Circuits of Culture/Consumption

The term circuits of culture refers to the argument that cultural meaning is produced through the articulation of a series of processes, stages, or moments in the biography of a given cultural artifact, which could be an object, commodity, or text. The specific processes discussed have varied since cultural theorists, notably Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson, first outlined circuit type models, but they have centered on the links between processes of production and consumption. In this, they reference the skeleton of commodity production outlined in Karl Marx's Grundrisse as well as in Capital. In Grundrisse Marx wrote,

It is this stress on the articulation of production and consumption as linked but distinctive moments that Hall drew on to develop his encoding/decoding model of communication in the 1970s. The encoding/decoding [Page 165]model was designed to challenge the linearity of traditional sender-message-receiver communications process models. The communications process, Hall suggested, could instead be thought of as a structure sustained through the articulation of distinct stages, which he defined initially as comprising production, circulation, distribution/consumption, and reproduction. Each of these moments is understood to be necessary to the circuit as a whole but no one moment can fully guarantee the next. Moments have their own specific forms and conditions of existence, and each has the capacity to break into, or interrupt, the circuit. Despite this recognition of the functional, formal distinction and relative autonomy of the stages, production in the encoding/decoding model retains from its Marxist heritage a privileged position. Consumption here is a “moment” of the predominant production process, and while the consumption of, in this instance, television messages, is not identical to their production, they are closely related.

Johnson's circuits of culture model retains many of the characteristics of Hall's earlier model, but here the emphasis shifts away from communication toward everyday social, cultural life. Reinforcing a growing commitment that cultural studies needed to concern itself not solely with the media and popular culture, Johnson remarked the need for all social practices, whatever their setting, to be understood as cultural. This call for an enlargement of the scope of cultural studies analyses, echoed by authors like Meaghan Morris, was grounded in the theoretical view that culture was best defined neither aesthetically nor anthropologically but symbolically. Thus, culture concerns those objects, texts, and practices that carry and construct meaning. Production, whether the setting is the economy, workplaces, commercial organizations, or markets, in this sense should be understood as cultural in the same way as consumption. Culture, and cultural meaning, is thus the outcome of processes whose various stages might be described diagrammatically, as a circuit comprising production, circulation, and consumption. Each box is a stage or moment in the circuit, each box is interdependent on the others, and they are all indispensable to the whole.

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