Graeme Turner British Cultural Studies, Third Edition An Introduction(1)

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.Thisbook examines a cultural product the Sony Walkman from a number ofperspectives.The authors discuss how the product has been represented in adver-tising and thus how it is implicated in the construction of particular identities.This involves, for instance, analysing the range of meanings mobilized in partic-ular campaigns recognizing the cultural specificities in campaigns in particularcountries.A second section examines Sony, the firm that produced the Walkman,in order to explain the industrial culture responsible for its design and produc-226CONCLUSI ONtion.This is a complex examination involving the consultation of publishedaccounts, interviews with key contributors to the design process, and the develop-ment of a history of the process of design and development.Part of this story isthe cultural identity of Sony itself, its relation to Japanese-ness and the culturalsources of the product s design.In the third section, Doing Cultural Studies asksmore specific questions about the marketing and design of the Walkman,following through the various models, the proliferation of specialized or niche-marketed versions, in order to develop a design history of the product.In Section4 they outline the economic logic of the product from the point of view of themanufacturer.Sony s place in the global market, as one of the big six multina-tional music companies, is a crucial element in this account.The fifth sectiondiscusses the consumption of the product through reference to published statis-tics on age, class, gender and so on.Finally, the adoption of the Walkman bysubcultural groups as a signifier of resistance or identity leads into the finalsection, which discusses how the use of the Walkman has been regulated by civicauthorities by notices on the walls of the London Underground, for instance,asking commuters to adjust the volume of their personal stereos.In order to generate the information they need the authors have drawn on awide range of material and employed most of the methodologies we have beendiscussing throughout this book.They have consulted published histories andpress accounts of the company, the design process and the marketing plan.Theyhave closely examined specific representations as texts, locating the meaningsgenerated around the product in advertising, news reports and other locations.Statistical evidence of consumption, as well as other empirical data aroundmarketing and design development, has also been used, as well as the publishedacademic and press information available on the political economy of the musicand media industries over the last two decades.Finally, there is a significantcomponent of oral history, or personal interviews with Sony staff, who providedirect accounts of the design and marketing processes, as well as the specificproduction decisions required to get the Walkman onto the market.This isextremely comprehensive.Even so, there are still areas of information which aremissing.There is no attempt to deal directly with consumers, for instance; theconsumption section primarily cites statistics or other data that deal with theconsumption process as an aggregation of individual choices rather thanfocusing, as ethnography tends to do, on specific choices made by specific indi-viduals in response to specific conditions.Nonetheless, what emerges is a fascinating story, successfully catching themultidimensional roles the Sony Walkman has played in contemporary popularculture, as well as the complicated logics behind its commercial production.It is agood example of the method of contemporary cultural studies research in that it227CENTRAL CATEGORI ESactively pursues competing accounts, seeking out different bodies and categoriesof evidence.Where these competing accounts differ, the authors use these differ-ences as an opportunity to explain the articulation (or, more familiarly, theconnectedness) of the constitutive cultural and economic processes in theconstruction of a cultural object.As they describe it, their method is to analyse the biography of a cultural artefact by focusing on the articulation of a numberof distinct processes whose interaction can and does lead to variable and contin-gent outcomes (Du Gay et al.1997: 3).It is this recognition of the necessity ofunderstanding the interaction of distinct, possibly contradictory and highlycontingent processes that underpins the method of the book.THE CIRCUIT OF CULTUREAt the beginning of Doing Cultural Studies there is an explanation of what theOpen University team describes as the circuit of culture.This is a model ofcultural production and consumption that now occurs in a number of the OpenUniversity readers and is probably widely taught to undergraduates, and not justin the UK.What this model describes is the interaction of the five key processes through which any analysis of a cultural text or artefact must pass if it is to beadequately studied (Du Gay et al.1997: 3).These processes are: representation,identity, production, consumption and regulation.The diagram which accompa-nies the chapter makes it clear that these processes are all interconnected.Whenwe apply the diagram to the analysis of a particular cultural text or artefact wefind that even the categories themselves can overlap.Identity and representationare quite hard to separate when one is examining advertising, for instance, and thebook s opening chapter, which deals with advertising, makes that quite clear too.Despite this, however, the pedagogic value of the circuit of culture model liesin its clarification of the kinds of questions that need to be asked in a study of acultural artefact, product or practice.These are:" How is it represented?" What identities are associated with it?" How is it produced and consumed?" What mechanisms regulate its distribution and use? (p.3)What these questions do is direct the research towards different locations,different cultural, industrial or social processes.Having to answer all four ques-tions ensures that the topic will be approached from more than one perspective.Itensures that the cultural study of the artefact, product or practice focuses notonly on the detail of (for example) its specific representations but also on how228CONCLUSI ONthose representations are related to the cultural processes which structure identity,consumption, production and regulation.It is this combination of approaches,this emphasis on the articulation between relatively discrete cultural processes,which now seems to mark out this research tradition.Indeed, I would argue that the standard form of cultural studies researchtoday not only combines the investigation of a range of cultural or social sites forinformation, but also employs a range of critical and empirical methodologies.So, within an essentially theoretical essay on the cultural function of television,John Hartley s preferred method of textual analysis is reinforced by a richlyhistorical account of the social function of television since the 1930s (1999).Richard Dyer s study of the meaning of the colour white (1999) in Westerncontemporary media culture deals most directly with the kinds of critique weencountered in Chapter 7 to do with the discursive construction of race andidentity [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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