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.
