Definitions for Discussion
Often when dealing with philosophy, rhetoric, and theory, the terms we use aren’t universally understood across disciplines. Their meaning(s) is (are) entwined with their history. Therefore, dictionary definitions are often inadequate to grasp the meaning of a term fully. The definitions below are to guide you in ways of thinking about culture as opposed to regurgitating in casual conversation.
- Critical Theory: [defintion not in the reading] often refered to as “theory,” an umbrella term for the many analyses of culture; examining society and culture and their products to understand how culture mediates a society’s ideology. Uncovering the ideology of a culture.
- Critical Rhetoric: this perspective is in contradiction to an assumed universalist sense of reason in the formation of a discursively constructed reality. “The perspective is useful both for the political speaker, as heuristic in composing discourse, and for the rhetorical critic or audience member responding to that discourse” (Sloane, Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, p. 619). Traditional rhetoric (and all speech acts) persuades if both sender and receiver agree upon logic and reason–they’re universal. Critical rhetoric recognizes contexts and situations.
- Late welfare-state capitalism: a term for a late and post-industrial economy where businesses provide “welfare” type benefits (retirement, health care, insurance, etc.) to employees.
Jürgen Habermas
- Public sphere: not the government, not a crowd, not the press (per se) but where public opinion is formed and (in theory) all citizens may contribute and be informed by this sphere.
- p. 51: “Today, newspapers and magazines, radio and television are the media of the public sphere.”
- p. 50: “…public opinion can by definition come into existence only when a reasoning public is presupposed.”
- p. 53: “…the newspaper publisher…changed from a vendor of recent news to a dealer in public opinion.”
- p. 54 (special interests): “The public sphere, which must now mediate [special interest] demands, becomes a field for the competition of interests.”
- p.55 (paraphrase): publicity is not an invitation for critical debate on a subject; instead, it’s to get people behind an issue.
Fraser, Nancy. “What’s Critical about Critical theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender?” (1991)
- Marx’s definition derived from his letter to Arnold Ruge: “Critical Theory [is] ‘the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age’” (p. 253). {Note: the online translation is different–scroll to the very bottom.}
- “A critical theory…frames its research in the light of contemporary social movements with which it has partisan though not uncritical identification” (p. 253).
- Material reproduction: “societies must reproduce themselves materially; they must successfully regulate the metabolic exchange of groups of biological individuals with a nonhuman, physical environment and with other social systems” (p. 254).
- Symbolic reproduction: “societies must reproduce themselves symbolically; they must maintain and transmit t new members the linguistically elaborated norms and patterns of interpretation that are constitutive of social identities” (p. 254)
- Childrearing falls outside of Habermas’ social-theoretical framework: “childrearing in not per se symbolic reproduction activity; it is equally and at the same time material reproduction activity. It is a ‘dual-aspect’ activity” (p. 255).
- Socially integrated action contexts: “…are those in which different agents coordinate their actions with one another by means of an explicit or implicit intersubjective consensus about norms, values, and ends” (p. 255).
- System-integrated action contexts: “…are those in which the actions of different agents are coordinated by the functional interlacing of unintended consequences, while each individual action is determined by self-interested, utility-maximizing calculations in the “media” of money and power” (p. 255-256).
- Capitalist “exchanges occur against a horizon of intersubjectively shared meanings and norms” (p. 256).
- To Fraser, the capitalist context is not free of ideology (although, really, nothing is non-ideological) because it is maintained by cultural assumptions and social practices–there is a marketplace that requires participant acceptance. Ask yourself, “Why does the latest HDTV cost more than the previous HDTV model (I don’t mean manufacturer), which cost as much as the latest model a few months ago?”
Public and Private Spheres
- Private sphere: “the nuclear family” (p. 257).
- Public sphere: “the space of political deliberation” (p.257).
- Habermas separates family from economy (p. 257).
- Fraser’s main argument: “[Habermas] fails to focalize the fact that in both spheres women are subordinate to men” (p. 257).
- Family units are sites of coercion and male dominated (p. 257).
- Normatively secured forms of socially integrated action: “…are actions on the basis of a conventional, prereflective, taken-for-granted consensus about values and ends, consensus rooted in the precritical internalization of cultural tradition” (p. 258).
- Communicatively secured forms of socially integrated action: “…are actions coordinated by explicit, reflectively achived consensus, consensus reached by unconstrained discussion under conditions of freedom, equality, and fairness” (p. 258).
- Fraser’s linchpin of modern women’s subordination: “the separation of the official economic sphere from the domestic sphere and the enclaving of childrearing from the rest of social labor (p. 259).
Patriarchy or just Androcentric Bias Pervades Capitalism
Fraser is critiquing Habermas’ social-framework theory not because she thinks he’s dead wrong but because it doesn’t allow for a feminist-centered perspective, which would change the capitialist system. Habermas is socialist-leaning, and Fraser seems to be also. This article is not a simple “for” or “against” discussion. Fraser is pointing out that male domination is so entrench in the capitalist system that any critique must be able to confront Patriarchy. She isn’t explicitly advocating the solution; instead, she’s divising a way to approach a feminist conscious critique of capitalism and the superstructures built up in support of the system.
Her point is that gender discussions need to be a part of any critique in order to uncover “the evil of dominance and subordination” (p. 273) intrinsic to both the public and private spheres.
- While one could simply belabor the point that capitalism rules because capitalism rules, that would be utterly unproductive. The point of our inquiry should be to recognize the tenets of a system under which we live.
- What is the division of labor? Are the male jobs and female jobs?
- What is a goal of Fraser repeatedly mentioning that childrearing is unpaid?
- What are the ways families socialize their members into the capitalist system?
- What does Fraser mean when she claims that “work[ers] are compensated by enhanced commodity consumption” and “there is a major decline in the importance of the citizen role as journalism becomes mass media, political parties are bureaucratized, and participation is reduced to occasional voting” (p. 265).
- What are some attributes of capitalism, especially gendered ones, that pervade the media? In other words, because the media is a product of the culture from which it comes, what marks it as capitalist?
- Is “decolonization”–removing the systemic biases from capitalism–possible?
- How does the media reinforce, thwart, or ignore the sytemic bias of capitalism?
Thomas Jefferson et. al.
- People should be able to govern based on the consent of those governed (in fact, they are guaranteed this right by nature).
- After the preamble: notice the listing of abuses. There aren’t heavy details, but there are many abuses the writers point to for why the colonies ought to separate from Britain.
- In essence, the listing is a group of sound bites that can be used to gather support for rebellion.
- The Natives: notice the one group (besides the British) that the writers “call out” as particularly aggressive. They seem like…
Our Public Sphere
What is our public sphere? In other words, where is public opinion formed and what mediates that communication? This is a perfect time to consider our class’s definition of rhetoric: how meaning is communicated through discourse, texts, media, etc.
But isn’t reality reality?
Because this course is a theoretical exploration of how we can locate a society’s values by “reading” its technologies, we ought to think about what those values are. This page asks you to think about American values. The goal of this next exercise is to identify values that we might be able to “read” technologies from American society.
Time permitting, we’ll look at some other new media examples–Rihanna’s and her fans:
- What did you notice about Rihanna’s tributes (or other tributes to videos/celebrities) on YouTube and amateur videos?
- Why would someone make a video of themselves and put it on YouTube?
- What does it say about our culture that there are many “tributes” like the one we saw in class online?
- How does the editing of the video “Umbrella” affect our perception of the narrative?
- What do the You Tube “tributes” say about New Media?
Next Class Readings
I’m giving you tomorrow and the next day off. On Monday (7/8), we’ll be looking at the world through a Marxist lens. Please preview Monday’s page in order to help guide your reading of the next two articles–Raymond Williams and Marx & Engels. Although this is a reductive way to think about Marxist critiques, we’re just being introduced to ideas about Marxism. Instead of discussing the attributes of Marxism in full detail (if such a discussion is even possible), we’ll be using Marixst theory to analyze the cultures from where our New Media texts come. Remember, all texts (like technologies) are cultural products.
Try to resist the temptation to read against these readings because you’re immersed in a culture that’s vehemently anti-Marx, anti-communism, and anti-socialism. We aren’t reading to debate which system is best; instead, we’re reading these to think further about what give power to beliefs about our “system.”
Don’t forget: Start reading Malpas’s The Postmodern.
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