Johan Fornäs

The crucial in between : The centrality of mediation in cultural studies

This essay argues against trends in cultural studies to avoid textuality and mediation in favour of a presumably direct access to reality, materiality or lived experience. Grand gestures of stepping out of modern thinking in toto might be rhetorically effective, but turn out to be expressions of a critical self-reflexivity on the productive contradictions within modernity. The centrality of the concept of mediation is defended in two opposite directions. Against reductionisms of absence that reify and totalize textual structures, communication is understood as a dialectic tension between subjects, texts and contexts. Against reductionisms of presence or immediacy, textual interpretations provide necessary mediations for all experience. Problematic formulations by Lawrence Grossberg and others are discussed, where material relations or histories and ethnographies of lived experience are believed to render textual interpretations superfluous. On the basis of Paul Ricoeurs hermeneutics, a communicative model for culture and cultural studies is outlined.

Three tasks for mediatization research: contributions to an open agenda:

Based on the interdisciplinary experience of a Swedish research committee, this article discusses critical conceptual issues raised by the current debate on mediatization – a concept that holds great potential to constitute a space for synthesized understandings of media-related social transformations. In contrast to other, more metaphorical constructions, mediatization can be studied empirically in systematic ways through various sub-processes that together provide a complex picture of how culture and everyday life evolve in times of media saturation. The first part of this article argues that mediatization researchers have sometimes formulated too grand claims as to mediatization’s status as a unitary approach, a meta-theory or a paradigm. Such claims have led to problematic confusions around the concept and should be abandoned in favour of a more open agenda. In line with such a call for openness, the second part of the article introduces historicity, specificity and measurability as three transdisciplinary and transparadigmatic tasks for the contemporary mediatization research agenda.

Bridging gaps : ten crosscurrents in media studies

Once upon a time, it was popular to declare war between opposing camps in media studies. The struggle between “critical theory” and “mass communications” or later between “cultural studies” and ...

Mediated identity formation : Current trends in research and society

Abstract This paper aims to overview the current processes and challenges that relate to how media developments infl uence – and are influenced by – the ways in which personal and collective identities are formed in contemporary societies. First, it discusses ways to approach and define the concept of identity from a media perspective. A discussion of how identity formation issues links to the concept of new media literacies forms a transition to three sections that in turn analyse the social trends, the policy trends and the scientific trends that may be discerned in this area. The final section first summarises key research questions and then offers some more concrete ingredients for identifying possible instruments of a new research agenda.

Continents of cultural studies – unite in diversity! Comparing Asian and European experiences

Continents of cultural studies – unite in diversity! Comparing Asian and European experiences

Exclusion, Polarization, Hybridization, Assimilation: Otherness and Modernity in the Swedish Jazz Age

The introduction of jazz in Sweden fed into discourses renegotiating modern forms of identity in welfare society. In this new Jazz Age, music became an arena for reformulating norms of age, class, ethnicity, and gender differences. This article presents an intersectional and inter-medial study of songs, films and print sources with such topics. The new jazz idiom was linked to enticing and horrifying forms of otherness. Four basic positions are highlighted in the successive integration of both jazz and identities, from separation to fusion: demonizing exclusion, primitivist polarization, diversifying hybridization and normalizing assimilation.

Intermedial Passages in Time and Space

This paper discusses spatial, temporal and relational aspects of mediated communication. It is based on experiences from the Swedish media ethnographic Passages project, where an interdisciplinary ...

In Garageland: Rock, Youth, and Modernity.

Seeking to understand youth culture through its visual and musical expression, In Garageland presents a pioneering ethnographic study of rock bands and their fans. Topics include class as well as sexual conflicts; mainstream and deviant subcultures, and the complex social, psychological and ethical relationships which exist within youth culture. In Garageland develops the notion of youth culture research as a way of mirroring our grown-up identities and of staking out the limits of late modern culture in general.

The Aesthetic Concept of Culture as Art

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the anthropological concept of culture was opposed to the “aesthetic” notion of culture as arts and artistic creativity. The two have starkly contrasting implications and tend to create confusing contradictions if combined in the same discourse. Culture in the aesthetic sense is usually implied by terms like cultural policy, cultural work or the cultural sector, and is often applied in institutional settings. It invites tensions between high and low taste, contrasting fine arts to popular culture and everyday aesthetics. It is also often opposed to the economy; for instance, when cultural and economic capital are discussed.

Introduction: Which Culture?

The first chapter highlights the confusing plurality of meanings attached to the notion of culture. While it is used in increasingly many contexts, giving rise to the idea of an ongoing ‘culturalisation’, a range of new materialists and antihermeneutic posthumanists have sought to undermine the centrality of culture, meaning, interpretation and mediation. The book structure is explained: Chapters 2– 5 in Part I summarising the main concepts of culture, presenting their meanings, uses and limitations; Chapters 6– 8 in Part II scrutinising the contestations in structuralism, science and technology studies and media archaeology; and Chapters 9– 11 in Part III reconstructing sustainable foundations for a ‘post-antihermeneutic’ concept of culture, defending the idea of meaning-making practices of communication and mediation, while attentively learning from the critiques.