GS302: Theories of Cultural Studies (Spring 2012)

Present: Jordyn, Scott, Louis, Alex

Scribe: Jordyn

The progression of relationships between people is something that has had a great impact on the creation and sculpting cultures and societies. There is always an innate power struggle occurring between members of a society, conflicting beliefs and ideologies, and the competition of knowledges. This can be held true and applied to subcultures and small groups as well, it can even be applied when looking at the progression of our cafe discussion group.

We started out going to our meetings and being very quiet, pensive, and unwilling to compete with each others ideas, we no longer have a relationship like this with one another. Our latest meetings, our last meeting in particular, is what led us to look at this process of “progression” that our group has undergone. Historicists argue that progression is a good and healthy action for societies, it helps people move forward and allows us to see how things really were in the past. Through this lens, progression moves in a linear fashion and the present is always better than the past. When looking at our cafe discussion group, we can consider it a small society, using society in it’s simplest form; a group of people living together in an area. The progression and changes that occurred within our “society” were most certainly not in a linear fashion, they were created through struggles and material practices we consciously and strategically enacted in.

As the semester went on and we continued meeting we all became much more argumentative with each other to the point of bringing in a mediator, if you will, to assist on the meetings and keep us on track. There were arguments about whose idea for a blog was more intelligent, fit better with the theory we recently covered, and even things very off topic like the motivations for “to-do” lists. There was a clear power struggle that began to occur within our group, arguing for the sake of proving someone else wrong, to hear yourself triumph, and to win an intellectual battle. This dynamic occurred soon after we began doing things together outside of the cafe discussion, we extended our relationships in ways that made us more vulnerable to such struggles.