Aims
- Critically define 'popular culture'.
- Contrast ideas of 'culture' with 'popular culture' and 'mass culture'.
- Introduce Cultural Studies and Critical Theory.
- Define ideology.
- Interrogate the social function of the mass media and the extent to which the media constitutes us as subjects.
What is Culture?
- 'One of the two or three most complicated words in the Englsih language'.
- General process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development of a particular society at a particular time.
- A particular way of life.
- Works of intellectual and especially artistic significance.
Marx's Concept of Base and Superstructure
Base:
Forces of production – materials, tools, workers, skills.
Relations of production – employer/employee, class.
Superstructure:
Social institutions – legal, political, cultural.
Forms of consciousness – ideology.
'The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’
(Marx, Communist Manifesto)
Base… Determines content and form of… Superstructure.
Superstructure… Reflects forms of and legitimises… Base.
Marx (1857) Quote on ‘Contribution to the critique of Political Economy’
- Born into capitalistic society, with capitalist values – see through capitalist lens.
Ideology
- system of ideas and beliefs.
- masking, distortion or selection of ideas, to reinforce power relations, through creation of ‘false consciousness’.
Pyramid of Capitalist System
Superstructure:
- The State.
- Instruments of the state.
- Ideological and Physical Coercion.
Base:
- The Bourgeoisie.
- The Proletariat.
Raymond Williams (1983) ‘Keywords’
Popular:
- Well liked by many people.
- Inferior kinds of work (not high culture).
- Work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people (tries to win the masses).
- Culture actually made by the people themselves (Made by people, for the people).
Inferior or Residual Culture
- Popular Press vs Quality Press
- Popular Cinema vs Art Cinema
- Popular Entertainment vs Art Culture
Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane (2005) ‘Folk Archive Archive'
- Painted eggs – Tate.
- Graffiti in South Bronx.
- Banksy piece exhibited in Covent Garden.
- Revolve around class and identity.
E.P. Thomson (1963) ‘The Making of the English Working Class’
- Bourgeois and Working Class split: physically, socially, and spiritually.
- Working Class do not have the means to go places.
Matthew Arnold (1867) ‘Culture and Anarchy’
Culture…
- ‘The best that has been thought and said in the world’ – much criticised.
- Study of perfection.
- Attained through disinterested, reading, waiting and thinking.
- Pursuit of culture.
- Seeks ‘to minister the diseased spirit of the time’.
Anarchy…
- Working Class are uncultured.
- ‘Raw and half developed.’
Leavisism – F.R. Leavis & Q.D. Leavis
- Still forms a kind of repressed common sense attitude to popular culture in this country.
- For Leavis – 20th Century sees a cultural decline.
- Standardisation and levelling down ‘Culture has always been in minority keeping.’
- Collapse of traditional authority comes at the same time as mass democracy (anarchy).
- Popular culture offers addictive forms of attraction and compensation.
- Hollywood films are largely 'masturbatory'.
- Weak imitations and attempts of normal life.
- 'Addicts' like a disease/drug.
- Threat to ruling class.
Frankfurt School - (Institute of Social Research)
- Founded in 1923 as an appendage to University of Frankfurt.
- Critical Theory - Marxism and Psychoanalysis.
- How culture affects our thinking.
Thinkers:
- Theodore Adorno
- Max Horkheimer
- Herbert Marcuse
- Leo Lowenthal
- Walter Benjamin
Adorno and Horkhesiter
- Reinterpretted Marxism for 20th Century - era of 'late capitalism'.
- 'The Culture Industry' - homogenous and predictable.
- 'All mass culture is identical'.
- 'As soon as the film begins it's quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished and forgotten'.
Herbert Marcuse
- Popular Culture vs Affirmative Culture.
- Negation = Depriving Culture of its great refusal.
Authentic Culture vs Mass Culture
Qualities of authentic culture:
- Real.
- European.
- Multi-dimensional.
- Active Consumption – interact and think.
- Individual Creation.
- Imagination.
- Negation.
- AUTONOMOUS.
Products of the Contemporary ‘Culture Industry’
- Hollyoaks – focuses on university students, reduced to tacky strippers and sex objects for annual calendar.
- Che Guevara on t-shirts = not representing communist revolution, its the mass media that has reduced this icon to its superficial form that's purely for aesthetics.
- X Factor – talented musicians exploited by the mass media.
Williamson (1978) ‘Decoding Advertisements’
- Instead of people being identified for what they produce, they are identified by what they consume.
- ‘Workers with two cars and a colour TV are not part of the working class’.
- Made to feel we can rise and fall in society by what we can afford to buy.
Adorno ‘On Popular Music’
- Loved classical music as it is multi-dimensional.
- Popular music is mass marketed, standardised and mechanical.
- ‘Social cement’.
- Like one song – love the genre – songs very similar – makes the decision for the listener about liking the music.
- Produces passivity through ‘rhythmic’ and ‘emotional adjustment’.
- People listen to music to escape from horrors of the world.
Walter Benjamin (1936) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.
- Introduction of new technologies – new possibilities.
- New techniques of mass production – challenges dominance of previous authority.
Aura: Quality and Authority
- Mona Lisa – socially important – behind bullet-proof glass in the Louvre – visit to see the work of art is like a religious pilgrimage.
- Now the Mona Lisa is printed on t-shirts, dodgy plates which challenges its importance – and allows others to create their own personal interpretation
- Mass culture creates revolutionary possibilities.
- Emergence of pop culture as a serious topic of study: England, Birmingham School, Dick Hebdige.
Conclusion
- Culture and civilisation 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 emerged from Marxism attacking mass culture as it is a threat to cultural standards and depoliticises the working class, therefore maintaining social authority.-
-Pronouncements on popular culture usually rely on normative or elitist judgements.
- Ideology is a mask to cultural and class differences, creating the interests of few as the interests of all.
- Popular culture as an ideology.
- The analysis of popular culture and the mass media is incredibly political, and has been contested, and this needs to be taken into account with those engaging with it or practicing it.
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