European Journal of Cultural Studies

This article draws on data gathered as part of a broader research project looking at the changing nature of children's television culture. In the light of public concerns about the shortcomings of children's 'natural' tastes in television, and broader academic arguments about the social functions of judgements of taste, the article considers whether it makes sense to talk about a distinctive 'children's taste culture' in relation to television. Through an analysis of children's discussions of television, the article identifies several criteria that children use to mark out what is distinctively 'for children', as compared with older age groups. However, it argues that these distinctions between 'adulthood' and 'childhood' are socially constructed; and that, in the increasingly competitive environment of contemporary media, age may be becoming a valuable symbolic commodity in its own right.

Study of the politics of popular culture has tended to focus on the familiar territory of censorship, propaganda and protest. Without wishing to deny the importance of these aspects of popular culture's politics, this article argues for a broader perspective, one that encompasses policy and aesthetics. It suggests not only that the recent interest in both aesthetics and policy is important to the politics of culture, but that the two need to be linked: that political values and arrangements shape aesthetic judgements and that aesthetic values inform policy decisions. This argument is developed through an analysis of recent debates about aesthetic judgement, focusing in particular on the work of Simon Frith.

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 Ricoeur's hermeneutics, a communicative model for culture and cultural studies is outlined.

In current intercultural advertising in Europe, languages are used not for their communicative function (what could be termed their utility value) nor any of the other more established functions of language in advertising communication, for example persuasion or hyperbole. Instead, it is their symbolic function that has come to have the greater value. Thus, it is unimportant whether the advertisee understands the foreign word in an advertisement, so long as it calls up the cultural stereotype of the country with which the language is associated. We have, therefore, in Marx's terms 'form without content'. Language in intercultural advertising has become fetished, imbued with value, existing as a thing on its own. In this article, the existence and functioning of language fetish in European advertising is explored. By examining a range of both pan-European advertisements and specifically intercultural advertisements, we can see how languages have become fetished with values based on deep-seated perceptions of the cultural identities of other European countries and regions.

Recently, there has emerged a new paradigm, informed by poststructuralist theory, for the appraisal of cosmetics. According to this approach, earlier critiques of cosmetics have been based on a mistaken premise that there exists a 'true' self independent of the masks one assumes when, in fact, the self is constituted by these very masks. Thus, in contrast to previous critics who proposed a return to the 'natural' body, these recent theorists advocate a cosmetics which openly declares its artificial nature. However, as will be argued in this paper, in their concern to dismantle 'essentialist' notions of the self, poststructuralist theorists have unwittingly fallen into the embrace of the cosmetics industry with their promotion of the notion of the self as masquerade. In our postmodern culture where the cult of appearances has become ubiquitous, the advocacy of a hedonistic experimentation with various guises is complicitous with contemporary capitalist consumer ideology.

Book reviews: Lynne Pearce and Gina Whisher (eds), Fatal Attractions: Re-scripting Romance in Contemporary Literature and Film (reviewed by Campbell and Harbord); Lori Landay, Madcaps, Screwballs, Conwomen: The Female Trickster in American Culture (reviewed by Jan Campbell and Janet Harbord); Kirsten Belgum, Popularizing the Nation: Audience, Representation and the Production of identity in Die Gartenlaube, 1853-1900 (reviewed by Erica Carter); Beverley Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable (reviewed by Sanna Ojajarvi); H. J. Stam (ed), The Body and Psychology (reviewed by Alkeline van Lenning); Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (eds), Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds or a Field Science (reviewed by Laura Huttunen); Deborah Cartmell, Trash Aesthetics, Popular Culture and its Audience (reviewed by Sofie Van Bauwel)