Page 45 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

• Associated concepts Cultural politics, culture, encoding–decoding, hegemony,
ideology, popular culture, resistance, text.
• Tradition(s) Cultural studies, culturalism, Marxism, poststructuralism,
22 psychoanalysis, structuralism.
• Reading Hall, S. (1992) ‘Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies’, in L.
Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies. London and New
York: Routledge.

Circuit of culture The idea of a ‘circuit of culture’ has developed from the debates
about cultural materialism and specifically the relationship between the economy
and culture. The metaphor of the circuit of culture is an attempt to move away from
the determinism and reductionism implicit in the Marxist ‘base and superstructure’
model while retaining an explanatory link between material and cultural
production and consumption. The model grew out of the description of a social
formation (put forward by structuralist Marxism in the 1970s) as constituted by
complex structures or regularities that are articulated or linked together. The
emphasis is on the irreducible character of cultural practices which are at the same
time in a relationship of mutual determination with other practices.
The metaphor of the ‘circuit of culture’, which emerged in embryonic form in the
early 1980s and was developed to greater maturity in the 1990s, adapts this basic idea
of the articulation of levels of practice to the question of economy and culture. Here,
cultural meaning is produced and embedded at each level of the circuit that is,
production–representation–identity–consumption–regulation, so that the
production of significance at each moment of the circuit is articulated to the next
moment without determining what meanings will be taken up or produced at that
level. Thus, culture is autonomous but articulated to other practices to form a whole.
The challenge is to grasp just how the moment of production inscribes itself in
representation in each case without assuming that it can be ‘read off’ from economic
relations. The model is also concerned with how culture as representation is
implicated in the forms and modes of organization that production takes. That is,
we need to grasp the ways in which ‘the economic’ is formed culturally.
Thus commodities may be analysed in terms of the meanings embedded at the
level of design and production which are subsequently modified by the creation of
new meanings as the commodity is represented in advertising. In turn, the
meanings produced through representation connect with, and help constitute, the
identities of its users. Meanings embedded at the moments of production and
representation may or may not be taken up at the level of consumption, where new
meanings are again produced. Thus, meanings produced at the level of production
are available to be worked on at the level of consumption. However they do not
determine them. Further, representation and consumption shape the level of
production through, for example, design and marketing.
The advantage of the circuit of culture metaphor is that it allows for analysis of
the specificities of each moment of the circuit while at the same time considering
the relations between them. This model is more flexible, more useful and more
sophisticated than a crude base–superstructure model. However, it does carry with