Page 59 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

think through cross-cultural communication in terms of the learning of language
skills and the development of what Rorty calls ‘the cosmopolitan conversation of
human kind’.
36 Like all metaphors, that of the conversation is better suited to some kinds of
purpose or object than others so that there are limitations to the analogy between
culture and conversations. The commonly understood connotations of
‘conversation’ may lead us to prioritize declarative voice over conduct, the verbal
above the visual and the utterance before the body. Indeed, what we say is only
occasionally the product of intentionality and self-conscious reflection for it is more
often than not the outcome of pragmatic routines, habits and ritualized or
unconscious processes. Further, objects and spaces, which are very much part of
cultural analysis, are in danger of disappearing from view in this metaphor.
Links Communication, dialogic, discourse analysis, language, meaning, performativity

Counterculture The idea of a counterculture refers to the values, beliefs and attitudes,
that is, the culture, of a minority group that is in opposition to the mainstream or
ascendant culture. Further, a counterculture is articulate and self-conscious in its
opposition to the values of the governing culture in a way that distinguishes it from
a subculture. The term is particularly associated with the cultural and political
movements and formations of the 1960s and early 1970s in the United States and
Britain, from whence the concept emerged.
The counterculture of the 1960s was primarily constituted by the anti-
materialistic Hippie movement with its themes of dropping-out, sexual liberation,
drug use and the display of hairstyle and clothing as self-conscious cultural and
political statements. The city of San Francisco (most notably the district of Haight-
Ashbury), the music of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan and Janis
Joplin, along with the writings of Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary and Herbert
Marcuse, were component parts of a cultural movement whose symbolic high point
was the Woodstock festival.
The counterculture of the time also included the political activists of the anti-
Vietnam war movement, the ‘Students for a Democratic Society’ and a nascent
Women’s Liberation Movement. As such the counterculture of the 1960s is the
forerunner of contemporary New Social Movements and the onset of the self-
conscious cultural politics that marks cultural studies. Indeed, cultural studies
emerged in Britain during much the same time period, so that a number of
significant figures in its history were influenced by the 1960s counterculture.

Links Cultural politics, life-politics, New Social Movements, postmaterialism, subculture,
women’s movement

Critical theory The term ‘critical theory’ has been associated with the work of the
‘Frankfurt School’, a research institute that began its work in Germany in 1923 but
later transferred to the United States under the threat of Nazism. The leading figures
of the Frankfurt School, Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, were indebted to
Marxism but also critical of it. A mixture of Marxism, critical philosophy and