Critical positions on the media and popular culture
- Critically define ‘popular culture’
- Contrast ideas of ‘culture’ with ‘popular culture’ and ‘mass culture’
- Introduce Cultural Studies & Critical Theory
- Discuss culture as ideology
- Interrogate the social function of popular 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 - A sense of a subculture, a certain set of values, ways of thinking, elite culture, working class culture. Global cultures.
- Works of intellectual and especially artistic significance’ - They become culture, who is to decide who makes these decisions
Marx's Concept of Base / Super structure
Popular culture could be described as a lesser or inferior form or actual culture.
4 definitions of ‘popular’
- Well liked by many people -
Shakespeare - well liked by many people, but it would be strange to call it popular culture.
- Inferior kinds of work
Snobbery that work that seeks to be obscure is more important that work designed for the people to understand.
- Work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people
- Culture actually made by the people themselves
Caspar David Friedrich (1809)‘Monk by the Sea’
Questions your relationship with the universe
Watercolor Piece- Popular culture piece but could actually connote similar themes and ideas as the Friedrich piece.
Popular Press vs Quality Press
Popular Cinema vs Art Cinema
Popular Entertainment vs Art Culture
Artifacts from Art show called the Folk Archive - Basically went round the country looking for examples of authentic popular culture, that fall outside of the institutions idea of art and design.
- Why are we making these judgements about what is good or bad, whats is correct and whats not in terms of aesthetic, you start thinking in an institutional way.
Mural painters - self taught, judging on our institutional way of thinking
Graffiti in South Bronx - Started as expression of ghettoised youth in the Bronx, entirely subcultural, what happens when its put in galleries, is that it selling out.
Banksy - turned into art, becomes elitist.
E.P. Thompson (1963) ‘The Making of The English Working Class’
Society had a common culture - there was a tiny part of elite culture, the first time this changes is with industrialisation and urbanisation. With industrialsation the working class and higher class are separated from each other. There is a physical distinction between the different classes which in turn makes a cultural separation. The working class start to author their own culture because they are separated, still need to entertain themselves, own cultural forms and activities, E.g. own forms of literature, music, going to the pub. They start thinking about how their society should be organised.
Late 19th Century - an organic working class culture, very separate from the ruling class.
Chartism - working class being able to vote, considered not important enough to have a say in how society should be organised.
Matthew Arnold (1867) 'Culture & Anarchy'
First form of cultural examination, tried to define what culture was. Culture is
‘the best that has been thought & said in the world’
Study of perfection
Attained through disinterested reading, writing thinking - without an adgenda, any culture with an adgenda is not true culture because its bias.
The pursuit of culture
Seeks ‘to minister the diseased spirit of our time’ -
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)
-----They were once hidden but now they assert themselves where they like, definite class division through the language used etc. The control of the working class is lost. Mocks the cultures of the working class.
Leavisism - F.R Leavis & Q.D. Leavis
Spawned from Leavis a whole generation of artists etc that looked at the world from his view.
Extension on Arnoldism
Throughout the 20th century - a gradual dumbing down of culture, he had the idea that culture was perfect, everything degraded.
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
‘Culture has always been in minority keeping’
‘the minority, who had hither to set the standard of taste without any serious challenge have experienced a ‘collapse of authority’
- There has always been an elite whose role it is that needs to defend the culture
- 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
- Popular culture offers addictive forms of ditraction and compensation
- ‘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)
- Snobbery in which people dismiss things are a hangover from this Elitest theory from Arnold and Leavisism.The ruling class's reading of lower class culture is just as much about them trying to dismiss their value and political input.
Frankfurt School - Critical Theory
They studied mass culture, when they went to America they entered the most developed society of the modern world. Went from Germany to seeing the result of these cultures in America. New York was the perfect place for someone who was analysing capitalism to be at that time.
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The culture industry - there's an idea of culture but its not this, this is culture that's is almost produced in a factory. At this time in America there was mass the emergence of mass production, economic conditions. They equated this production to the production of culture, those cultural artifacts are the same or similar, all predictable or standardised. Culture for them was mass produced.
When you think about films and the specifications that they have to meet, for example when you go to a horror movie you know who dies first etc. Romantic comedy the man ends up with the girl, makes us start to want these standard products - This is 'Mass Culture'
>>>>"Quote slide 19"<<<<
The idea of art has been turned into a business, takes any meaning out of it.
These TV programmes that are all the same, films, etc makes us think about the world in a one dimensional way and in turn makes us one dimensional.
Frankfurt School -
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
(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
Hollyoaks - The way the women are marketed as sexual objects, seeing programs like this de politicises women to make them think that this is ok.
Big brother / X Factor - Your salvation out of the misery of your life isn't to form a political party its to try out on one of these programs, teaches you that its the only way you can make it for yourself.
Adorno 'On popular Music'
-All popular music is standardised, its all the same, works around the same beats.
- Social cement - you get trapped in your own popular cultures
- Produces passicirt through 'rhythmic' and emotional adjustment
Dance music - with its insistent rhythm that people follow blindly, its a kin to the idea of following orders. It causes you to be counter revolutionary
Qualities of authentic culture
Real
European
Multi-Dimensional
Active Consumption
Individual creation
Imagination
Negation
AUTONOMOUS
Walter Benjamin - The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction' - 1936
The way in which mass production change the status of works of culture
What happens when you have a painting that can be reproduced, what happens to the status of the Mona Lisa, its value and its status. Previously you have to go the LLurve in Paris
"‘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’
Aura - with technology we have our own Mona Lisa, re-define the meaning. What all this means is that mass production allow us to redefine culture in the way pace makers and institutions want it to be. Gives us the opportunity to redefine elitist cultures.
Incorporation
Punk - Anti capitalist gesture, loads of un-employment, black and white youths together, challenge capitalism, overthrow of the system, totally radical, you don't need to play an instrument. Starts as a symbolic challenge. Eventually it becomes utterly conventional. This is what Hebdige called incorporation.The idea that it becomes neutralised.
Ideological Form / Commodity Form
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 ideology
- 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.
