It is nearly impossible to define Cultural Studies in definite terms. It is difficult because the concept of Culture itself has been made ambiguous. The pendulum of the definition of Culture ranges from Matthew Arnold's idea of "perfecting what was best thought and said" on one extreme to Raymond Williams and the likes of poststructuralist who would love to define it as "everyday life as really lived by one and all, including common-men".
The second problem with Cultural Studies is its scope of study. As it aims to transcend all disciplines and breaks the difference between the high and the low, the elite and the popular culture, it encompasses almost everything under its umbrella. This makes it confusing and the student / teacher with lesser ability to dig deeper in the artefacts to connect it with the 'discourse', sometimes, fails Cultural Studies.
Thirdly, as Cultural Studies reads 'power' with critical insights, it makes the students / scholars 'politically incorrect'. This also makes it difficult for CS to survive in the academia where 'political correct' and 'right-wingers' are in majority.
However, it is but sure that the study of Cultural Studies in incomplete without the study of 'Power'. In addition, as in our times, 'Media' is the tool to control the perceptions and the subject, the Power makes extensive use of Media. All forms of media. Print, radio, TV, electronic, digital, social.
Moreever, the critique of Media studied under Cultural Studies gives an opportunity to provoke our thoughts to understand the how power makes use of media. Here we will see What is Power and how power makes use of media. Watching these videos may help us read power, understand media and thus make us truly educated person.
First of all, let us understand 'POWER':
This video help us understand where power comes from, how it is exercised and how can one read and write power.
Political Power & our sense of judgement:
Do politics make us irrational?
Can someone's political identity actually affect their ability to process information? The answer lies in a cognitive phenomenon known as partisanship. While identifying with social groups is an essential and healthy part of life, it can become a problem when the group's beliefs are at odds with reality. So how can we recognize and combat partisanship? Jay Van Bavel shares helpful strategies. [Directed by Patrick Smith, narrated by Addison Anderson].
Secondly,let us see what Noam Chomsky has to say about Mass Media. He gives “Five Filters.” 1. Media Ownership 2. Advertising 3. Media Elite 4. Flack 5. The Common Enemy
One must read these filters in detail to understand how power makes use of mass media to create the illusion of Democracy. Click here to read about it in details. Chomsky and Herman’s book offers a surgical analysis of the ways corporate mass media “manufactures consent” for a status quo the majority of people do not actually want. Yet for all of the recent agonizing over mass media failure and complicity, we don’t often hear references to Manufacturing Consent these days. This videos explains this - 'Manufacturing Consent'.
It seems that the media theory and criticism like Chomsky’s, or the work of Marshall McLuhan, Theodor Adorno, or Jean Baudrillard (all thought provoking critics of Culture), has fallen out of favor in a 140-character world. Never-the-less, we can understand our times in a better way with their cultural lenses. Well, if this interests you and if you are hungry to know more, watch this amazing debate between Michael Foucault and Noam Chomsky on 'Human Nature and Power' (1971):
In ’71, at the height of the Vietnam War, the American linguist and French historian/social theorist appeared on Dutch TV to debate a fundamental question: Is there such a thing as innate human nature? Or are we shaped by experiences and the power of cultural and social institutions around us?
40 years later, you can find the classic debate on YouTube. If you need subtitles, make sure you turn on the captions function at the bottom of the video. Thanks Open Culture for this.
Lastly, Cultural Studies makes one truly educated person as the students cultivate the habit of questioning one discipline with the findings of another discipline; as the student unlearn what specific disciplines taught, and more importantly, it it teaches controversies.
However, it is enriching to listen what Noam Chomsky thinks about truly educated person. Watch this video:
Here is the highlights of what he said in this video:
The core principle and requirement of a fulfilled human being is the ability to inquire and create constructively, independently, without external controls.
A true education opens a door to human intellectual freedom and creative autonomy.
It’s not important what we cover in the class; it’s important what you discover.
To be truly educated means to be resourceful, to be able to “formulate serious questions” and “question standard doctrine, if that’s appropriate”…. It means to “find your own way.
Thus to conclude, in this series of short lessons on Cultural Studies, it seems this is enough to understand Power, Media and what it is to be Truly Educated person.
Official Website: http://www.riversandtides.co.uk/
Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Timeis the most spiritually literate documentary. It won the Golden Gate Award Grand Prize for Best Documentary at the 2003 San Francisco International Film Festival[1].
Try to picture an art piece that cannot be put in a museum, purchased by wealthy collectors, or displayed in a corporate foyer or boardroom – because it disintegrates in less than a day, perhaps even within 20 seconds. Try to imagine executing artwork through the medium of iron oxide chalk, raw sheep’s wool, flower blossoms, leaves and grass, feathers, random sticks and stones, broken rocks, pieces of icicle, green iris blades and red berries, thorns, bracken, or handfuls of snow. Try to fathom the notion that an artist could a take stroll in the woods, along a riverbank, down a beach, and with no tools at all – no paint brushes, no sculptor’s chisels or knives, no canvases or pedestals or quarried granite or polished wood – manage to create unutterably beautiful art from the objects and materials he finds by chance.
Often it seems that contemporary art has become a largely academic exercise, with artists frantically carving out tiny niches of discrete subject matter or distinctive media in which to say something, show something faintly “original.” But for more than two decades, Scottish sculptor Andy Goldsworthy has quietly been blowing that notion to smithereens. He’s the visual art world’s equivalent of Italo Calvino, who celebrated the wide-open choices available to him as a writer of short stories and novels while others lamented the death of the novel. Goldsworthy calmly demonstrates over and over that the forms, styles, and media available to the artist are approximately infinite.
In the documentary by German filmmaker Thomas Riedelsheimer, we watch Goldsworthy build man-sized standing “eggs” of stacked slate on a beach between tides; place a 50-foot spiral “worm” of leaves sewn together with grass in a pond, whence it begins to wend its way down a mountain stream; gnaw at icicle shards in order to piece them into a looping snake that seems to pass repeatedly through a stone promontory like a fat crystal thread; construct an “igloo” of driftwood that is carried away by the incoming tide in a stately galactic whirl.
“Art for me is a form of nourishment,” he tells us. Goldsworthy seeks the “energy that is running through, flowing through the landscape.” Not to capture it, clearly, but to participate in it. He speaks slowly, carefully, and the viewer adjusts to his pace. Not a single abstract spiritual or philosophical term turns up – the sculptor employs direct and concrete words only – but the effect is like a 90-minute session with a Zen master showing us how to “be here, now.”On an icicle job, he notes that heat and melted water created his artistic medium, while the rising sun will destroy it: “the very thing that brought it to life, will bring about its death.” Flying to a commission in Nova Scotia, he says he hates the sensation of travel, and having to go straight to work without getting any time to get the feel of the new locale. Yet he does: “I’ve shook hands with the place . . . and begun.”As we watch the artist make “something from nothing,” usually something startling and gorgeous; as serendipity and the elements (sunshine, wind, water) contribute to the process; and even as pieces he has spent hours on collapse in a heap – one’s concept of what is possible, what constitutes art, becomes as fluid as Goldsworthy’s natural media. Initially the viewer automatically thinks, “oh, it fell apart,” then realizes it doesn’t matter. One feels disappointment a project did not meet one’s expectations, yet rejoices in a different, unforeseen result.
Having isolated pieces of a new environment and formed them into an unexpected artifact, then watched it dissipate back to its component parts in the larger setting, Goldsworthy says, “You feel as if you’ve touched the heart of the place. That’s a way of understanding. Seeing something that you never saw before, that was always there but you were blind to it.” As the tide carries his driftwood igloo out to sea, spinning it slowly and dismantling its structural unity, he remarks: “It feels as if it’s been taken off into another plane, another world. . . . It doesn’t feel at all like destruction.”
The long worm of strung-together leaves reminds the viewer of an emerald green water moccasin, of Chinese dragons, of other references near and far. Subtly, the filmmakers join in the spirit of Goldsworthy’s labor to see things anew. Occasionally the camera takes note of lovely sights and events not immediately related to the artist’s work at hand: a fluff ball walking across the surface of a river, or the subtle prismatic colors in a spray of water.Several times, Riedelsheimer wittily shows us a work in progress, or a piece of the whole, that we don’t understand; or understand in one way, only to see it in a very different light when the camera pulls back. For example, a shockingly bright red-orange liquid trickles down a rock face, plashes into a river, and fans out in skeins of “unnatural color” that we cannot help but associate with blood. (Macbeth’s classic lines come to mind: “this my hand will rather/The multitudinous seas incarnadine,/Making the green one red.”)You think: He’s using applied color! But no, even as Goldsworthy makes the blood reference explicit, you find he has not violated his unwritten law of “all natural ingredients.” He has painstakingly collected red iron ore stones from the river bottom and ground them to a powder, commenting that iron is what makes our blood red as well. When he mixes the powder with water and trickles it across rock or into the stream, the color is a shock: it seems so alien to the river, yet is deeply rooted in it.“I think the color is an expression of life. I am in continuous pursuit of the red. That something so dramatic, so intense, could at the same time be so hidden, underneath the skin of the earth.” A single red Japanese maple tree on a hill of green in Japan “looks like a wound on the mountain,” he says. We set much store by the solidity of stone, he goes on, yet it is only a step in a process that goes from stone to powder to liquid and back to stone. The “stability of stone” is actually a snapshot of fluid, liquid life in which everything, including human beings, participates.This artist’s work might seem utterly apolitical, yet Goldsworthy casually identifies political elements in his projects. At first, when the camera lingers on a Scottish farmer helping a ewe to birth several lambs, it seems a digression into local color. Then Goldsworthy talks about how difficult it is to get past the “wooliness” of sheep to their “dangerous and powerful” qualities: Their status as an economic gold mine denuded the forest landscape of Britain and led to violent labor disputes. While he speaks, he constructs a long, glowing white river of raw wool that gilds the stone walls near his home.(In a similarly subtle political statement, Paul Hawken, founder of the Smith & Hawken gardening chain, chose a Goldsworthy “horn of plenty” sewn from leaves for the cover of his book The Ecology of Commerce: a Declaration of Sustainability.)Not all Goldsworthy’s labor is solitary. “Rivers and Tides” shows us several collaborative projects: one at Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York where stone masons build outdoor walls to the artist’s specifications, and another in Digne,France where a crew helps him build an indoor clay wall designed to crack into eye-catching patterns as it dries.With the Storm King project, Riedelsheimer’s camera again starts in close, watching hands place individual stones. Then we get a look at part of the finished wall slaloming between trees. Finally a helicopter shot pulls us high for a breathtaking view of the running wall, which wends its way through forestland for hundreds of yards, and appears to plunge into a lake and out the other side!The documentary is not perfect, by any means. It doesn’t “build a case”; though there’s a lovely coherence and wit to the unveiling of each piece or project, the larger structure seems episodic and disconnected. A brief sequence with Goldsworthy’s wife and kids comes across as garish and out of place. While it’s useful to know he has a family, he himself seems nonplused by them, and having been introduced, one yearns to know how they fit into his life as a professional artist.
In the seventeenth year of the digital era, it sounds stupid to ask whether machines / computers can write poems or not. We face ever graver and frightening question. What if machines write better poems than humans?
What if human poems sounds mechanical and machine's, humane?
However, if you still have doubt about whether computers can write poems or not, give your 10 minutes to watch this video to change your perception. Oscar Schwartz has some very provoking questions:
Now, if you want to try some poems written by computer, click here: http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/Poem/
Type first line of your poem and a short poem will be generated by computer!
How easy it is to be a poet!
Such poems are known as Computer Poetry. Want to know more about it? Click here: http://botpoet.com/what-is-computer-poetry/
These days, there are interesting and unbelievable poems written by computer. If you think that computers cannot write poems like humans, check this. Take a test:
An amazing short film on a poem by W.H. Auden on the man who drew a line to divide India and Pakistan. An unpardonable act. The karma whose heavy price even today the innocent people are paying with their flesh and blood.
Partition - a poem by W. H. Auden
Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission, Having never set eyes on the land he was called to partition Between two peoples fanatically at odds, With their different diets and incompatible gods. "Time," they had briefed him in London, "is short. It's too late For mutual reconciliation or rational debate: The only solution now lies in separation. The Viceroy thinks, as you will see from his letter, That the less you are seen in his company the better, So we've arranged to provide you with other accommodation. We can give you four judges, two Moslem and two Hindu, To consult with, but the final decision must rest with you."
Shut up in a lonely mansion, with police night and day Patrolling the gardens to keep the assassins away, He got down to work, to the task of settling the fate Of millions. The maps at his disposal were out of date And the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect, But there was no time to check them, no time to inspect Contested areas. The weather was frightfully hot, And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot, But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided, A continent for better or worse divided.
The next day he sailed for England, where he could quickly forget The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not, Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.
It is advised to read the speech rather than listening it. Read it when you are free from hustle and bustle. Read when you are completely free from all preoccupations. Read slowly. Take pause in between . . . . and THINK!
The transcript of the speech in given in Hindi as well as in English below this video.
Thank you Gandhi Peace Foundation. I am conscious of the fact that this award has been created by the sweat of journalists. Receiving anything from my seniors in the profession is like bakshish to me. Its like having my prayers answered. We all revere Kuldip Nayyar sahab. Millions of people have read you. You have lit candles at those borders in whose name hatred and venom is spread every day. In fact, how many of us are even talking of love? I doubt whether people still think of love. We no longer start our mornings with the rising sun – instead, we begin our day by checking good morning messages on WhatsApp. It seems like soon the world will start believing that the sun rises on WhatsApp. Soon, we are going to prosecute Galileo once again and this time we will get to watch it via live telecast.
Anupam Mishra is not amongst us anymore. We have accepted this truth just like society seemed to have accepted his non-existence even during his lifetime. I wish I had received this award when he was around, perhaps even from him. Whenever I feel a fresh breeze or see a wave of fresh water, I remember Anupam Mishra. He has left us a language that can help save us a lot of things. For that, however, it is important that we clear our souls. The purity within us has been blotted by filth. We must attempt to refine our thoughts and our language, just like Anupam Mishra. We will not be able to stand up without brushing off the layers of dust that are covering us.
This is a phase of discovering possibilities. We are continuously on the lookout for new and remaining possibilities, and the people who continue to cherish and safeguard these new hopes and possibilities. However, these hopes and possibilities are now fading away. In the midst of this, our hopes seem to be growing lonely. How long can we survive – this question is bothering us all. But we have forgotten how to live meaningfully even for the time that we are around. In such a scenario, there is a need to rekindle our energies and passions. Hone your questions. Question the political groups you relied on. Those groups have broken our trust. Also question those in whom you do not have any faith. Our communication with other people in our society has completely broken down. Today’s society pins all its hopes on political parties to bring about change. The society now knows that it is only the politically powerful who can bring about pleasant or dangerous transformation. It is because of this that people do not step back from pinning hopes in political parties. People continue to take this risk. Political parties fail them every time, but the people still place their bets on them the next time.
Political parties have witnessed a constant decline as various members have left them to pursue other directions. These are people who no longer see politics as an instrument for bringing about social change. The absence of such people in political parties has led to a decline in the parties’ morality. There is a need to restructure and reshape political parties. Please set aside your inner contradictions. We’ve seen them enough for the past thirty-forty years. Leftists, Gandhians, Ambedkarites and Socialists – they have all left their mainstream political formations. With their departure, mainstream politics has lost its sense of alternative politics. Return to those parties and take over these organisations. Forget the past. Work hard for a new politics. It is a good time to recognise our helplessness and cowardice. These dark times are the right occasion for us to assess ourselves by being brutally honest.
I am being awarded for my journalism. It gives me immense pleasure to tell you that there is no crisis in journalism today, if you thought there was one. All the editors – from the capital city to those in small districts are very happy to be swept away by the ideological storm of a particular party. However much we criticise them, we also need to accept that they are extremely happy. It is only now that they feel accomplished as journalists. The media had made incessant efforts for the past fifty-sixty years to merge with political entities. Hotels, malls, mining leases and the different licenses they procured could not satiate their hunger. Their souls remained unfulfilled. Now, they have attained peace. Finally, the media’s dream of being a part of power politics has been fulfilled.
Indian media is currently state of ecstasy. There was a time when people spoke of finding a stairway to heaven; today they have found heaven on earth. The stairway is no longer needed. If you do not believe me, please go ahead and have a look at any newspaper or watch any news channel. You will be overwhelmed by the media’s love for and loyalty to one particular political agenda. Only when you appreciate the bliss they have attained after decades of desperation, will you take your pain less seriously. Never before have these decked-up anchors looked so handsome. Nor have the female anchors praising the government looked as beautiful, ever before. Journalists are also the government now.
If you intend to fight, fight the newspaper and television. Let go of your stubbornness to salvage journalism. Journalists themselves do not want to be saved! The few who are left can be evicted easily. How would the survival of any individual journalist help the situation? Organisations as a whole have been communalised. Journalism is spreading communalism in India. It is thirsty for blood. It will make the nation bleed one day. It may not appear to be very successful in promoting its agenda today, but we cannot ignore its efforts. Thus arises the need for us to deliberate upon this with anyone and everyone we come across. Newspapers and television channels have become branches of political parties. Anchors now wield more power in political parties than the general secretaries of these parties. Until one fights these new political formations, alternative political ideas cannot take shape. They have also managed to hegemonise the minds of people in such a manner that many now ask me why I question things. Those who throw ink are being appointed spokespersons and those who write with ink are only indulging in propaganda. Contemporary journalism is the contemporary propaganda.
But how can we overlook journalists who are making efforts to safeguard possibilities? While these possibilities will eventually fade, their legacy will empower us in the future. Whenever these journalists – tired of sycophancy or humbled by betrayal – wake up from their slumber, it is these cherished hopes and possibilities that will save them. That is why I insist that we cherish our hopes and possibilities. Refrain from seeing these times through a prism of hope or failure. We are on a railway-track where the giant engine is just before us and there is no way to run away or save ourselves. Neither hope nor failure is an option. It is time to throw yourself into work. We are running short of time and its pace is very fast.
Translated from the Hindi by Ikshula Arora. (https://thewire.in/117630/ravish-kumar-speech-journalism-kuldip-nayyar-award/)
