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Communication and Cultural Studies
Course Description
This course will focus on the interrelated areas of communication theory and
cultural studies with a specific emphasis on the influence of Roman
Jakobson's formulation of the model of communication and its functions on
the analysis of decoding practices (the full range of which span aberrant to
hegemonic) in cultural studies. The study of decoding practices is at the
heart of cultural studies. I will emphasize the Birmingham school tradition
as it is represented through the significant contributions of Stuart Hall
and Dick Hebdige, among others, but also include reflections on the work of
John Fiske and John Hartley in which Jakobson's work was used to flag a move
beyond content analysis in studies of television. The communication
component of this course will limit itself to questions concerning
cybernetic and poetic models with attention resting on their critique by
Jean Baudrillard and their semiotic complexification by Umberto Eco. The
more general goal of the course is to investigate how models of
communication have served cultural studies in its diverse theoretical and
political (Gramscian) expressions of decoding practices in the now familiar
process of sub-cultural creativity involving
borrowing-redefinition-relocation. This will be brought into contemporary
focus through issues around the production of locality in the context of
studies of globalization. The cybernetic model serves both as background to
modelling communication as such and introduces questions around the
conditions required for successfully encoding and decoding technical as
opposed to semantic signals and signs, but also provides a context in which
I will suggest that cultural studies has, like cybernetics, something of a
military flavour at or near its origins, and that this persists today in the
tactical countermeasures of culture jammers and the new Situationists of
alternative youth culture.
This course will be of interest to students of communication theory and
cultural studies as well as cultural sociologists. It will involve detailed
commentaries on and expositions of key texts in the field that are widely
available either in Readers devoted to the themes or in original editions.
These lectures are based on a seminar offered in the Department of Sociology
at Lakehead University
www.lakeheadu.ca/~socwww/genosko.html in the fall of 1999 and
they complement my existing series of eight cyber lectures on "McLuhan,
Baudrillard and Cultural Theory," recently published as McLuhan and
Baudrillard: The Masters of Implosion (Routledge 1999;
www.routledge.com). All those interested in following the course
may contact me for further details, supplementary materials and conditions:
genosko@mist.lakeheadu.ca
Course Outline
Lecture 1. Overview/The Mathematical Model Revisited
Lecture 2. Roman Jakobson and the Primacy of the Poetic
Lectures 3 and 4. Oblique Strategies and Counter-Hegemonic Struggles:
Decoding in the Birmingham Tradition
Lecture 5. Message as Text: Umberto Eco's Model of Communication
Lecture 6. The Logic of Diversions: Soft Resistance by Manufactured
Constituencies of Decoders in Cultural Studies (Text-Based Case Studies)
Lecture 7. Communication without Reciprocity: Jean Baudrillard's Critique of
Jakobson
Lecture 8. Decode Yourself: Variations on the Theme of Anti-Commercial
Guerrilla Tactics
Send comments or questions to Gary Genosko: genosko@mist.lakeheadu.ca
copyright 2000, Gary Genosko.
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