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Culture Studies (Subject) / Culture Studies Terms (Lesson)

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• Connoisseurship   The ability of having a great deal of knowledge about the fine art, cuisines or an expert knowledge in matters of taste. Judgment informed by intuition is essential but it must be grounded in a thorough understanding of the work itself. The concept of connoisseurship has been criticised for representing upper-class taste as something that is natural, more authentic, more educated, and more discerning than popular taste.
• Appropriation   The deliberate “borrowing” of an image in order to create a recontextualization which helps not only the artist to comment on the image’s original meaning but also the viewer’s association with the original image or real thing. Appropriation is a wanted recognition of the image that is copied. (Campbell’s Soup Series by Andy Warhol, 1961)
• Encoding   In cultural assumption, the production of meaning in cultural products that will then be decoded by viewers. Coding involves representing thoughts in a physical form such as writing or speaking. The recipient should be able to perceive the message through sensory organs that involves activity such as hearing, reading or seeing.
• Transcoding When Social movements sometimes take terms that are derogatory (abfällig) and reuse them in empowering ways.
• Bricolage   As a cultural practice bricolage refers to the activity of taking consumer products and making them one’s own by giving them a new meaning. It is a way for subcultures to defy the meanings of massculture as well as it is a way for commodity to appropriate and incorporate subculture styles.
• Counter Bricolage The practices used by advertisers and marketers by manufacturing and selling aspects of by bricolage style, which is taken as a basis.
• Denotation Denotation refers to the literal meaning of a word, the “dictionary definition”. Taken “snake” as an example, the denotative meaning would be a legless, venomous reptile which moves its long tapering, cylindrical body and is found in most tropical and temperate regions.
• Connotation   Connotation refers to the association that is connected to a certain word or the emotional suggestions related to that word. The connotative meaning of a word always exists together with the denotative meaning. The connotation of the word snake could include evil or danger.  
• Representation Representation is the use of signs that stand in or for something else. These signs are arranged in order to form semantic constructions and express relations which are essential for organizing reality and the world. It is a type of recording in which the sensory information about a physical object is described in a medium
• Ekphrasis   An Ekphrasis is a poem which is written about a visual basis such as art. It can either explain or analyze what is happening in the painting or derive meaning from the painting and go from there.
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• Wintergarden photograph As Barthes says the Wintergarden Photograph only exists for him whereas for other spectators it would only be an indifferent picture unable to establish objectivity. In addition it would only affect the spectators stadium (the clothes, period, photogeny) and therefore would not pierce you as it does for Barthes. The picture becomes the absent referent of Barthes’s paean to presence taking over the form of an elegiac ekphrasis.
• Studium Studium is denoting the cultural, linguistic and political interpretation of a photograph which are therefore nameable and have a cultural meaning that we understand at once.
• Punctum   Punctum is the piercing, wounding personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it. This can be a personal memory and in addition when the there is a match between a signifier in the photograph and the scene in memory.
• Barthes Adventure For Barthes the principle of adventure allows him to make Photography exist, therefore the existence of photography is determined by the presence of an adventure. It is they way in what the picture becomes alive.
• Aesthetics   Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art and taste and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. More scientifically it is the study of sensori-emotional values called the judgment of sentiment and taste.
• Taste A man’s ability to distinguish, understand and evaluate the beautiful and the ugly in reality and in works of art by using the ear and eye and for that reason are called “essential powers of man”. Taste is a culturally specific, class based concept that can be learned through contact with culture and exercised through patterns of consumptions and display.
• Kitsch Kitsch is a form of art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art or a worthless imitation of art of recognized value. The concept is associated with the deliberate use of elements that may be thought of as cultural icons while making cheap mass-produced objects that are unoriginal.
• (cultural) Icon A cultural Icon is a symbol, logo, picture, name, face person, building or other image that is recognized and generally represents an object or concept with a great cultural significance or the status of a representative to a wide cultural group.
• Interpellation   Interpellation is Althusser’s term to describe a mechanism whereby the human subject is “constituted” by pre-given structures. Used by Marxist media theorists to explain the ideological function of mass media texts the concept says that the subject (listener, viewer, reader) is constituted by the text and the power of the mass media resides in the ability to “position” the subject in such a way that their representations are taken to be reflections of everyday reality. Interpellation can be considered as recruitment as it invites a person into a subject position.
• Althusser's Ideology   Refers to Marx and Gramsci as well as Freud’s and Lacan’s concept of the unconscious and mirror phase respectively and describes the structure and systems that enable the concept of the self. According to Althusser these structures are both agents of repression and inevitable it is impossible to escape ideology.
• Voyeurism The secret viewing of a person in a place where the person would have a reasonable expectation of privacy or is engaged in a private act for the purposes of the viewer’s sexual arousal and gratification.
• The Girl with a Pearl Earring painting   Caught in an unconscious moment, in this gaze the female radiates depth, complexity and innocence. Due to her wide and expressive eyes, the slightly parted lips, her posture and expression give the painting timelessness and therefore offer another view of male gaze, which values the complexity and strength of women’s characters engaged in daily domestic activities.
• Authenticity   Authenticity is the quality of being genuine or unique and is attributes to things that are one of a kind and original and this “special something” cannot be reproduced when an original is copied.
• Aura   A term used by Walter Benjamin to describe a special quality emanating from unique works of art which gives it a quality of authenticity that cannot be reproduced. There is not authenticity without its destruction in mechanical reproducibility but reproducible art  makes unheard perceptions possible.
• Rhizome   A rhizome is defined as the roots and stems of a plant growing underground and horizontally away from their plant’s center. In this philosophy it is explained that multiple non hierarchical entry and exit points exist in our interaction and understanding of information, allowing us to illustrate a new subject without beginning end or hierarchy.
• Open source The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product’s source material
• Gatekeeping   Gatekeeping were a practice necessity for printed newspapers, radio and television since they could never offer more than a tightly edited selection of the day’s news, which comes with judgements of which stories were most important for aufiences to learn about. There are three stages, the input stage where journalists pre-select the stories they believe is worthy of investigation, at the output stage editors select from the total amount of material generated by journalists for those stories with the greatest importance to their audience and at the response stage a small selection of audience responses are chose to be in the following neswaper.
• Gatewatching   Gatewatching complements or supplements traditional journalistic gatekeeping, which becomes impossible in an open medium such as the Internet (Web). Participants may still occasionally report and publish their own stories, but frequently publicise information becoming available elsewhere rather than publish original content. Gatewatching sites compile such reports, and usually enable all of their users to submit material as well as comment on stories. This can be described as participatory journalism. While individual user submissions may remain less than comprehensive, their combination and complementation with comments and discussion allows them to grow into an in-depth multiperspectival coverage of news events. (The idea of multiperspectival news reporting was introduced by Herbert Gans in the 1970s.)
• Media: 4th estate   The fourth estate is the public press, referred to as a collective and encompassing photographers, journalists, television broadcasters or radio announcers. The press has an immense political and social power since it can be used to shape societies while conveying news and commentary; therefore many nations have laws to protect the right of the press.
• Postmodernism A general term which is applied to art, philosophy, architecture, fiction and cultural and literary criticism (aesthetic, literary, political) which stems from the recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. It is highly skeptical of explanation which claims to be valid for groups but rather the relative truth of every person.
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• Postmodernity Postmodernity is used to describe the economic or cultural state or condition of society which is said to exist after modernity associated with the changes to institutions and conditions with social and political results globally but especially in the West since 1960s.
• Citizen journalism When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another.
• Global village Global village is a term closely associated with Marshall McLuhan describing that the globe has been contracted into a village by electric technology and the instantaneous movement of information from every quarter to every point at the same time. IT refers to the traditional concept of Networking that includes social interaction with about 200 – 300 people.
• Realism Is a style of painting and sculpture which was trend between 1850 and 1880 that seeks to represent the familiar or typical as well as the depiction of nature or of contemporary life rather than an idealized, formalized or romantic interpretation of it.
• Panopticon   A circular prison with cells distributed around a central surveillance station, so conducted that the inspector can see each of the prisoners at all times, without being seen first propsed by Jeremy Bentham.
• Reception The action or process of receiving something sent, given or inflicted.
• Mimesis   Mimicry is defined as the action, practice, or art of mimicking or closely imitating the manner, gesture, speech, style or mode of actions and persons or the superficial characteristics of a thing.
• Frankfurt School   This term refers to a school of neo Marxist interdisciplinary theory dealing with the issue that traditional Marxist theory could not adequately explain the turbulent and unexpected development of capitalist societies and therefore seeking for an alternative path to social development. Early members: Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno and theorists: Walter Bejamin.
• Mass Culture Mass culture is the totally of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given especially the Western culture. It is influenced by mass media and the collection permeates the everyday lives of society.
• Popular Culture This term was coined in the 19th century to refer to the education and general culturedness of the lower classes. The current meaning the production of culture for mass consumption is established by the end of WWII.
• Noeme The overall project of Barthe’s Camera Lucida is to determine a new mode of observation and, ultimately, a new consciousness by way of Photography. His efforts aim to fashion an altogether customized framework—one that is distinct from already-determined accounts of images and representation—in which one can ‘classify’ photography, so as to get at its essence, or noeme. This new punctum which is no longer of form, but of intensity, in Time, the lacerating emphasis on the noeme (“that-has-been”), its pure representation.
• Photographic Truth Arguments for and against the idea that photographs are objective renderings of the real world that provide unbiased truth: some advocates held that cameras render the world in a perspective that is detached from a subjective, particular human viewpoint because the conventions of the image are for the most part built into the apparatus. Others emphasize the role of the photographer in the subjective process of choosing, composing, lighting, and framing scenes. These discussions have taken new intensity with the introduction of digital media processes.
• Signifier The word, image or object within a sign that conveys meaning. In advertisement for sport shoes, an inner-city basketball court is  a signifier of authenticity, skill, coolness. The relationship of a signifier and asignified together froms a sign.
• Signified The mental concept of the referent, which together with the signifier (object/image/word) makes the sign. The signified is the concept, the meaning, the thing indicated by the signifier. It need not be a 'real object' but is some referent to which the signifier refers. The thing signified is created in the perceiver and is internal to them. Whilst we share concepts, we do so via signifiers. Whilst the signifier is more stable, the signified varies between people and contexts. The signified does stabilize with habit, as the signifier cues thoughts and images.
• Gaze The term gaze means a looking long and intently or the act of looking. Humans can gaze on objects places or one another with affection, awe, wonder or fascination. The concept gaze has been used in specific ways by visual theorists to emphasize the embeddedness of the gaze of the individual viewer in a social and contextual field of looks, objects and other sensory information.
• Modernity Term used by scholars to refer to the historical, cultural, political and economic conditions related to the Enlightenment especially the rise of the industrial society and scientific rationalism and to the idea of controlling nature through technology, science and rationalism. Associated with the belief that industrialization, human technological intervention in nature, mass democracy and the introduction of a market economy are the hallmarks (Kennzeichen) of social progress.
• Discourse Traditionally used to describe passages of writing or speech, Foucault applied the term to express a group of statements that provide a means of talking about a particular topic at a particular historical moment. People could talk about broad social domains such as  law, medicine, criminality or technology that define particular forms of knowledge and change from any given time period ad social context to another.
• Episteme An episteme is an accepted dominant mode of acquiring and organizing knowledge in a given period of history. Each period of history has a different episteme sine it is the predominant way of ordering things and representing knowledge. Nevertheless, later epistemes are not necessarily beter or more advanced epistemes.
• Camera Obscura   The camera Obscura is a simple device that is based on the phenomenon that light rays bouncing off a well-lit object or scene, when passed into a darkened chamber through a tiny hole, create an inverted projection which can be seen on a surface inside the chamber. Although the camera obscura’s influence had a long history in the nineteenth century it was transformed from being a metaphor for truth to being a metaphor for those aspects of society that conceal or invert (as the camera obscura does to light) the truth.  
• Consumer’s republic Lizabeth Cohen defines this republic as an economic and cultural context in which the highest social values are equated with the promises of consumerism so that the consumerism is understood by citizens to be the primary avenue to achieving freedom, democracy and equality. This results in more social inequality along racial lines, a decrease of voter participation and increased social and political segmentation.

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