Here's a stab I took at the above for an exam last fall in an SI seminar.
I'm enthusiastic enough to cut and paste it into an email file but not to
go through and fix all messed up tabs. Sorry.
What is cultural studies and why does Denzin believe we must bring a
cultural studies perspective to symbolic interaction?
I. Cultural studies
A. Attempts to unravel ideological meanings coded into
taken-for-granted meanings in everyday life (e.g.,
gender)
1. Production, distribution, consumption and exchange of
cultural objects and their meanings
a. Issues of ideology and political economy of signs
2. Textual analysis of these objects, their meanings, and
the practices that surround them
a. Implies critical reading strategies (e.g., how
does text create a gendered subject?)
3. Study of lived cultures and lived experiences which are
shaped by the cultural meanings that circulate
in everyday life
a. Interpretive interactionism enters field of
cultural studies at the level of
lived experience; provides conceptual framework for:
b. How interacting individuals connect their lived
experiences to the cultural
representations of those experiences
-How an actor (re)defines the meanings of
his experiences and identity,
informed by cultural texts
II. Connection to symbolic interactionism
A. Presence of cultural studies has always existed - untheorized
term "communication"
1. American program traces roots to C. Wright Mills
2. Advocated study of communication that was:
a. Critical
b. Symbolic interactionist
c. Pragmatic
d. Marxist
3. Because communications/mass media are the semiorganized
source of identities
a. Communication is culture
-Society exists in the interactions between
individuals
b. Between consciousness and existence stands
communication (culture)
-Patterns the meanings one's consciousness has
B. Interactionists have neglected the symbolic side of the theory,
instead building elaborate theories on interaction
C. Communication connects the terms "symbolic" and "action"
1. It is the symbolic process by which reality is
produced, maintained, repaired and transformed
2. It is an ensemble of social practices, social forms,
social relationships, and technologies of
representation which construct definitions of reality.
a. These interact in concrete historical moments
b. Produce particular ideological, emotional, and
cultural meanings which are connected
to the lived experiences of interacting individuals
D. Reality defined by meanings actors have not chosen for themselves
1. Cultural apparatuses of communication:
a. Produce the real and its representations
b. Guide, define, and expropriate experience
c. Include:
-Organizational milieux in which art and
science exist
-Political economy in which they're
distributed and marketed
-Social institutions which distribute and
interpret them
-Meanings which define reality
E. Therefore we must develop a critical aesthetic theory of
popular culture experience and the cultural subject who
experiences such social texts
1. Must grasp how subjects are produced and shaped by
social and cultural texts, as they
appropriate such texts for their own personal experience.