific
character of local forms of political and intellectual
discourse as culture…it is the context dependence of
cultural studies which we need to keep in mind, and
indeed reinforce, if we are to resist tendencies towards
the development of orthodoxies and the temptations of a
codified vocabulary
• P. 2, dalam Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies,
David Morley
 • In the context of the North American Academy, Cultural
studies not only has become almost synonymous with a
certain kind of postmodern theorizing but also is now
often referred to simply as ‘theory’.ibid, p.3
• The key figures in Cultural studies came originally from
backgrounds in literary criticism and the humanities and
that, consequently, their own primary concerns (and
competences) lie with the analysis of texts of one kind or
another, while they tend to have, on the whole and with
the significant exception of Hall
• Murdock notes, …, increasingly, enhanced by the
tendency for newly institutionalized Departments of
Cultural Studies to be mainly housed in faculties of arts
and humanities and to have few institutional links to the
social sciences. P. 5
• This insight is of particular interest to me, as one trained
initially as a sociologist who has, by virtue of that fact,
always felt somewhat marginal to the successive
dominant paradigms (whether in their culturalist,
structuralist, psychoanalytic, post-structuralist or
postmodern variants) within cultural studies.
• From within cultural studies, the major critique of much
of my own work has been that it is too essentialist or
reductionist.
• The prime objective of the work has been to analyse
processes of culture and communication within their
social and material settings.
• Hall has recently desribed as a ‘moment of profound
danger’, as cultural studies, especially in America, is
rapidly professionalized and institutionalized around
a’theoritical fluency’ of deconstructionist formalism, in
which the current ‘overwhelming textualisation of cultural
studies’ own discourses…constitutes power and politics
as exclusively matters of language’ (Hall 1990) p.6
• Hall notes,…, ‘textuality is never enough’ and cultural
studies must learn to live with ‘the…tension which Said
describes as its affiliations with institutions, offices,
agencies, classes, academies, corporations, groups,
ideologically defined parties and professions, nations,
races and genders…questions that..can never be fully
covered by critical textuality and its elaborations’ (Hall
1990 : 16-17) p.6
• From the late 1970s onwards, researchers within the
media/cultural studies traditions in Britain began to
explore the political and ideological significance of the
structure of media products outside the ‘news’ category.
These studies focused on issues such as the
construction of gender identities in soap opera (see
Hobosn 1982 ; Ang 1985), the presentation of racial
streotypes in drama and light enertainment (see Cohen
and Gardner 1984), the political and cultural values
embedded in popular fiction and drama (see McCabe
1981 ; McArthur 1981 ; Bennett and Woollacott 1987)
and the presentationn of knowledge itself in quiz shows
(Mills and Rice 1982).
• In Britain much of this work was collected and
summarized in the Open University’s influential course
on ‘Popular Culture’ (1981)
• This study demostrated that any concern with the
influence of the media in the construction of political
culture needed to operae with a wider and more
inclusive definition of the kind of media texts considered
to be relevant.p. 8
CCCS, Birmingham
• Analysing,…, the way in which the television programme
Nationwide was characterized by particular formal
devices, particular modes of address to its audience,
particular forms of textual organization
• Exploredd how that programme material was interpreted
by individuals from different social backgrounds, with a
view to establishing the role of cultural frameworks in
determining individual interpretations of the programmes
in question.
• The relations between socio-demographic factors (such
as age, sex,race, class) and differential interpretations of
the same programme material
• P.76, Morley
Douglass Kellner
• All of the theories we have discussed so far can be seen
as providing models of media and cultural studies, but
the school of cultural studies that has become a global
phenomenon of great importance over the last decades
was inauguraated by the University of Birmingham
Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964
• P. xxiii
• Its director Richard Hoggart, ..successor Stuart Hall,…,
the Birmingham groups developed a variety of critical
perspectives for the analysis, interpretation, and criticism
of cultural artifacts, combining sociological theory and
contextualization with literary analysis of cultural text.
• The now classical period of British cultural studies from
the early 1960s to the early 1980 adopted a Marxian
approach to the study of culture, one especially
influenced by Althusser and Gramscy.
• Through s set of internal debates and responding to
social conflict and movement of the 1960s and the
1970s, the Birmingham group came to concentrate on
the interplay of representations and ideologies of class,
gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality in cultural texts,
especially concentrating on media culture.
• They were among the first to study the effects of
newspapers, radio, television, film, and other popular
cultural forms on audiences.
• They also engaged how assorted audiences interpreted
and deployed media culture in varied ways and contexts,
analyzing the factors that made audiences respond in
contrasting manners to media texts. pxxiv
• A critical media and cultural studies will overcome the
boundaries of academic disciplines and will combine
political economy, social theory and research, and
cultural criticism in its project that aims at critique of
domination and social transformation. pxxxvii
• A transdisciplinary cultural and media studies would
productively engage postmodern theory and emergent
interpretive discourses and methods while maintaining
important traditional goals like cultivating literacy, critical
thinking, and the art of interpretation.pxxxviii
• We are currently living in a proliferating image and
media culture in which new technologies are changing
every dimension of life from the economy to personal
identity.
• In a postmodern media and computer culture, fresh
critical strategies are needed to read cultural texts, to
interpret the conjunctions of sight and sound, words and
images, that are producing seductive cultures spaces,
forms, and experiences.
• The cultural populism, turn to the audience, and
fetishism of the popular that emerged in British cultural
studies during the 1980s and 1990s can be read as part
of a postmodern turn in cultural studies which
corresponds to a new stage of cunsumer and global
capitalism. xxxv
• The frankurt school described a mass society and
culture that sought to incorporate individuals into a more
homogenized culture, controlled by big corporations, the
state, and centralized media.
• By contrast, the current form of consumer capitalism is
more fragmented, specialized, aestheticized, and
celebratory of difference, choice, and individual freedom
than the previous stage. xxxv
• The postmodern turn has generated a great variety and
diversity of novel forms of cultural studies and
approaches to the study of media and culture.
• Postmodern theories erase the economic, political, and
social dimensions of cultural production and reception,
engage in a type of cultural and technological
determinism, indulge in theoreticist blather, and
renounce the possibility of textual interpretation, social
criticism, and political struggle. ibid
• Postmodern theory is used to rethink cultural criticism
and politics in the contemporary era.
• Postmodern theory can be effective in
• This undertaking also involves exploration of the
emergent cyberspaces and modes of identities,
interaction, and production that are taking place in the
rapidly exploding computer culture, as well as exploring
the new public spaces where myriad forms of political
debate and contestation are evolving.
• The fresh forms of culture requires using the tools and
insights already gained, rather than simply rejecting all
“modern” concepts and theories as irrelevant to the new
“postmodern” condition.
• Adequately understanding postmodern phenomena
requires contextualization in terms of the way that novel
cultural artifacts are produced by the dominan mode of
production and are used to reproduce—or contest—
existing figurations of class, race, gender, and other
forms of power and domination. P.xxxviii
• A future oriented cultural and media studies should look
closely at the development of the entertainment and
information technology industries, the mergers and
synergies taking place, the syntheses of computer and
media culture that are being planned and already
implemented, and emergent wireless technologies. A
global media and cyberculture is our life world and fate,
and we need to be able to chart and map it accordingly
to survive the dramatic changes currently taking place
and the even more transformative novelties of the
rapidly approaching future. pxxxviii
• Handbook of international and intercultural
communication
• William B. Gudykunst
• Bella Mody
• Researchers in international and development
communication draw from political economy, geography,
anthropology, and cultural studies.
• Foreword p. x
• A more critical approach to ICC study might question
basic tenets of the ICC paradigm by asking, why study
intercultural differences? Who gains from such
knowledge, and who is disadvantaged? These questions
are attracting more attention as feminist, critical, and
cultural studies scholars challenge the ICC paradigm.
P.5
• Sumber lain, dari materi tahun lalu
• Cs, particularly that which places language at its heart…
influenced by poststructuralist theories of language,
representation and subjectivity is given greater attention
than a cs more concerned with the ethnography of lived
experience or with cultural policy….p.4
• Cs is , and always has been a multior post disciplinary
field of inquiry which blurs the boundaries between itself
and other subjects.
• For Hall, what is at stake is cultural studies connections
to matters of power and politics, to the need for change
and to representations of and ; for marginalized social
groups, particularly those of class, gender and race. Cs
is a body of theory generated by thinkers who regard the
production of theoretical knowledge as apolitical
practice. P. 5
• Cs is a discursive formation, that is , a cluster (or
formation) of ideas, images and practices, which provide
ways of talking about, forms of knowledge and conduct
associated with, a particular topic, social activity of
institutional sitein society (Hall).
• Draft tulisan materi lalu
• Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams dan Edward
Thompson are held to be early figure heads
representing the moment of ‘culturalism’
• Culturalism stresses the ‘ordinariness’ of culture and the
active, creative, capacity of people to construct shared
meaningful practices. Empirical work, which is
emphasized within the culturalist tradition, explores the
way that active human beings create cultural meanings.
Baker. P. 15.
• Culturalism, particularly for Williams and Thompson, is a
form of historical cultural materialism which traces the
unfolding of meaning over time, exploring culture in the
context of its material conditions of production and
reception. ..exploring the class basis of culture which
aims to give ‘voice’ to the subordinated and to examine
the place of culture in class power.
• Source : Baker. P. 15.
• In recent years communication and media studiesin the
united states have come under the influence of a body of
British literature identified with the intellectual traditions
of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and the
Univesity of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies, notably under the leadership of Stuart
Hall. Indeed, the writings of the British Cultural Studies
group constitute a significant contribution to the field of
communicaton research, representing the most decisive
theoretical break in the field of communication and
media studies in the United States that has captured the
attention of scholarly journals since the domination of
traditional sociology a generation ago. P. ix
• There is also an affinity with those communication
studies in the united sates which have had a strong
cultural tradition. After all, the idea of culture and society
in the context of communication and media research in
the united states is defined through its assimilation of
nineteenth century European social thought into
American practice ;that is to say, by the effects of
pragmatism on the development of academic disciplines
and their particular social concerns. P.233
Neo Pragmatism and Cultural Studies
• pragmatism philosophy such as Peirce, James, Dewey,
and others.
• pragmatism shares with the poststructuralist strand of a
cultural studies an anti foundationalist, anti
representationlist, anti realist view of truth.
• It is combined with a commitment to pragmatic social
reform.
• pragmatism regards liberal democracies as the best kind
of within them even as they are urged to do better. It
favours a trial and error experimentalism which seeks
after new ways of doing things which we can describe as
‘better’ measured against our values. …as with
postmodern cultural studies, pragmatism is against
‘grant theory’
• Baker 373
McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory
• The cultural approach has its roots in the humanities, in
anthropology and in linguistics.
• It has been mainly applied to questions of meaning and
language, to the minutiae of particular social contexts
and cultural experiences.
• The study of media is part of a wider field of cultural
studies.
• It is more likely to be ‘media centric’, sensitive to
differences between media and settings of media
making and reception, more interested in the in depth
understanding of particular or even unique cases and
situations than in generalization. Its methods favour the
qualitative and depth analysis of social and human
signifying practices and the analysis and interpretation of
‘texts’. 13
Tempo, 2 September 07
• Internasional
• Imajinasi dari Sebuah Buku
• “Seluruh kurikulum didesain sesuai dengan gaya hidup
bebas negara Barat. Di negara ini, kami hidup dengan
nilai-nilai keluarga,’ kata Ram Madhav, juru bicara
Rashtriya Swayamsvak Sangh, satu organisasi agama
Hindu sayap kiri.
• Prakash Javadekar, jru bicara Bharatiya Janata Party,
mengatakan guru seharusnya mendidik siswa-siswanya
mengendalikan nafsu seksual mereka.”Ini sistem nilai
yang harus diajarkan guru, bahwa mereka tidak
berhubungan seks hingga mereka menikah,” ujarnya.

Ien Ang
On the Politics of Empirical Audience Research
--dalam buku media and cultural studies--keyworks
 In media studies, .., the ‘critical’ tradition, wohse
beginnings can be located in the work of the Frankurt
School, has generally derived its philosophical and
political inspiration from european schools of thought
such as Marxism and (post) structuralism…’critical’
media researchers have mainly been concerned with the
analysis of the ideological and / economic role of the
media in capitalist and patriarchal society. Furthermore,
the epistemological underpinnings of this kind of work
are generally characterized by a strident anti positivist
and anti empiricist mentality. 2
 P. 175
 The question for cultural studies is not simply one of
‘where the power lies in media systems’ (Blumler et al.
1985 : 260)– power are organized within the
heterogeneous practices of media use and consumption.
 It is important to look at how ‘audience activity’ is
theorized or interpreted, and how research ‘findings’ are
placed in a wider theoretical framework.
 P. 181
Catatan Lepas
 Ketih Tester
 Media, Culture, and Morality, Routledge, 1994
 Cultural studies has appropriated the study of the media
for itself and has concentrated on popular culture and
pleasure in such a way that meaningful questions about
cultural and moral value have been at best ignored and
at worst pushed quite beyond the asking
 P.6, Keith Tester
 Sociology might do this because, unlike cultural studies,
if it is worth doing sociology is not happy just to describe
and explore what exists. Sociology ought to be driven by
a sense of moral commitment and by a moral outrage at
what presently passes for the good life : an outrage that
cultural studies, with its increasing emphasis on things
like clothes and shopping, can say absolutely nothing
about.
 P.4, Ketih Tester,
Kenneth Thompson
 Social Pluralism and Post Modernity
 Dalam buku : Modernity and Its Futures
 Edited by Stuart Hall, David Held and Tony McGrew
 Polity Press in Association with the Open University,
1992
 Postmodernist concerns with surface, …, can be traced
to the necessary format of television images.
 ‘television causes postmodernism’ variety. For television
is itself a product of late capitalism and, as such, has to
be seen in the context of the promotion of a culture of
consumerism. This directs our attention to the
production of needs and wants, the mobilization of
desire and fantasy, of the politics of distraction as part
and parcel of the push to sustain sufficient buoyancy of
demand in consumer markets to keep capitalist
production profitable.
 Postmodernism then signals nothing more than a logical
extention of the power of the market over the whole
range of cultural production.
 P.268
Steven Yearley, Environmental Challenges
 Dalam buku : Modernity and Its Futures
 Edited by Stuart Hall, David Held and Tony McGrew
 Polity Press in Association with the Open University,
1992
 Britain has perhaps the most highly organized
environmental lobby of any Eoropean country… Of the
social causes that came to prominence during the
1960s, including feminism, consumerism, and minority
rights, environmentalism has best weathered the
economic tribulations of the 1970s and 1980s and the
right ward shift in national politics.
 P.157
George Ritzer
• Sociological Theory, third edition
Ritzer, p. 327
 Pragmatism is a wide ranging philosophical position,
from which we can identify several aspects that
influenced Mead’s developing sociological orientation
(Charon, 1985)
 Pragmatists true reality does not exist ‘out there’ in the
real world ; it ‘is actively created as we act in and toward
the world’ (Hewitt, 1984 ; 8, see also Shalin, 1986)
 People remember and base their knowledge of the world
on what has prooven useful to them. They are likely to
alter what no longer ‘works’
 People define the social and physical ‘objects’ that they
encounter in the world according to their use for them.
Dian Sastrowarodyo
 Kompas Minggu, 2 September 2007
 Urban Sosialita : Dian, Cantik Versi Indonesia
 Belakangan, gadis ini (Dian Sastrowardoyo,---) malah
mengkritik kriteria cantik yang diproduksi mesin citra
yang membesarkan dirinya itu. Katanya, “Kecantikan itu
hanya konstruksi sosial belaka”
 “Kecantikan itu konstruksi politis dari ideologi
masyarakat yang plural dan berubah-ubah. Siapun pun
bisa mendefenisikan kecantikan sesuai dengan
kriterianya sendiri,”katanya.
 Dia fasih membicarakan kecantikan sebagai produk
budaya. Ketika menukil penggalan teori budaya dan
filsafat—seperti pemikiran Immanuel Kant, Michael
Foucault, Karl Marx, Julia Kristeva, atau Jean
Boudrillard—
 Skripsinya berjudul Kompleks Industri Kecantikan :
Sebuah Kritik Sosio Filosofis
 “Saya jadi korban, pelaku, sekaligus saksi”
 Dalam zaman kapitalisme terkini, citra cantik itu menjadi
permainan rumit dengan melibatkan kepentingan dari
industri kecantikan, obat-obatan, kesehatan, dan industri
iklan. Masyarakat menjadi korban mode yang
dikembangkan produsen untuk kepentingan pasar.
Filsafat ilmu
Source : Teori Kebudayaan dalam Ilmu Pengetahuan Budaya,
E.K.M. Masinambow, dalam Meretas Ranah—Bahasa, Semiotika,
dan Budaya, penyunting Ida Sundari Husen, Rahayu Hidayat,
Bentang, Oktober 2001
 Pada saat aliran-aliran intelektual Barat mulai
berpengaruh pada pengetahuan dan cara berpikir
kalangan akademis di Indonesia, maka paradigma yang
berlaku pada saat itu adalah yang dipengaruhi oleh
paham Pencerahan (enlightenment) dari abad ke 18.
paham ini berkeyakinan bahwa rasionalitas,
penggunaan akal manusia, mampu mendorong
perkembangan masyarakat kearah kesempurnaan yang
makin meningkat. 33
 Setelah para sarjana Indonesia dalam bidang ilmu-ilmu
sosial dan ilmu-ilmu budaya mulai kembali dari luar
negeri setelah menyelesaikan studi di berbagai
universitas di Amerika dan Eropa dalam tahun-tahun 70-
an dan 80-an. Melalui peranan dan pengaruh mereka
berbagai ragam teori diperkenalkan dalam pendidikan
tinggi dan dalam melaksanakan penelitian-penelitian
lapangan. Terutama melalui linguistik dan ilmu susastra,
prinsip-prinsip strukturalisme diperkenalkan melalui
analisis kebahasaan dan karya-karya kesusastraan. 34
 Pada saat teori-teori modern itu sedang diterapkan pada
kenyataan sosial budaya masyarakat Indonesi, dan
belum memperoleh kemantapan yang memuaskan ,
apalagi dengan perkembangan masyarakat Indonesia
kearah industrialisasi dan globalisasi, maka seiring
dengan arah itu, mulai berpengaruh pula teori-teori
kebudayaan yang bersumber padapaham anti
Pencerahaan. 34
 Pandangan anti pencerahaan ini berkembang akhir-
akhir ini dalam masyarakat Barat sebagai pencerminan
 disilusi dan ketidakpuasan dengan rasionalitas, dan
pranata-pranata yang bersumber pada optimisme
kemampuan rasionalitas itu untuk membawa umat
manusia ke kesejahteraan dan kebahagiaan. Hal ini
tercermin dalam aliran pascastrukturalisme dan
pascamodernisme. 34
 Inti pokok dari paham itu adalah bahwa realitas sebagai
sesuatu yang konkret di luar subjek tidak mempunyai
wujud mandiri, tetapi terbentuk oleh wacana (discourse)
yang berlaku dan digunakan dalam masyarakat. 34-5
 Dalam hubungan ini apa yang didefinisikan oleh Turner
(1990 : 4) sebagai modernitas secara umum dapat
digunakan untuk membedakannya dengan
pascamodernitas. …bahwa modernitas adalah
perubahan sosial budaya secara besar-besaran yang
mulai berlangsung di dunia Barat pada pertengahan
abad ke-16. perubahan ini harus dipandang sebagai
berkaitan dengan pengembangan masyarakat industrial
dan kapitalistis. Perubahan itu merupakan pemutusan
radikal dan revolusioner tradisi dan terhadap suatu
kestabilan sosial berdasarkan peradaban agraris yang
relatif statis.
 Pascamodernitas berkembang bersama
berkembangnya industri yang memungkinkan konsumsi
barang dan jasa secara luas ; dan yang menciptakan
lebih banyak waktu luang untuk bersantai bagi semua
lapisan masyarakat. Teknologi komunikasi yang makin
canggih mampu menciptakan tanda-tanda yang
membentuk realitas semu. Didalam bidang ilmu
pengetahuan realitas pun mengalami pemecahan sesuai
dengan berbagai jenis wacana. 38
 Outhwaite (1985) dalam membicarakan Gadamer
memberikan perbedaan antara apa yang dinamakan
epistemologi—yang sebenarnya mengacu pada
pendekatan positivisme—dan hermeneutik.
 Hermeneutik merupakan suatupengkajian filosofis
terhadap teori pemahaman (understanding) dan
penafsiran (interpretation).
 Epistemologi menggambarkan bagaimana pengetahuan
itu mungkin, sedangkan hermeneutik menggambarkan
bagaimana pemahaman itu mungkin..
 Epistemologi selalu berusaha untuk menentukan apa
yang secara objektif merupakan kepastian, apa yang
merupakan dasar-dasar suatu fenomena tertentu. Hal
ini sangat berbeda dari hermeneutik yang tidak
memberikan jaminan bahwa kepastian itu ada.
 Hermeneutik tidak mengakui adanya suatu pendirian
yang otoritatif yang menjanjikan adanya kepastian dari
pemahaman ; makna tidak bertumpu pada otoritas yang
berada diluar teks, melainkan berasal dari teks itu
sendiri.
 Menurut epistemologi (positivis), otoritas yang
menentukan kepastian makna adalah pembuat teks itu
sendiri. Source : p.40-1
 Proses membaca itu menghasilkan suatu interpretasi
yang tidak didasarkan atas suatu latar atau referen yang
konstan dan pasti, melainkan atas dasar makna yang
dimunculkan dari teks itu dan atas dasar pemaduan
(fusion) cakrawala teks itu dengan cakrawala pembaca.
 Derrida (dalam Hoy, 1985) menarik konsekuensi yang
lebih ekstrem dengan mengatakan bahwa oleh karena
tidak ada
 Referen yang konstan, maka interpretasi dari suatu teks
dan pemahamnnya terus menerus berubah.penentuan
yang mana yang benar dan yang pasti tidak mungkin
diadakan (undecidability), oleh karena teks tidak dapat
mengacu ke luar dirinya, kecuali pengacuan kepada
teks yang lain (intertextuality).
 Source p. 41
 Oleh karena teks dan maknanya itu bergantung dari
struktur teks itu sendiri, dan dari makna teks yang lain,
maka pengetahuan dan pemahaman bukanlah sesuatu
yang objektif, melainkan bergantung dari interpretasi
kekuasaan yang terkandung dalam wacana yang
berlaku atau diberlakukan pada waktu itu.
 Kekuasaan dalam hal ini didefinisikan Foucault (dalam
Philip, 1984) sebagai suatu jenis hubungan sosial antara
individu di mana yang satu bertindak sedemikian rupa
sehingga mempengaruhi tindakan dari yang lain.
 Maka kebenaran gagasan-gagasan ilmiah tidaklah
bersumber pada dunia objektif, melainkan bersumber
pada interpretasi dan pemahaman dari para ilmuwan
yang berpengaruh. Pengaruh mereka itu menentukan
arah perkembangan bidang ilmiah yang bersangkutan.
 P. 42
Konsep-Konsep Cultural Studies
 Beberapa konsep penting dalam cultural studies :
articulation, ideology, constructivist, identity, over
deterministic, theathre of struggle, representation,
poststructuralist, postcolonial,
Articulation :
 bahwa terjadi proses penyampaian kepentingan oleh
kelompok tertentu. Proses mengemukakan
kepentingannya ; dengan menggunakan bahasa atau
wacana. Dalam realitas senantiasa terjadi proses
artikulasi. Apakah melalui media, aksi, dan sebagainya.
Ideology :
 berkaitan dengan sistim pengetahuan, untuk mencapai
tujuan tertentu. Ideologi memerlukan bahasa untuk
menyampaikan. Karenanya kemudian bahasa selalu
berkaitan dengan adanya kepentingan. Ini
mengingatkan kita kemudian dengan Micahel Foucault
adanya kepentingan kekuasaan dan pengetahuan.
Identity :
 menyangkut aspek yang mendasari suatu kelompok
tertentu. Sesuatu yang mencerminkan pengalaman,
nilai, kepentingan, dan sebagainya. Raymond William
menganmati identitas kalangan pekerja atau buruh di
Inggeris. Stuart Hall mengamati identitas warga inggeris
keturunan Afrika. Di Indonesia,identitas dapat kita temui
pada etnik seperti Minang, Jawa, dan sebagainya. Atau
Tionghoa, Arab, Hindia, dan sebagainya. Demikian pula
suku terasing, seperti Dayak, Tengger,Samin, dan
sebagainya. Tema-tema kontemporer seperti sub culture
: punk, underground, kelompok minat, dan sebagainya.
Theathre of struggle :
 bahwa dalam realitas berlangsung proses pertarungan
secara simbolik. Ada pertarungan ideologi. Upaya untuk
saling membangun hegemoni.—disini kita melihat
kaitannya bila kita memakai perspektif kritis. Dimana
terjadi proses pertarungan. Maka disini menjadi penting
untuk memasukan konsep-konsep dari Gramscy,
Althusser. Jadi berkaitan dengan neo Marxist. Dalam
kontek ini kemudian, kenapa cs disebut berwatak
reformis, karena orientasi pada perubahan.
Over deterministik :
 bahwa dalam realitas terdapat banyak variabel yang
terlibat dalam melakukan relasi. Jadi berbeda dengan
pandangan Marxisme klasik dimana realitas dipandang
sebagai relasi ekonomi determistik. Disini tampak
pendekatan yang lebh tepat adalah neo marxist.
Constructivist :
 pandangan bahwa realitas bersifat dinamis, dibentuk
secara simbolik. Pembahasan tentang konstruktivis
dapat merujuk pada Peter L. Berger, dan beberapa
tokoh lainnya.
Jean Boudrullard :
 French Social Critics
 Signs take on special significance, in the media, and the
media shape in many ways how signs function for us.
 Believes that signs have become increasingly separated
from the objects they represent and that the media have
propelled this process to the point where nothing is real.
 Today we are in an era of simulation, in which signs no
longer represent—but create—our reality. Simulation
determines who we are and what we do. No longer tools
to represent our experience, signs establish it.
 --source littlejohn. P. 307-8
Stuart Hall :
 -theathre of struggle
  -societies as complex formations, necessarily
contradictory, always historically specific.
 -the interpretation of media texts always occurs within a
struggle of ideological control.
Micahel Foucault
 --each period has a distinct worldview, or conceptual
structure, that deermines the nature of knowledge in that
period.
 - it is called episteme
 - the episteme, or way of thinking, is determined not by
people but by the predominant discursive structures of
the day.
 -discourse includes written texts, but it also includes
spoken language and nonverbal forms such
architecture, institutional practices, even charts and
graphs.
 --people are not responsible for establishing the
conditions of discourse. Inversely, it is discourse that
determines the place of the person in the scheme of the
world.
 -Foucault’s work centers on analyzing discourse in a
way that reveals its rules and structure. This he calls
arcaelogy..seeks to uncover, through careful description,
the regulaties of discourse.
 -focus on the subject of power. He believed that power is
an inherent part of all discursive formation….power and
knowledged cannot be divided.
 Source : littlejohn. P. 220-1
 -like Derrida, argues against structuralist theories of
language which conceive of it as an autonomous rule
governed system. He also opposes interpretative or
hermeneutic methods which seek to disclose the hidden
meaning of language.
 -Foucault is thus concerned with the description and
analysis of the surfaces of discourse and their effects
under determinate material and historical conditions.
..discourse concerns both language and practice and
refers to the regulated production of knowledge through
language which gives meaning to both material objects
and social practices.
 --discourse regulates not only what can be said under
determinate social and cultural conditions but who can
speak, when and where. …much of his work is
concerned with the historical investigation of power and
the production of subjects through that power.
 Source : Baker. p. 20.
Derrida :
 Primary philosophical sources of poststructuralism are
Derrida and Foucault.
 They give rise to different emphases, postructuralist
cannot be regarded as a unified body of work.
 Derrida’s focus is on language and the deconstruction of
an immediacy, or identity, between words and
meanings.
 Derrida accepts Saussure’s argument that meaning is
generated by relations of difference between signifiers
…that meaning can never be fixed. Words carry many
meanings,
 Derrida proceeds to deconstruct the ‘stable’ binaries
upon which structuralism, and indeed western
philosophy in general, relies.
 Source : Baker. P. 19
 Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams dan Edward
Thompson are held to be early figureheads representing
the moment of ‘culturalism’
 Culturalism stresses the ‘ordinariness’ of culture and the
active, creative, capacity of people to construct shared
meaningful practices. Empirical work, which is
emphasized within the culturalist tradition, explores the
way that active human beings create cultural meanings.
 Culturalism, particularly for Williams and Thompson, is a
form of historical cultural materialism which traces the
unfolding of meaning over time, exploring culture in the
context of its material conditions of production and
reception. ..exploring the class basis of culture which
aims to give ‘voice’ to the subordinated and to examine
the place of culture in class power.
 Source : Baker. P. 15.
 Neo Pragmatism and Cultural Studies :
 -pragmatism philosophy such as Peirce, James, Dewey,
and others.
 -pragmatism shares with the poststructuralist strand of a
cultural studies an anti foundationalist, anti
representationlist, anti realist view of truth.
 It is combined with a commitment to pragmatic social
reform.
 -pragmatism regards liberal democracies as the best
kind of within them even as they ar urged to do better. It
favours a trial and error experimentalism which seeks
after new ways of doing things which we can describe as
‘better’ measured against our values. …as with
postmodern cultural studies, pragmatism is against
‘grant theory’
 Baker 373
 Culturalism focused on meaning production by human
actors in an historical context, structuralism pointed to
culture as an expression fo deep structures of language
which lie outside of the intentions of actors and constrain
them. Where culturalism stresses history, structuralism
is synchronic in approach, analyzing the structures of
relations in a snapshot of a particular moment.
 Culturalism focuses on interpretation as a way of
understanding meaning, structuralism has asserted the
possibility of a science of signs, of objective knowledge.
Annabelle Srebermy
The Global and the Local
 The complexity of the global contemporary media /
culture spectrum at the start of the twenty first century,
and the range of theoretical constructs that have been
used to explain, and base policy on the international role
of media, particularly in the “Third World”.
 The “mood” of contemporary analysis can be quite
varied.
 One position is that of the happy post modernist who
sees that many kinds of cultural texts circulate
internationally and that people adopt them playfully and
readily integrate them in creative ways into own lives,
and that cultural bricolage is the prevailing experience
as we enter the twenty first century.
 Another is the melancholy political economist who sees
the all pervasive reach of the multinationals and
wonders how long distinctive cultures can outlast the
onslaught of the western culture industries.
 Somewhere in between lies the cautiously optimistic
fourth Worlder who sees in the spread of media the
possibilities for revitalization of local identities (ethnic,
religious class, etc) and their use as tools of political
mobilization vis a vis both national and global forces.
 P. 621
 The apparent triumph of late capitalism in 1989-90 and
the demise of the so called second world of state
socialism, suggest that ideological politics in the classic
sense is going to be less important than the revival of
identity politics in the future.
 Yet at the same time as the demise of a single master
narrative of global progress is trumpeted in some
quarters, in others the old indicators of a single path to
“development” are still utilized, and even adopted with
greater eaterness by Third World societies yearning for
“progress”.
 It is likely that in the next decade we shall see a revival
of intense debate about development, and the
unresolved role of culture within that process, nel
Lernerian arguments for the positive roe of media
systems as part of national development encountering
arguments for more thorough going Third World
economic disassociation and delinking from the global
capitalist economy (Amin 1990), as well as fourth
world/indigenist culture arguments for the maintenance
of local identities (Verhelst 1990).
 P. 621-2
 Media effects is one of the most disputed areas of
domestic media research so there is no reason to expect
any greater unanimity about the effects at the
international level.
  The “cultural imperialism” thesis did tend to suggest a
“hypodermic needle” model of international effects,
“American” values being injected into third World hearts
and minds. Recent work, building on reception theory
and models of the active audience, is giving a more
nuanced view of international effects as mediated by
preexisting cultural frameworks and interpretative
scheme. Thus, despite their book’s title (The Export of
Meaning), Leibes and Katz (1990) argues that meaning
is not exported in Western television programming but
created by different cultural sectors of the audience in
relation to their already formed cultural attitudes and
political perceptions.
 Others (Beltran, Oliveira) argue that it is not so much
national American values that are exported but rather
more generalized capitalist consumption and prevailing
development orientations. For them, globalization
portends homogenization which, while useful for milk,
produces a culture that tastes bland and is not even
good for you.
 P. 618
 Hannah Davis (1990) describes life in a small Moroccan
agricultural town of 50.000 people and notes how
“symbols from different worlds overlap : a picture of the
king of Morocco hangs next to a poster of the Beatles.
The sounds of a religious festival outisde…mingle with
the televised cheering of soccer fans…in the morning we
watch a holy man curing a boy, then stop off at the fair
where we see a woman doing motorcycle stunts : in the
evening we watch an Indian fairy tale or a Brazilian soap
opera or an Egyptian romance” (p.13)…as in much of
the middle east public space is male space, and thus it
is the women who ather round the relevision and VCR at
night, watching Egyptian films were
 romances that reduced the women to tears, while the
western films elicited “grasps of surprise, horrified hiding
of the eyes, fascination or prurlence”, with American
sexual shamelessness being both admired and feared,
imitated and denigrated. The transcultural mix of
symbols is apparent when one young girl organizes a
traditional religious feast yet defiantly appears wearing a
denim skirt and earrings ; thus, such symbols may be
used in personal struggles to “define, test or transform
the boundaries” of local lives (p. 17)
 P. 619
Posmodernisme
Masinbow, dalam Meretas
 Perkembangan teori-teori yang digolongkan sebagai
pasca strukturalis terjadi melalui studi-studi hermeneutik
yang telah mengembangkan seperangkat konsep untuk
menganalisis wacana dan teks ; dua pengertian yang
jelas berasal dari studi bahasa.p.38
McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory
 Our era as ‘postmodern’ in the literal sense of being a
late stage of the ‘modern’ period that was characterized
by rapid social change, industrialization and the factory
system, capitalism, bureaucratic forms of organization
and mass political movements. 114
 Postmodernism undermines the traditional notion of
culture as something fixed and hierarchical. It fovours
forms of culture that are transient, of the moment,
superficially pleasing and appealing to sense rather than
reason. Postmodern culture is volatile, illogical,
kaleidescopic and hedonistic. Mass media culture has
the advantage of appealing to many senses as well as
being associated with novelty and transience. Many
features of (commercial) popular media culture reflect
postmodernist elements. Music video on television was
hailed as the first postmodern television service (Kaplan,
1987 ; Grossberg 1989, Lewis, 1991). 114
The Nature of Inquiry and Theory
Communication theory and Scholarship
Inquiry
Three stages
 First is asking questions
 Second is observation
 Third is constructing answers
asking questions
 Gerald Miller and Henry Nicholson believe that inquiry is
“nothing more..than the process of asking interesting,
significant questions..and providing disciplined,
systematic ansers to them
 Questions of defenition call for concepts as answers,
seeking to clarify what is obseved or inferred
 Questions of fact ask about properties and relations in
what is observed : what does it consist of ? How does it
relate to other things?
 Questions of value probe aesthetic, pragmatic, and
ethical qualities of the observed : is it beautiful ?
observation
 The scholar looks for an answer
 Methods of observation vary significantly from one
tradition to another
 Some scholars observe by examining records and
artifacts, others by interviewing people
constructing answers
 The scholar attempts to define, to describe and explain,
to make judgements
 This stage is usually referred to as theory and is the
focus of this book
 People often think of the stages of inquiry as linear,
occuring one step at a time—first questions, then
observations, and finally answers.
 But inquiry does not proceed in this fachion. Each stage
affects and is affected by the others. Observations often
stimulate new questionss, and theories are challenged
by both observations and questions.
 Theories lead to new questions, and observations are
determined in part by theories
 Inquiry is more like running around a circle than walking
in a straight line
Types of scholarship
 Different types of inquiry ask different questions, use
different methods of observation, and lead to different
methods of observation, and lead to different kinds of
theory
 Methods of inquiry can be grouped into three broad
forms of scholarship : scientific, humanistic, and social
scientific
Positivism
 To discover natural laws so people can predict and
control events
 Stable preexisting patterns or order that can be
discovered
 Self interested and rational individuals who are shaped
by external forces
 Clearly distinct from and less valid than science
 A logical, deductive system of interconnected definitions,
exioms, and laws
 Is logically connected to laws and based on facts
 Is based on precise observations that others can repeat
 Science is value free, and values havo no place except
when choosing a topic
ISS
 To understand and describe meaningful social action
 Fluid definitions of a situation created by human
interaction
 Social beings who create meaning and who constantly
make sense of their worlds
 Powerful everyday theories used by ordinary people
 A description of how a group’s meaning system is
generated and sustained
 Resonates or feels right to those who are being studies
 Is embedded in the context of fluid social interactions
 Values are an integral part of social life : no group’s
values are wrong, only different
CSS
  To smash myth and empower people to change society  To what extent and in what ways are messages created
radically in interaction with others
 Conflict filled and governed by hidden underlying  How does the process of message development differ
structures from culture to culture, and what are the cultural
 Creative, adptive people with unrealized potentials, mechanisms that enter into the message development
trapped by illusion and exploitation process
 False beliefs that hide power and objective conditions
 A critique that reveals true conditions and helps people Interpretation and generation of meaning
see the way to a better world  How do humans understand messages, and how does
 Supplies people with tools needed to change the world meaning arise in interaction with other people
 Is informed by a theory that unveils illusions  How does the mind process information and interpret
 All science must begin with a value position ; some experience
positions are right, some are wrong  To what extent and in what ways are meaning and
understanding products of culture
Characteristics of postmodernism social research
 Rejection of all ideologies and organized belief systems, Message structure
including all social theory  Consists of the elements of messages in writings, the
 Strong reliance on intuition, imagination, personal spoken world, and nonverbal formas
experience, and emotion  How are messages put together, and how are they
 Sense of meaninglessness and pessimism, belief that organized
the world will never improve  In what ways does the organization of a message create
 Extreme subjectivity in which there is no distinction meaning
between the mental and the external world  How are communicator’s messages in a dialogue
 Espousal of diversity, chaos, and complexity that is organized
constantly changing  How do the participants in a conversation mesh their talk
 Rejection of studying the past or different places since
only the here and now is relevant Interactional dynamics
 Belief that causality cannot be studies because life is too  Involves relationships and interdependency among
complex and rapidly changing communicators and the joint creation of dicourse and
 Assertion that research can never truly represent what meaning
occurs in the socail world  It addresses the give and take, the production and
 Belief that causality cannot be studies because life is too reception, between parties in a communication
complex and rapidly changing transaction whether those parties are individuals or
groups
 Assertion that research can never truly represent what
Institutional and societal dynamics
occurs in the socail world
 The ways power and resources are distributed in
Communication as a social science society, the ways culture is produced, and the interaction
among segments of society
 Communication involves understanding how people
behave in creating, exchanging, and interpreting
messages.
 Communication inquiry combines both scientific and
humanistic methods
 Theories in communications vary significantly in the
extent to which they use scientific or humanistic
elements.
 Traditionally, humanistic theories of communication have
been referred to as rhetorical theory and scientific
theories as communication theory
 All theories we will discuss deal with human
communication, and both humanistic and scientific
theories are worthy of inclusion in our body of
knowledge about human communication
 The rhetorical tradition
 The semiotic tradition
 The phenomenological tradition
 The cybernetic tradition
 The sociopsychological tradition
 The sociocultural tradition
 The critical tradition

Levels of Communication
 Interpersonal communication
 Group communication
 Organizational communication
 Mass communication

Core communication theories

 Development of messages
 Interpretation and generation of meaning
 Message structure
 Interactional dynamics
 Institutional and societal dynamics

Development of messages
 How do we create what we write, say, and express to
others
 What mental processes are involved