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.