Introduction

Welcome to "The Practice Blog." This blog is being created for use in a humanities course titled Introduction to Cultural Studies, which I will be teaching starting in January 2009 at Spokane Falls Community College in Spokane, WA. For now, though, the purpose of the blog is to practice--to learn the ins and outs of blogging and figure out how the various tools work.

As an intellectual field, cultural studies has been defined in a variety of ways--there's not really a single, consensus definition. For the purposes of the SFCC class, however, and for the purposes of this blog, the following definition will do just fine: cultural studies is the use of tools drawn from traditional fields of inquiry such as art, philosophy, and literature to analyze any and all aspects of culture.

Cultural studies, then, builds on an insight associated with Raymond Williams, who argued that "culture," properly considered, should not be seen as only referring to "high" culture. In other words, a traditional view of "culture" might say that the term should be reserved only for the very best of what a society produces: the most exalted poetry, music, and art. Classical music would count, but not pop music. A painting by Matisse would count as culture, but an image created to advertise potato chiops certainly would not.

In contrast, students of cultural studies assume that anything that can be analyzed should be analyzed. The purpose of analysis, according to this way of thinking, is not to separate "high" and "low" culture, so that we can immerse ourself in the good (or tasteful) and avoid the bad (or tasteless). The purpose, instead, is to understand both, including trying to understand the logic by which one type of cultural product is considered good and another, bad.

Although it is not limited to popular culture, much scholary work in cultural studies has been devoted to the analysis of artifacts that more traditionally-minded critics would not touch: movies (including, or especially, popular movies), advertising, toys, etc. We are attempting to understand how our society defines itself, and we assume that understanding the products of our culture (emphatically including popular-culture artifacts) offers a useful window. Perhaps understanding its products is the same thing as understanding the culture.

It would be legitimate to object that, if the humanities turn their attention to popular culture, then "elite" culture (for lack of a better word)--certain types of poetry, music, and painting that aren't necessarily geared toward popular tastes--will be endangered. How can poetry survive without a critical apparatus devoted to it? That sort of question will probably be considered from time to time on this blog. However, in the end the best way to defend popular culture is by pointing to its results: if this field of inquiry produces intelligent, incisive analysis (regardless of the object of this analysis), then it is presumably worthwhile. I think there are lots of really good examples of exemplary scholarship in cultural studies, some of which also serve the purpose of refining our understanding of traditional "high-culture" art works; yet this blog's main purpose is not to catalogue those examples. Rather, it is to explore the potential of cultural studies by practicing precise, observant description and sustained, thoughtful analysis of all kinds of cultural artifacts.