CounterTexts: Reading Culture

CounterTexts: Reading Culture identifies and analyzes the ideological coding of media representations as cultural signs that we learn through, about, and from. It engages how we participate in and actualize the performative ground of the culture industry. CounterTexts: Reading Culture will present various readings of cultural signs, objects and practices as means of countering the media focus on narrowing the subjective desire of citizens and consumers in an economy of intellectual and material self-fulfillment based on an empire of representations whose terms and values are to be worked out and actualized commercially at any and all costs. CounterTexts: Reading Culture will engage the following questions: what does a sign of culture teach and how? What are the sources and openings of its meanings and power? its pedagogy? How does it inform the subjectivity of culture and the living text of social practices? How can we engage the signs of culture? CounterTexts: Reading Culture aims to awake a critical consiousness; to enable a critical vocabulary and means for analyzing how we cultivate passion in relation to cultural signs, texts, and representations for the sake of finding satisfaction and pleasure in everyday life. But it will do so by looking at how meaning and desire is created in us and works through through the signs of culture we are exposed to through the texts and media.