Critically define ‘popular culture’
Contrast ideas of ‘culture’ with ‘popular culture’ and ‘mass culture’ Loaded with Value judgements
Introduce Cultural Studies (emerged fro British scholarship) & Critical Theory (German Marxist)
Discuss culture as ideology
Interrogate the social function of popular culture
What is culture?
- ‘One of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’
- general process of intellectual, spiritual & aesthetic development of a particular society, at a particular time
- a particular way of life i.e. Subculture with certain attitudes and values
- works of intellectual and especially artistic significance’- A canon of really important literature eg Shakespeare - Who decides?
Reminder of the Marxist reading - materialistic, culture is part of the superstructure emerging from the base. Particular class or economic relations which form the super structure which includes culture. Refer to Marx quote
Culture could be a site of ideological conflict.
Raymond Williams (1983) Keywords -Pioneer of cultural studies in 20th C
4 definitions of ‘popular’ culture
- Well liked by many people - Quantitively measured eg Dr Who. Can be confusing definition.
- Inferior kinds of work - Lower than 'High' culture. Mass produced. "Kitsch" Aspire to be important. Someone makes a 'value judgment' a 'Taste maker' Who in history has acted as taste maker - the ruling class- A class judgement.
- Work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people Eg Judgements made by about Jack Petriano prints, a snobery, elitist work is high culture, work for the people is flawed
- Culture actually made by the people themselves eg grass roots, working class - Brass Bands from mining communities.
The one you side with depends on your political position.
EG Caspar David Friedrich (1809)‘Monk by the Sea
'high' culture reading The insignificence of men, transience of life Compared to Jenny mossison Popular culture. Both could make you contemplate life but why don't they?
v
Inferior or residual culture
Judgement on all stratas of society
Popular Press vs Quality Press - Aimed at Mass v Elite
Popular Cinema vs Art Cinema
Popular Entertainment vs Art Culture
Examples of popular culture as people's culture which we make class judgements about
Muriel of Bobby Sand - IRA prisoner/ starved himself/ Jeremy Deller & Alan Kane looked for examples of genuine popular culture around the country and exhibited in the Tate Gallery. Initial reaction is to laugh, however then question why you laugh as they look quite poor quality, why could we do better and why are we making these judgement. This is because we are coded to think a certain institutional way about what is good and bad.
Gerning competition
What happens when a popular culture enters into 'high' culture eg Graffiti started in Ghettos of Sth Brox has been translated into mainstream western culture such as Banksy where a wall has been knocked down then exhibited in a Art gallery.
Culture as opposed to Popular culture
In the late 19th C, a change in culture occurred in with Industrialisation and urbanisation. People are clearly separated as 'working class' then condensed in factories. There is a clear separation between the gentry and the working class in where they live in the city. This created a Cultural separation. The working class start to author their own culture eg piano and singing in pubs. Up to this point the ruling class defined Culture. This also occurred in politics, Chartism emerges where working class fought for the right to vote. A class consciousness, how to organise their society.
Cultural studies start to emerge One of the first books written about culture as a discipline.:
Matthew Arnold (1867) Culture & Anarchy
His definition: Culture is‘the best that has been thought & said in the world’
Study of perfection
Attained through disinterested reading, writing thinking
The pursuit of culture
Seeks ‘to minister the diseased spirit of our time’
Culture can minister the diseased spirit of our times. He is describing the 'anarchy' emerging working class culture which threaten the Elite classes. This pattern continues throughout the 20th century - attempts to legitimise the culture of the working classes which is mocked by the Upper classes.
Culture polices ‘the raw and uncultivated masses’
‘The working class… raw and half developed… long lain half hidden amidst it’s poverty and squalor… now issuing from it’s hiding place to assert an Englishmans heaven born privelige to do as he likes, and beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, breaking what it likes (1960, p.105)
Leavisism - F.R Leavis & Q.D. Leavis - Similar is an extension of Arnoldism.
Still forms a kind of repressed, common sense attitude to popular culture in this country.
For Leavis- C20th sees a cultural decline
Standardisation & levelling down of culture. When in feudal society we could just get on with 'our' culture.
‘Culture has always been in minority keeping’ There has always been an elite whose role is to preserve culture.
‘the minority, who had hitherto set the standard of taste without any serious challenge have experienced a ‘collapse of authority’
Collapse of traditional authority comes at the same time as mass democracy (anarchy)
Nostalgia for an era when the masses exhibited an unquestioning deference to (cultural)authority (Working class being deferential to the upper classes)
Popular culture offers addictive forms of distraction and compensation.Eg popular fiction, music halls, rise of working class
A form of snobbery which is still reflected today:
'Real rock' music dismissing X Factor.
Their are trying to defend their class position so they have an agenda and it is biased.
‘This form of compensation… is the very reverse of recreation, in that it tends, not to strengthen and refresh the addict for living, but to increase his unfitness by habitutaing him to weak evasions, to the refusal to face reality at all’ (Leavis & Thompson, 1977:100)
Conslusion- A threat from working class towards the Elite classes
Populr intil 60's until The Birmingham School energes. Dick Hebdige
Frankfurt School Critical theory - Marxist thinkers
Institute of Social Research, University of Frankfurt, 1923-33- Closed down by the Nazis relocated to New York
University of Columbia New York 1933-47
University of Frankfurt, 1949-
Studying popular Wrote about radio, TV, Films a rising popular culture and then in US arrived to a well developed popular culture. Promotion, advertising and consumer culture.
Five writers:
Theodore Adorno
Max Horkheimer
Herbert Marcuse
Leo Lowenthal
Walter Benjamin
They described what was happening in the Capitalist world. eg Hollywood and film houses almost produced in a factory like Fordism. The cultural artefacts are predictable and standardised.
Frankfurt School : Theodore Adorno & Max Horkheimer
Reinterpreted Marx, for the 20th century – era of “late capitalism”
Defined “The Culture Industry” :
2 main products – homogeneity & predictability
“All mass culture is identical” :
‘As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished or forgotten’. Mass cultural products can also dish out moral messages.
‘Movies and radio need no longer to pretend to be art. The truth, that they are just business, is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. ... The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry. ... The culture industry can pride itself on having energetically executed the previously clumsy transposition of art into the sphere of consumption, on making this a principle. ... film, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part ... all mass culture is identical.’
Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment,1944
The idea of art as been turned into a business and all art as gone. As we consume the mass culture ie TV shows and songs this can code us into thinking a certain way about the world in a one dimensional way. Reduces our capacity for free independent thought.
Frankfurt School : Herbert Marcuse
Popular Culture v Affirmative Culture
The irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers more or less pleasantly to the producers and, through the latter, to the whole. The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood. ... it becomes a way of life. It is a good way of life - much better than before - and as a good way of life, it militates against qualitative change. Thus emerges a pattern of one dimensional thought and behaviour in which ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe.
Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 1968
Attitudes from mass culture codes us to think one way and usually affirms the Status Quo, does not challenge it. Cements authority and depolitises.
(of affirmative culture): a realm of apparent unity and apparent freedom was constructed within culture in which the antagonistic relations of existence were supposed to be stabilized and pacified. Culture affirms and conceals the new conditions of social life.
Herbert Marcuse, Negations, 1968
- Cultural Commodities
- Negation = Depriving culture of “its great refusal” = Cultural Appropriation
ACTUALLY DEPOLITICISES THE WORKING CLASS
EG Hollyoaks - women in Education as students as primarily sexual objects. Che Guevara posters became neutralised into a symbol of 'cool' not of revolution. Big Brother and X Factor your salvation is not to form a political party but instead to be a celebrity.
Authentic Culture vs Mass Culture
Qualities of authentic culture
Real
European
Multi-Dimensional
Active Consumption
Individual creation
Imagination
Negation
AUTONOMOUS
[…]in our society, where the real distinctions between people are created by their role in the process of production, as workers, it is the products of their own work that are used, in the false categories invoked by advertising, to obscure the real structure of society by replacing class with the distinctions made by the consumption of goods.
Thus, instead of being identified by what they produce, people are made to identify themselves by what they consume. From this arises the false assumption that workers ‘with two cars and a colour TV’ are not part of the working class. We are made to feel that we can rise or fall in society through what we are able to buy, and this obscures the actual class basis which still underlies social position.
The fundamental differences in our society are class differences, but the use of manufactured goods as means of creating classes or groups forms an overlay on them.
Williamson (1978) ‘Decoding Advertisements’
Adorno ‘On Popular Music’ Particularly like writing about music.
STANDARDISATION - Same beats, instruments, does your thinking for you
PSEUDO-INDIVIDUALISATION
‘SOCIAL CEMENT’ - locked into your social position
PRODUCES PASSIVITY THROUGH ‘RHYTHMIC’ AND EMOTIONAL ‘ADJUSTMENT’ - reduces your capacity for free thought. Limited engagement. regulate behaviour Early dance music insistent rhythm are akin to the rhythm of the factory. Emotional escape does not encourage you to change your world. Joy Division - introspective, kill yourself.
If culture is mass produced becomes lost forever.
An idea that the 'real' culture hat has been lost that would make you 'think', independent from mass culture and systems.
Walter Benjamin - Slightly different take, more positive. EG Mona Lisa if can be reproduced - what happens to its value and cultural importance.
Previously have to queue up to see Mona Lisa at Louvre and you meet the work on the Galleries terms, Benjamin says reproduced objects detaches the reproduce object from the Galleries and taste makers context into your own context, in your home. Liquidates cultural traditions. Challenge meaning of the original. Allowed democratically in and challenging high culture. The Aura starts to reduce. An opportunity in and amongst the mass production allows you to define your own meaning.
‘The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction’
1936
‘One might generalise by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own situation, it reactivates the objects produced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition… Their most powerful agent is film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage’
Arnoldist approach was popular until the 60's until The Birmingham School emerged - Dick Hebdige - The first to seriously look at culture being commodified and working class culture being radical and new. Subculture and the meaning of style - Young people challenge the main stream - Mods challenge, Punks symbolic challenge capitalist systems, spoke for working class overthrow the system. But creates new industries and become marketed. 'The best of' The idea of punk. Incorporation, neutralised. Analysis of popular culture being radical. Stuart Hall Angela McRobbie female sub culture
‘Youth cultural styles begin by issuing symbolic challenges, but they must end by establishing new conventions; by creating new commodities, new industries, or rejuvenating old ones’
The original album 1977
The collection 2005
The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was a research centre at the University of Birmingham. It was founded in 1963 by Richard Hoggart, its first director. Its object of study was the then new field of cultural studies.
The Centre was the locus for what became known as the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, or, more generally, British cultural studies. Birmingham School theorists such as Stuart Hall emphasized the reciprocity in how cultural texts, even mass-produced products are used, questioning the valorized division between "producers" and "consumers" that was evident in cultural theory such as that of Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School.
Conclusion
The culture & civilization tradition emerges from, and represents, anxieties about social and cultural extension. They attack mass culture because it threatens cultural standards and social authority.
The Frankfurt School emerges from a Marxist tradition. They attack mass culture because it threatens cultural standards and depoliticises the working class, thus maintaining social authority.
Pronouncements on popular culture usually rely on normative or elitist value judgements
Ideology masks cultural or class differences and naturalises the interests of the few as the interests of all.
Popular culture as a site of ideology - Whilst consuming this disguises class differences. Hidden politics to all cultural artefacts.
The analysis of popular culture and popular media is deeply political, and deeply contested, and all those who practice or engage with it need to be aware of this.
Key quotes
‘In the social production of their life men enter into definite, necessary
relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of
production which corresponded to a definite stage of development of their material
productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the
economic structure of society, the real foundation on which rises a legal and
political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social,
political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men
that determines their being, but on the contrary it is their social being that
determines their consciousness.
At a certain stage in their development, the material production forces of
society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, …From forms
of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters.
Then begins an era of social revolution.
With the change in economic foundation the whole immense
superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such
transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material
transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be
determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political,
religious, artistic or philosophic, in short, ideological forms in which men become
conscious of this conflict and fight it out.’
Marx, (1857) ‘Contribution to the critique of Political Economy’
‘[ The ruling class has ] to represent its interest as the common interest of
all the members of society, …to give its ideas the form of universality, and
represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.’
Karl Marx, (1846) The German Ideology,
‘The working class…raw and half developed…long lain half hidden
amidst it’s poverty and squalor… now issuing from it’s hiding place to assert an
Englishmans heaven born privilege to do a she likes, and beginning to perplex us
by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, breaking what it likes.
Matthew Arnold (1960) Culture & Anarchy
‘This form of compensation… is the very reverse of recreation, in that it tends,
not to strengthen and refresh and the addict for living, but to increase his unfitness
by habituating him to weak evasions, to the refusal to face reality and all’
F.R.Leavis & Denys Thompson, (1977) Culture And Environment
‘Movies and radio need no longer to pretend to be art. The truth, that they
are just business, is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they
deliberately produce. … The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the
culture industry. …The culture industry can pride itself on having energetically
executed the previously clumsy transposition of art into the sphere of
consumption, on making this a principle . … film, radio and magazines make up a
system which is uniform as a whole and in every part … all mass culture is
identical.’
Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944) Dialectic of Enlightenment,
‘The irresistible output of the entertainment and information
Industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers more or less pleasantly to the
producers and, through the latter, to the whole. The products indoctrinate and
manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood. … it becomes a way of life. It is a good way of life – much better than
before – and as a good way of life, it militates against qualitative change. Thus
emerges a pattern of one dimensional thought and behaviour in which ideas,
aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established
universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this
universe.’
Herbert Marcuse, (1968) One Dimensional Man
‘One might generalise by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many
reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in
permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own
situation, it reactivates the objects produced. These two processes lead to a
tremendous shattering of tradition… Their most powerful agent is film. Its social
significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its
destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage’
Walter Benjamin (1936) The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical
Reproduction
[…] in our society, where the real distinctions between people are created
by their role in the process of production, as workers, it is the products of their
own work that are used, in the false categories invoked by advertising, to
obscure the real structure of society by replacing class with the distinctions
made by the consumptions of goods.
Thus, instead of being identified by what they produce, people are made
to identify themselves by what they consume. From this arises the false
assumption that workers ‘with two cars and a colour TV’ are not part of
working class. We are made to feel that we can rise or fall in society through
what we are able to buy, and this obscures the actual class basis which still
underlies social position.
The fundamental differences in our society are class differences, but the
use of manufactured goods as means of creating classes or groups forms an
overlay on them.
Judith Williamson (1978) ‘Decoding Advertisements’
‘Youth cultural styles begin by issuing symbolic challenges, but they must
end by establishing new conventions; by creating new commodities, new
industries, or rejuvenating old ones’
Hebdige, D (1979) ‘Subcluture: The Meaning of Style’
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