Aclara's SGM1400 SMETS2 smart electricity meter, developed specifically to support large-scale smart meter deployment in the UK's national smart meter rollout program, received Commercial Product Assurance (CPA) certification by the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) in September 2017. Last April, Smart gas meters provided by FLONIDAN, Aclara's strategic partner for the SMETS2 rollout, also were granted CPA certification, meaning that both smart electricity and gas meters provided by Aclara can be deployed immediately in the National Grid Smart implementation.
What is a text? Where are its textual boundaries? How do we deal with its readers or subjective forms in and of the text?
In reading a text, how do we avoid giving an evaluative reading or objective study? How do we examine a literary text from a "cultural" perspective?
There are three main models of cultural studies research: production-based studies, text-based cultural studies, and studies of lived cultures. It may be more transformative to rethink each moment in light of the others, importing objects and methods usually developed in relation to one moment into the next.
circuit of culture = circuit of capital and its expanded reproduction and a circuit of the production and circulation of subjective forms.
I. Definitions: p. 78 "Actually it is not definition or codification that we need but pointers to further transformations. "
the importance of critique -- p. 76 "The critique of economism has been the continuous thread through the whole 'crisis of marxism'; the critique of gender; critique of scientism
2. culture involves power and helps to produce asymmetries in the abilities of individuals and social groups to define their needs.
3. culture is neither an autonomous nor an externally determined field, but a site of social differences and struggles.
Consciousness for Marx -- embraced the notion of a consciousness of self and an active mental and moral self-production.
Subjectivity includes the possibility that . . . some elements or impulses are subjectively active--they move us--without being consciously known
the stress on forms: p. 81 ". . . the structured character of the forms we inhabit subjectively: langauge, signs, ideologies, discourses, myths. [Structuralist insights] have pointed to reguliariteis and principles of organization. . . " .
1. we need to look at forms of subjectivity from the point of view of their pressures or tendencies, esp. their contradictory sides.
2. we need histories of the forms of subjectivity where we can see how tendencies are modified by other definitions.
pp. 85-86 Three things occurred in the process of public-ation. 1. the car [commodity] (and its texts) became public in the obvious sense: it acquired if not a universal at least a more general significance. 2. at the level of meaning, publication involved abstraction. 3. it was subjected to a process of public evaluation.
p. 86 If the first set of methods are usually derived from sociological, anthropological or social-historical roots, the second set owe most to literary criticism, and especially the traditions of literary modernism and linguistic formalism.
Private forms, not necessarily "private" -- "They may also be shared, communal and social in ways that public forms are not." (e.g. Gossip as a private form, but also with discursive forms. TV programme and its separate and abstracted form. <--> "Another Great Day"
The public and private forms of cluture are not sealed against each other. There is a real circulation of forms. Cultural production often involves public-ation, the making public of private forms. On the other side, public texts are consumed or read in private.
Limitations: 1. economism: tendency to neglect what is specific to cultural production in this model. Cultural production is assimilated to the model of capitalist production in this model. 2. productivism: "production determines all"; that conditions of origins exercise a profound influence on the nature of the product. --> premature (e.g. Adorno & Benjamin's ideas of epic theatre)
p. 93 A more sensible approach: 1. grant independence and particularity to a distinct production moment--and to do the same for other moments. 2. consumption is also part of production (the text as produced vs. the text as read)
the importance of being "formal": literary forms are also social categories or subjective forms. pp. 95-96
post-post-structuralist account of subjectivity -- 1. accepting structuralist insights as a statement of the problem; 2. taking seriously . . . a discursive self-production of subjects, esp. in the form of histories and memories. p. 104
to grasp the more concrete and more private moments of cultural circulation. 1. detail, recompose and represent complex ensembles of discursive and non-discursive features. 2. social inquiry of those which do not apprear in public sphere.
p. 106 its lack: attention to the means of signification as a specific cultural determination. The virtue of abstraction are eschewed. .
p. 108 The moments, though separable, are not in fact discreet, therefore we need to trace what Marx would have called 'the inner connections' and 'real identities' between them.
e.g. to look for the signs of production process in a text: this is one useful way of transforming the very unproductive concern with 'bias' that still dominated discussion of 'factual' media.
to read texts as forms of representation; . . .The first object, that which is represented in the text, is not an objective event or fact, but has already been given meaings in some other social practice.
the formal reading of a text has to be as open or as multi-layered as possible, identifying preferred positions or frameworks certainly, but also alternative readings and subordinated frameworks, even if these can only be discerned as fragments, or as contradictions in the dominant forms.