a glossary of cultural theory

[...]... spiritual aura to it This, said Adorno, ignored the internal, dialectical juxtaposition within autonomous art of both magical aura and a contrary 'mark of freedom' (1992: 52) The AESTHETIC and cultural status of original works of art remains a matter of debate In recent times, certainly, original works of art, especially paintings, have risen enormously in commercial VALUE (see Bourdieu 1984): thus, in a. .. Benjamin's contemporary, and a leading figure of the School of Social Research with which Benjamin was associated, shared an interest in technology and art but disagreed about the potential of the commercial arts of mass reproduction In a direct reply to Benjamin's argument, he defended the AUTONOMY of art and was critical of Benjamin's attribution exclusively of the 'bourgeois' attributes of a magical... more of a hindrance than a help to cultural analysis Raymond Williams, for example, argues that the terms 'base' and 'superstructure' are inherently limited by their misleading spatial metaphor and by their effective REIFICATION and separation of what are in reality dynamic, contradictory and closely linked aspects of society 'What is fundamentally lacking', Williams contends, ' is any adequate recognition... SIMULATION Avant-garde A term used to refer in French to the military corps sent ahead of the main body of an army (the 'vanguard') and adopted, by analogy, to describe experimental movements in the arts In particular, the avant-garde has tended to mean the so-called 'historical' avant-garde of the early decades of the twentieth century; many of which announced themselves provocatively as new movements... importance as a 'gesture of selflegitimation' (1966: 290) she saw this in a broader context 'Notes on camp' and other essays in the collection in which it appeared, Against Interpretation (1966), was part of Sontag's polemic against the liberal humanist defence of modernism and an associated hierarchy of high, middle-brow and MASS art on the part of a contemporary generation of New York INTELLECTUALS... opening' (a = without; poria = gate) In Classical and Renaissance handbooks of rhetoric 'aporia' is a figure of speech naming a state of doubt or a speaker's uncertainty about how to proceed with an argument A celebrated example would be Hamlet's 'to be or not to be' speech The term has been revived in poststructuralist thought to similarly name a paradox or moment of self-contradiction that cannot be... re-articulation In structural linguistics, language is said to have a 'double articulation', comprising sound and thought or ideas Thus Ferdinand de Saussure writes of language as 'the domain of articulations Each linguistic term is a member, an articulus in which an idea is fixed in a sound and a sound becomes the sign of an idea' (1966: 120) It is on the basis of this arbitrary, or conventional, relation... World Of REPRESENTATION, and in the development of non-essentialist notions of IDENTITY Here, too, in an articulation of academic discourses that marks the field itself, theory and analysis have drawn upon a variety of concepts - DIFFERENCE, DIASPORA, HYBRIDITY developed in FEMINISM, POSTSTRUCTURALISM and POSTCOLONIALISM Thus Pratibha Parma in a response to Hall's call for a 'politics of articulation'... as 'allegorical transcoding' As this suggests, Jameson seeks to read cultural texts - from literature, photography, video and cinema, avant-garde installation and architecture as allegorical emblems of broader political and economic conditions The world system of late capitalism is so complex, comments Jameson, that it can only be mapped and modelled, and therefore known, indirectly, 'by way of a simpler... of Rama and Sita Folk tales, fables and nursery rhymes can also in this sense be allegories and often carry a moral lesson Allegory is therefore a way of encoding a broad worldview or complex MESSAGE in a more focused, accessible and entertaining narrative form Often, from medieval morality plays to modern times, POPULAR GENRE forms have been employed to this end - though it would be a mistake to ascribe . but again they are not identical. What we might say is that there is &apos ;a Cultural Studies approach': an understanding of literary texts, of the media and communications. such as Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and Stuart Hall. As described by Lawrence Grossberg, Hall offers, &apos ;a non-essentialist theory of agency'. He proposes &apos ;a fragmented, . or as an extension of its literal meaning, as, for example, in the stories of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden or of Rama and Sita. Folk tales, fables and nursery rhymes can