Aims
- critically define popular culture
- contrast ideas of culture with popular culture and mass culture
- introduce cultural studies and critical theory
- 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 - Raymond Williams
- general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development of a particular society, at a particular time
- slippery term
- a particular way of life
- works of intellectual and especially artistic significance
Marc's Concept of Base/Superstructure
Base
forces of production - materials, tools, workers, skills, etc
relations of production - employer/employee, class, master/slave, etc
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 > reflects form of and legitimises
e.g. pyramid of capitalist system
- the state - politics
- instruments of the state ideological and physical coercion - systems of law, the army, systems of ideology, religion
- the bourgeoisie
- the proletariat - industrial capitalists and workers
- politics working in the interest of the rich, maintaining the status quo
Raymond Williams (1983) 'Keywords'
4 definitions of 'popular'
1. well liked by many people
2. inferior kinds of work - popular culture is inferior to 'real' culture, popular culture is like a base version of culture or popularism which tries to be commercial which can be inferior or worse than elitist
3. work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people
4. culture actually made by the people themselves - - culture made by the masses for the masses, the direct opposite of traditional culture
Examples
1. Caspar David Friedrich (1809) 'Monk by the Sea' v.s. Jerry Morrison's Sea and Sky in Watercolour
2. Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane (2005) 'Folk Archive'
- creative practice that wouldn't normally get shown in art galleries
- eggs with funny faces, little characters made from vegetables, gurning competitions
- asks question 'why are these not classes as culture when they're made by people of society' throwaway items
3. Banksy piece exhibited in Covent Garden
- graffiti, hip hop, urban youth for urban youth - what happens when this gets stolen by culture
- knocked down wall by Banksy stolen and put into an art gallery sold for loads of money, is it art or popular culture
E.P. Thompson (1963) 'The Making of the English Working Class'
- growth of industrialisation, heavy industry, growth of the city, height if development of industrial capitalism
- very clear class divides
- very clear who are workers and who are bosses
- different stratas of society
- idea/illusion of shared culture for all society but only the elite got to experience this, have time to swan about, read literature and so on until clear division in society on class terms
- because of false separation, had working class culture, made by the workers for the workers
- began to get entrepreneurs which was frowned upon by upper class culture
- tendency in working class culture to talk about experiences and working class life - this directly led to birth of chartism - movement to get working class people the vote
Matthew Arnold (1867) 'Culture and Anarchy' - backlash from above
culture is...
- the best that has been thought and said in the world
- study of perfection
- attained through disinterested reading, writing, thinking
- the pursuit of culture
- anything with an agenda is not really culture
- culture serves to minister the diseased spirit of our times - culture is this beautiful thing and if everyone would go back to thinking above poetry, literature, art etc then the world wouldn't be such a horrible place, popular culture is a disease, need to get back to stuff we've always known
- 'anarchy' should be seen as synonym to working class who dare to stake their claim or write a culture of their own
- high culture v.s. low culture
- 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 Englishman's heaven born privilege to do as he likes, and beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes
Leavisism - F.R Leavis & Q.D. Leavis
- still forms a kind of repressed, common sense attitude to popular culture in this country
- 20th century sees a cultural decline
- standardisation and levelling down
- 'culture has always been in minority keeping'
- the minority, who had hitherto set the standard of taste without any serious challenge have experienced a collapse of authority
- world is in a slow decline towards the gutter
- had a brief moment of shared culture with beautiful art and beautiful music but as society develops and becomes more mass produced the world has slowly sunk down and levelled becoming insignificant
- elite have experience collapse of authority so there has been a downwards spiral
- wants return to elitist system where they can become the 'taste makers'
- 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 distraction 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 habituation him to weak evasions, to the refusal to face reality at all' (Leavis and Thompson, 1977:100)
- writing from position of anxiety, position of collapse
- mass culture represents a threat to social authority
Frankfurt School - critical theory
- Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, Walter Benjamin
- bunch of philosophers working at University of Frankfurt (1923-33) before being shut down by Nazis then headed to New York (1933-47)
- radical perspective of study of culture in the 30s, high point of popular culture at this time
- argued popular culture actually maintains social order, doesn't present a challenge or a threat, what it does is maintain social system that we live in and perpetuate it, strengthens and maintains the system that we live in (capitalism)
- one of the tools which capitalism employs to perpetuate itself
Frankfurt School
Adorno and Horkheimer
- reinterpreted Marx for the 20th century - era of 'late capitalism'
- defined "The Culture Industry"
- 2 main products - homogeneity and 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'
- film, radio, art - just like the car industry, profits are made for big businesses, sucked into a big vacuum, everything is all just the same, it isn't 'art', it's uniform, identical
Marcuse
- popular culture v.s. affirmative culture
- giving people no options, just a mass system of culture which is broadly identical
- produces people's capacity for individual thought
- why are people so pacified in the modern world, why don't people resist
- why do people sit back and let it happen
- works like ideological programme that indoctrinates you, promotes a false consciousness, an incorrect view of the world which stops you trying to change it which makes you one-dimensional
- 'culture affirms and conceals the new conditions of social life' but culture acts as a fog/blanket on top of this which makes everything seem ok even though it's not
- culture serves to de-politicise us, stops us rebelling
e.g. products of the contemporary 'Culture Industry'
- Hollyoaks, Big Brother, The Xfactor
- creates self perpetuating system, exploits loads of people but allows the high up people to get tonnes of money
- teaches us lesson that the way out of the abject misery of capitalism is to go on some talent show and be judged by the middle classes and if you're good enough you'll get a few morsels off their table
- starting a revolution isn't the way to go about solving your misery
- mass system of consumption
- Hollyoaks girls reduced to sexual objects, products of contemporary culture
Adorno 'On Popular Music'
- writing in 1941
- all pop culture is rubbish, programmes us, stops us rebelling
- effectively hates all music, particularly jazz
- standardisation
- produces passivity through 'rhythmic' and emotional 'adjustment'
- 'social cement'
- not only is this stuff easy to produce/make but more importantly it's easy to consume
- can consume it in a mindless way
- love one band so you must love that other band - chain of consumption
Walter Benjamin - The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical...
The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1963-2002)
- subcultures, popular culture that gives people agency and direction
- includes works by Dick Hebidge - Subculture: The Meaning of Style - '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'
- what was once anarchy in the UK is now 'the best of punk rock volume 3 sold at high street record store' etc
- individuality and self expression becomes 'punk rock wig' in fancy dress shop
- things bought and consumed, sad end to all subcultures
Conclusion
- culture emerges from and represents anxieties about social and cultural extension, they attack mass culture because it threatens cultural standards and social authority
- Frankfurt School emerges from MArxist tradition, attack mass culture because it threatens cultural standards and depoliticises working class
- pronouncements on popular culture usually rely on normative or elitist value judgements
- popular culture is an ideology
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