5 questions for Week 7 (from David)

1) It seems to me Raymond Williams is very much in keeping with the spirit of incorporating 'the voice of the common person' as part of his critique, a la the Birmingham crowd, but I also get a sense that he's trying to do something else, too. On p. 143 of D&K, Williams writes "(w)hen we find ourselves looking at a particular work, or group of works, often realizing as we do so their essential community...we should find ourselves attending first to the reality of their practice and the conditions of their practice." I get a sense he's trying to rescue Marxism from its modern critics by elevating some of the 'background' of production practices...and I wonder what Williams would think of McLuhan??

2) Let's get this out of the way: Hebidge rocks. But I do wonder whether Hebidge thinks (or would acknowledge) there's something basically generational about the "original innovations which signify subculture" (D&K, p156), and the media which freeze-dries it and commodifies it. I ask this because it seems to me Hebidge is basically saying something we take for granted/as a given today about the relationship between generations---though I wonder if that's because society/pop culture has embraced his critique?

3) I find the concept of naturalized coding (D&K p. 167) as explained by Stuart Hall simply fascinating (and difficult to refute); but I'm not sure I understand how these codes become "habituated' in the encoding/decoding process. Isn't there something more than mere repetition of images/language going on here? It seems to me there has to be, because otherwise the plurality of decoding (individuals hearing different messages) would, if anything (it seems to be) be reinforced...no? I guess I'm trying to understand the real-world process of making a sign 'iconic' in the sense that most get the same message...

4) The longer I spend with these readings, the more I appreciate what Ang describes as "relativiz(ing) the academic commitment to increasing knowledge per se, and resist(ing) the temptation of what Stuart Hall has called the 'codification' of cultural studies into a stable realm
of established theories and canonized mythologies (D&K p.182). So now I'm thinking: are we basically looking at a fissure with the 'Stuart Hall's versus the 'Raymond Williams's both trying to reclaim the validity of cultural studies via separate paths? (Or am I reading too much into this?) Is seems to me as much as Ang is critical of the social sciences approach, she's also frustrated with the idea of cultural studies trying to develop strategies to outflank the empiricists, no?

5) I enjoyed Parameswaran's challenge to cultural studies scholars, but I did wonder about just how many ideas were bound up in the pursuit of feminist perspectives vis a vis globalism. It seems that the very foundation of critical studies is contentious enough, needing for conceptual clarity the definitions of hegemony, agency, etc. that Parameswaran discounts as 'turf policing barriers' (p. 200); adding in the feminist critique and the globalization critique adds even more theoretical complexity to say nothing of the (most likely) narrow perspective that an 'outsider' (i.e., a Westerner in India) would bring to the project. I respect the idea in the abstract, but isn't there a danger of expanding critical studies so far beyond its base that from a theoretical basis alone, it becomes unglued (and more the product of the researcher's rhetorical skills than a generalizable statement of knowledge)?

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David D. Brown
Austin, TX | voice: 512.394.3532 | fax: 512.722.7740