Sunday 1 April 2012

A critical analysis of Ivan Ilich - Deschooling Society


This essays seeks to demonstrate my own understand of “deschooling society” and begin to apply it to my own practice.

It is noted in ‘Deschooling Society’ that Fidel Castro said ‘by 1980 Cuba will be able to dissolve its university since all of life in Cuba will be an educational experience.’ (Illich, 1973 p.15) This powerful sentiment provides the basis for Illich’s dream of an educational system that truly benefits society and individuals in their quest for self-actualization.

Abraham Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ states having the opportunity for ‘self-actualisation’ as the ultimate in becoming a complete human being. Self-actualisation involves ‘morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice and acceptance of the facts.’ This essay will show that modern ‘schooling’ achieves none of those things.

Illich starts his book by saying that the effect school has on students is to ‘school them into confusing process and substance.’(p.09) He expands on that by saying that this is the modern ‘institutionalization of values.’(p.09) Modern school dehumanizes us by turning ‘non-material needs into demands for commodities.’ (p.19) If the curriculum is a product and we are the consumer, we are taught to expect profound rewards for the consumption of a product. Or as Illich puts it, ‘neither learning nor justice is promoted by schooling because educators insist on packaging instruction with certification.’ ‘Instruction is the choice of circumstances which facilitate learning.’ (p.19) The difference between Illich’s model and the current state of affairs is that actual ‘learning’ is reserved to those ‘whose every step in learning fits previously approved measures of social control.’(p.19) This is education as following instructions to put up an IKEA bookshelf. In a pre-packaged process, although an incentive might be there, there is no encouragement to develop and improve as the process is taking place and in fact it is discouraged. This in turn eliminates creativity from the process.

Illich argues that the ‘modernization of poverty combines the lack of power over circumstances with a loss of personal potency.’ In comparison to modern poverty, classical poverty was ‘stable and less disabling.’ American Law makes six to ten years of school obligatory and during this time we are ‘schooled in a sense of inferiority towards the better schooled’ which permits exploitation through ‘increasing allocation of public funds for the education of a few and increasing acceptance of social control by the many.’ This process of ‘schooling’ serves as a conditioning process for the modern underclass, ‘disabling the poor from taking control of their own learning’ (p.15) and ‘discourag[ing] other institutions from assuming educational tasks.’  (p.15) According to Illich’s research, ‘No country can be rich enough to afford a school system that meets the same demands this system creates.’  (p.15) If good education is always associated with better funding and [the poor] depend on school for advancement of learning, the rich will always have the advantage. This is the ‘polarisation of society’ and is discriminatory on the basis of household income.
A “major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching.” (p.20) An example Illich gives is that ‘most people who learn a second language do so as a result of odd circumstances’ (p.20) Paulo Freire discovered that ‘any adult can begin to read in a matter of forty hours if the first words he deciphers are charged with political meaning.’ 

I am going to break 3rd person to give a personal account of how I engaged in an institution that gave me a far more profound education than the capitalist school system. Two years ago I started working for a festival in the summer. I wanted to contribute very much, as the festival itself held many great memories for me and seemed like an opportunity to learn new skills in the arts and develop a new network of creative friends. In the time I worked for them I developed skills in mural painting, sculpture design, event organising and construction using materials and tools I had never used before. Not only that, but I was required to demonstrate my skills to others who watched me working and were curious to my methods. It was logical to do this and I was learning how to relate to people on a skill-sharing level. As Illich puts it ‘education for all means education by all.’ (p.28) I did this under pressure of a deadline, without so many legislative constraints and with the desire to impress a group of people I respected and whose opinions and knowledge intrigued me on a personal level. On educator Paulo Freire’s theories, Illich states ‘the most radical alternative to school would be a network or service which gave each man the same opportunity to share his current concern with others motivated by the same concern.’ (p.26) The politics of working for this festival meant that we all wanted to achieve as highly as possible, for the benefit of ourselves and the patrons of the festival. I believe that the kind of educational network I was experiencing is a small localized version of what Illich calls a ‘learning web.’ He says that ‘if we left the initiative for meetings to the match seekers themselves, organizations which nobody now classifies as educational would probably do the job much better,’ (p. 28) and in my experience he was right. In this experience I had what Maslow defines as self-actualisation, I had the freedom to create and problem solve, there was no strict timetabling and I could engage spontaneously with creative projects and I was also making moral decisions within a new social network. The above statement is only an estimation of the extent of the education I got during this time, the actual result is far more profound and has been a part of shaping me into the person I am today. On reshaping learning structures Illich says ‘our present educational institutions are at the service of the teachers goals. The relational structures we need are those which will enable them each man to define him-self by learning and by contributing to the learning of others.’ (p.72) The festival I worked for is an institution in itself with its own set of values and systems. The politics of the situation dictated that everyone was to work as hard as possible, within their own limits, to create a show for 10,000 people and in the meantime I gained an education. 

I had access to teachers to demonstrate skills to me in the context of ‘charged political meaning,’ but this is uncommon. ‘Those using skills which are in demand and do require a human teacher are discouraged from sharing these skills with others. This is done either by teachers who monopolize the licenses or by unions which protect their trade interests.’ (p.23)

“School appropriates the money, men and goodwill available for education and in addition discourages other institutions from assuming educational tasks. Work, leisure, politics, city living and even family life depend on schools for the habits and knowledge they presuppose, instead of becoming themselves the means of education.” – (Page 16)

In this powerful quote from Illich, he explains that school assumes the responsibility for education the masses and in doing so it acquires approval from the masses as a positive institution within society. However, the negative effects of this are that other institutions are absolved from the responsibility of educating those who they involve. Why spend time and money on education when necessary education happens at school? People are employed based on curriculum vitae of relevant skills to that institution. When Illich suggests that other institutions, such as working environments, could themselves be the means to education he suggests that if those institutions acknowledged that they had a responsibility to educate, the education of its employees would be far more profound. If curriculum vitae provided evidence of key interests, rather than institutional achievements, those institutions could employ people safe in the knowledge that those people would be willing to engage and learn in the environment that they worked in. Relevant skill shares and ‘learning webs’ could be set up with other relevant institutions. Take for example, a network of cafes that offered different foods and cultural experiences, swapping their staff in order to educate them in different methods of cooking and customer service.

“An insistence on skill drill alone could be a disaster; equal emphasis must be placed on other kinds of learning. But if schools are the wrong places for learning a skill, they are even worse places for getting an education. School does both tasks badly, partly because it does not distinguish between them. School is inefficient in skill instruction especially because it is curricular. In most schools a programme which is meant to improve one skill is chained always to another irrelevant task.” (Page 24)

While skill learning is important, enjoyable and key for 'self actualisation' for someone who appreciates the relevance of those skills to their situation for political or practical reasons, it is not the only form of learning relevant to an education. Schools rarely offer skills drills today as it is impractical in terms of delivering the curriculum which requires them to make its students jump through metaphorical hoops in order to progress to the next level of the schooling ladder. This process goes against the 'self actualisation' process as it feels meaningless. It has become a skill in itself to pass exams that test a student’s knowledge of only the curriculum. When the results of 2011’s GCSE results, BBC news was widely debating why student grades were going up and one suggestion was simply that teachers were getting better at teaching students how to pass exams.  

On the myth of packaging values Illich states;
“School sells curriculum.” It starts with “alleged scientific research, on whose basis educational engineers predict future demand and tools for the assembly line, with-in the limits set by budgets and taboos. The distributor – teacher delivers the finished product to the consumer – pupil whose reactions are carefully studied and charted to provide research data for the preparation of the next model, which may be ‘ungraded’, ‘student – designed’, ‘team – taught’, ‘visually – aided’ or ‘issue – centred’”. - The curriculum is a “commodity whose ‘balanced appeal’ makes it marketable to a sufficiently large number to justify the cost of production.” (Page 46 / 47)

In the above quote, Illich discusses a school system within a capitalist society. That being a society where selling a product is part of its key value system. School must have a product to sell. That product is the curriculum. This curriculum is engineered by scientists working within the educational system and within that systems prescribed values and budget. If the teacher is the distributer of the product, then the student in the consumer. As people widely acknowledge that education is indeed a personal process, terms like ‘student – designed’ are used to sell the product to a ‘sufficiently large number to justify the cost of production.’ Education is widely regarded as a personal process. This should be enough to oppose the idea that selling "education" as a pre-defined product is just not an appropriate process to facilitate the education of the masses, however clever and manipulative the advertising behind the product is. 

Today equal educational opportunity is regarded as a core value of our society. However, Illich argues that ‘to equate this with obligatory schooling is to confuse salvation with the church’ and that ‘instead of equalizing chances, school has monopolized their distribution.’ He goes on to say that ‘laws forbidding discrimination on the basis of prior schooling must be enacted.’ But even with laws such as the Equality Act 2010 which protects those with learning disabilities against discrimination, we still discriminate on the grounds of prior ‘schooling.’ It could be argued that those without prior schooling would not have the literary or mathematical skills to attend a university course and keep their head above water, but this is not the point. Illich calls for an educational revolution involving the not-so-radical ideal of society facilitating access to learning resources and educational dialogue.

With the rise of social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter, we are more and more able to instantly connect with each other, but the majority are reduced to using it for vague entertainment purposes while advertises fill our minds with images of people that we should look like and products that we should desire. When Illich talks about ‘a network or service which gave each man the same opportunity to share his current concern with others motivated by the same concern,’ (p.26) he begins talking about classified adverts in newspapers and telephone services, but a present day service like Facebook could do this job more efficiently if its ideals weren’t rooted in production and consumption. There are services like “LinkedIn” (www.linkedin.com) and “Giant Hydra” (www.gianthydra.com) but again these are catering to advertising agencies. On the Mass Hydra website it states that ‘its system allows advertisers and ad agencies access to a global pool of creative professionals,’ stating its designed usage. This pre-packaged, directed, ‘mass collaboration unit’ could be a mass education unit used to form critical judgement by free networking and skill sharing, but while we school people into valuing a ‘pre-packaged process’ over ‘self-actualisation’ and education this will not happen.
We cannot expect an institution to teach us how to de-school ourselves. As Illich says; “each of us is personally responsible for our own deschooling, and only we have the power to do it.” (p.54)

Bibliography:
Illich, Ivan (1973a) Deschooling Society, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Lefebvre & Space - Critical reading of Headinley Sainsburys



Headingley Sainsburys is designed (representation of space) to be a ‘panoptic’ space to minimize theft and encourage people to act “as they should” in a consumerist institution. Cameras are pointed up the rows and there is an attendant manning a till at the end of every row as constant reminder to pay for what you take out with you. The isles are wide, and brightly lit. 

The floor plan is designed in such a way to maximise your visibility, their sales and your efficiency of shopping. It is quick to find anything. It is a modern space and you are constantly aware (representational space) of the possibility of being watched by cameras and attendants. The lower priced products and essentials such as snacks, batteries and toilet roll are all by the counters so you can grab them last minute. The expensive produce is at the back of the shop where you have to go and look for it. It is a way from the door to minimise theft. Signage is hung from the ceiling to make the food categories easily accessible and to optimise shopping time, turning over customers quickly and efficiently.  

The large population of students in Headinley coupled with the fact that this branch of Sainsburys is the only supermarket within a square mile and a half of the centre meaning the majority of customers seem to be in their early twenties. On evenings, cheap booze is sold in large quantities, their selection of which is large and subject to deals on price. There are buskers and beggars who sit outside next to the cash machine and ask for change from the customers of the shop. One particular man plays an accordion there more often than not, providing a sound track to a visit to the establishment. (Practice)

In practice, Headinley Sainsburys deviates from the designer’s intent. While the space is no doubt designed to be ‘Panoptic’ in a brightly lit, gridded floor plan, there are places where you can be comfortably hidden from site. The large pillars in the centres of the isle, sometimes right next to shelves of food, provide a hidden space for thieves to put items in their clothes.

Constructing the Other - The Jeremy Kyle Show



The Jeremy Kyle show is a modern coliseum that exploits its participants and disempowers it audience for the benefit of the show’s staff and nothing else.
The ITV website classifies The Jeremy Kyle Shows core audience as ‘Young, Female.’ The show presents vulnerable people who are in need of help and support as an ‘other’ to secure the identities of its core audience. The ‘others’ presented are in a compromised position. They are often unemployed, addicted to substances or dependant on the benefit system and there is always opportunity for public conflict between them. In short, the audience can sit back and be glad that they are not in the same position. That is not to say that this is just a coincidental by-product of a publicly aired family therapy session. The audience is in fact encouraged to react this way by the shows antagonistic, bigoted tyrant of a presenter Jeremy Kyle, whose opinions are forced down the throats of the participants and the audience at every opportunity. Kyle’s constant opposition to what he sees as the attitudes and apathy of the underclass of Britain helps to amplify the audiences shock, pity and resentment, thus reinforcing their identity as independent young individuals, successful in their own right in todays “broken society.”
In Theodore Adorno’s essay ‘How to watch Television’ he says “the technology of television production makes stereotypy almost inevitable. The short time available for the preparation of scripts and the vast material continuously to be produced call for certain formulas.”
While ‘The Jeremy Kyle Show’ is not scripted as such, it is common knowledge that the shows researchers ask the participants for specific information to be disclosed to the audience and ask them to talk about certain subjects. The shows staff are constructing stereotypes and characters for a story line that they craft out of the available material provided to them by the participants.  The shows unwitting participants are presented as a representation of everything Kyle opposes, regardless of their individual lifestyles, morals and position in society. The production is not intended for the wellbeing of the participants as the premise of the show suggests, but for the entertainment of their target audience and for their ratings. This is even more despicable when it is considered that they bait the participants onto the show by offering services such as DNA tests, lie detector tests and family therapy. ‘The Jeremy Kyle Show’ is far from an appropriate therapeutic environment to provide such services, even if family therapy and ‘fixing Britain’s broken society’ was their primary objective. The shows psychologist is called Graham Stanier. His job title is ‘head of aftercare’ and it is an appropriate one, as his job seems to be cleaning up the mess after the public, ritual humiliation of the participants.
Adorno speculates “what matters in mass media is not what happens in real life, but rather the positive and negative "messages," prescriptions, and taboos that the spec-tator absorbs by means of identification with the material he is looking at.”
In providing an apathetic, drug-addled, ignorant and wholly monochrome stereotype of Britain’s underclass, the ‘Jeremy Kyle Show’ is guilty of furthering class division by presenting them as an ‘other’ to be observed and criticized, but not engaged with on a human level. Not only that, but by ignoring key therapeutic concepts like empathy, the show disempowers the observer by supposing that such things aren’t needed when relating to and aiding others. It is institutionalized bigotry and absolves responsibility to form educated opinions on fundamental class issues in British society from its viewers and places it in the hands of Kyle as institutional figure head.
 It may be presented as “reality television” but it is in no way a realistic representation of the demographic or the therapeutic process it claims to portray. Proper ‘aftercare’ might include an empowering, empathic debate about the issues raised and then an organised man hunt to destroy self-serving ego-maniacs like Jeremy Kyle.

Bibliography
Adorno, T. W. (1954) The quarterly of film, television and radio

Thursday 23 February 2012

Feminism - 10/02/12

Feminism - the personal is political

Barbara Kruger - "Your body is the battle ground"

Social reaction through art practice / artistic movement / poltical personal movement

1918 - Women over 30 allowed to vote

1928 - Women got the vote

1920 - First woman at University (Oxford)


Gender as Social Construction

Binary Relation - what is femeninity in opposition to masculinity? Othering

Art History and Theory
- Griselda Pollock
Art system and history has institutionalised sexism, just as society at large has.

'His'-tory - a masculine construct

ESSAY - Linda Nochlin - Why have there been no great women artists?

Yoko Ono - Cut Piece, using her own body to comment

Femenisms and Methodologies

- Judy Chicago 1922 "woman as artist" ESSAY

Thursday 26 January 2012

Lecture 20/1/2012

Modernism marked the migration of bodies towards the city centre to work

Frankfurt School - Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno

Metropolis and Mental Life - Simmel

Resistance of the individiual to being swallowed up in the social (fedirological??? i cant read my notes..) mechanism.

Architect Louis Sullivan
- critic of chicago school
"form follows function"
Essay - "Office buildings artistically considered."
- Sky scrapers - representitive of upwardly mobile society.

Guaranty Building

Charles Scheeler - Photos of Big industry

Production Line - Fordism, sythesis of body and machine

Film - 'Modern Times' by Chaplin
background - stockmarket crash 1929
great depression
Margerat Bourke-White

Film - "Man with a movie camera" (1929)
Modern film / photography
-detatched observation, sythesis of man and machine, experiment in technology
the flaneur, urban observer

Baudelair (charles) walks the city to experience it, to find art, to capture the city.

Arcades Project - W. Benjamin, - Berlin Chronocle

Flaneuse - female, Janet Wolf
either a prostitute or a bag lady

Dennis Hopper - Automat

Arbus. NYC - woman at smoking counter

Venice "Dont Look Now" Nichola Roeg

The Detectice - wants to provide photo evidence of her own existance

Weegee (arthur felig) (oija, he owned a police radio... haha)
murder and police incidents

"Naked City" Film and photo collection.

Lorca Di Cocia - Heads - 2001
the experience of an individual in a croud.
interesting lighting machines
secret photos - detatchment

Walker Evans - secret photos

Post Modern City - disorientating, dislocating, easy to get lost so easy to submit to authority

lost and confusion - submit to instruction or freedom?

A place of a larger threat, constant fear of terrorism
Surveillane, more togetherness


Monday 28 November 2011

Popular Culture - Lecture Notes

Culture:

- One of the two or three most complicated words in the English 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.

Four definitions of 'pupular':

- Well liked by many people
- inferior kinds of work
- Work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people
- Culture actually made by the people themselves

Residual Culture:

Popular presss (vs quality press)
Popular Cinema (vs art cinema)
Popular Entertainment (vs art culture)

Individuals and Authorities legitimise art through discourse

Emmanuel Kant and the Sublime

"We call that sublime which is absolutely great". Beauty "is connected with the form of the object", having "boundaries", while the sublime "is to be found in a formless object", represented by a "boundlessness".
Kant then further divides the sublime into the mathematical and the dynamical, where in the mathematical "aesthetical comprehension" is not a consciousness of a mere greater unit, but the notion of absolute greatness not inhibited with ideas of limitations.
The dynamically sublime is "nature considered in an aesthetic judgment as might that has no dominion over us", and an object can create a fearfulness "without being afraid of it".
He considers both the beautiful and the sublime as "indefinite" concepts, but where beauty relates to the "Understanding", sublime is a concept belonging to "Reason", and "shows a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of Sense" - Wikipedia page, "Philosophy of the Sublime", quoting from Kant, I. - A Critique of Judgement (1790)


We judge some image making, crafts and design as poor as we are trained to look from an art school perspective. But why aren't these things equally valuable?

What happens when low art raises in status? Take Banksy for example.

Matthew Arnold (1867) - 'Culture and Anarchy'

- Culture is 'the best that has been thought and said in the world'
- the study of perfection
- attained through disinterested reading (unbiased, objective) writing and thinking
- the pursuit of culture
- seeks to 'minister the diseased spirit of our time.'

on Anarchy

- Culture polices 'the raw and uncultivated masses'

"The working class... raw and half developed... long lain half hidden amidst its povert and squalor... now issuing from its 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

Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture Fiction and the Reading Public

Q.D. Leavis

Culture and Environment

- Still forms a kind of repressed, common sense attitude to pop culture in this country.
- For Leavis, 20th Century sees a culture decline
- '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'

- collapse of traditional authority comes at the same time as mass democracy (anarchy) (is that really anarchy?)
- Nostalgia for an era when the masses exhibited an unquestioning deference to culture 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 habitutaing him to weak evasions, to the refusal to face reality at all’

University of Frankfurt, 1949
Theodore Adorno
Max Horkheimer
Herbert Marcuse
Leo Lowenthal
Walter Benjamin

Adorno & Horkheimer

Reinterpreted Marx, for 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'


‘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


FORDISM = The production line. Henry Ford.

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

(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
"the great refusal" = the ability to fight back against the values of the upper class.
 ACTUALLY DEPOLITICISES THE WORKING CLASS

I think what all this is getting at is that the upper classes are seeking to water down any challenging cultural idea that comes up and feed it back to us for profit in a form that distracts and pacifies.(negates) something with very little value.

 Qualities of Authentic Culture

Real
European - why..?
Multi Dimensional
Active Consumption
Individual Creation (why not collaboration?)
Imagination
Negation
Autonomous

Examples: Hollyoaks, Big Brother, X-Factor, Che and Anarchy symbol turning into something that just
means "cool"
"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."
distinctions between people are created by how they engage in production, their produce then labels them using the values advertising puts on those products as a reference point. this replaces the traditional class system.
"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."
What is highlighted above in bold is exactly what I have been struggling with when I consider class. I genuinely started thinking that owning expensive items defined you as a higher class as it reflects a higher income.
"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’

STANDARDISATION
the repetition of a structure that is proven to please an audience
PSEUDO-INDIVIDUALISATION
using a new hook or something to create an illusion of originality

‘SOCIAL CEMENT’

PRODUCES PASSIVITY THROUGH ‘RHYTHMIC’ AND EMOTIONAL ‘ADJUSTMENT’
the repetition of the same with the illusions of originality has a nullfying effect on people. they begin to like 'that sort of music' and that then defines them partly.
‘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’

cathartic - cleansing, violent emotional shift
"Mechanical Reproduction changes the reaction of art towards the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into a progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterised by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert"
(Benjamin, The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936)

this implies that an analysis of an object over a personally selected time span is better than a barrage on the senses guided by an expert. i'm not sure about this. why is that less valuable? what stops you going through a piece of film and analysing it step by step? Allan Moore seemed to agree as he prefers comics to film. Is this just to do with time span?
is this to do with the upper echelons of society thinking that the lower classes arent capable of scrutinizing art and gaining valuable education from it? when he talks about "the traditional value of the cultural heritage" does he mean the culture that is valued by the upper classes? the culture that is so high and mighty that it cant possibly be understood by the general public? this leads me to believe my values are very different from that of walter benjamin

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 (given value) division between "producers" and "consumers" that was evident in cultural theory such as that of Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School.

SUBCULTURE:
Incorporation
Ideological Form
Commodity Form
‘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’

Books: SUBCULTURE: the meaning of style. - Dick Hebdige
The uses of Literacy - Richard Hoggart
Culture, Media, Language - Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, Paul Willis
Angela McRobbie - The aftermath of Femenism
Culture and Society - Raymond Williams

IN 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 (relating to an ideal standard or model.) 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.





Task 2 - The Gaze

‘according to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome - *men act* and *women appear*. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ (Berger 1972, 45, 47)


Olympia - Eduardo Manet

When looking at this painting it is worth noting that Manet was responding to 'Venus of Urbino' by Titian. In this painting by Manet, the woman depicted has a look of authority where as the expression of Titians Venus is inviting and submissive. Olympia is being brought flowers by someone working for her. We are free to look at her as an object. However, her gaze is directed at us and by the object making eye contact with us it challenges us to think, maybe she is not something we could possess. She is already rejecting the flowers sent from an interested party. The model is covered in expensive decoration. She has an expensive orchid flower in her hair, a symbol of affection. She is also wearing shoes which contrasts Titians 'Venus of Urbino,' shoes are a symbol of power and independance. In Titians painting there is a small dog on the bed in the lower right. In Manet's painting the animal is a black cat. Dogs signify fidelity, cats signify independence.
Manet knows that in artworks of his time, women were being viewed as objects and sought at least to challenge the comfort of the male viewer.




Pin-up girls in the current media.

If the concept of 'the nude' was developed in a patriarchal society, practiced by artists who were employed to paint, by men who could afford art as a commodity, then its safe to say it serves to legitimize the practice of painting naked women. The concept of the nude is used now to justify the photography of naked women.
Our society is still a patriarchal one. If women 'watch themselves being watched' then she is 'continually accompanied by her own image of herself.'

FHM employ women for use models, they are women who are so aware of the male gaze that they know how to exploit it. They know that they can be shown as objects of desire and exploit the oppertunity to be exploited. But if Berger is right in saying that any action by a woman is also "read as an indication of how [they] would like to be treated" then this is hardly an empowering vocation as they will forever be seen primarily as an object of desire and secondly as a subject for communication.

In the image above, the model is shown along side nothing else, except for the FHM logo and the words "Its a guy thing." Notice the language used, the words 'it' and 'thing' are pronouns and therefore used to objectify a subject. Not only does it present the woman for the viewing of men, it ignores the fact that there may be other women who find the image attractive, dismissing women absolutely as sujects of communication.