Popular Culture - Lecture 4

Popular Culture


Critical positions on the media and popular culture


Aims:
- Critically define 'popular culture'
- Contrast ideas of 'culture' with 'popular culture' and 'mass culture'
- Introduce cultural studies and critical theory (German Marx)
- 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'
- General process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development of a particular society, at a particular time
- A particular way of life - Certain set of values, way of living, ways of thinking about the world, elite, southern, global culture etc
- Works of intellectual and especially artistic significance


Culture can be use to describe a canon of really important art and literature, Shakespeare Divinci Beethoven, institutions signify those as really important, they become culture. They represent and significance.


Marx concept of base and superstructure (previously studied in another lecture)


Culture emerges from the base, culture almost legitimises and makes possible the base relation of production
Culture could be a sight of political conflict


Ideology


Raymond William (1983) 'Keywords'
4 Definitions of popular
- Well liked by many people, the idea of something being popular. Leads to confused results. Shakespeare - well liked by many, but would be strange to call that popular culture.
- Inferior kinds of work. Lesser or inferior form of real culture, work that is mass produced, 'kitche', works that aspire to be important but for various reasons, fail. To label popular culture in this way, means someone making a valued judgement. You need a taste maker to say what is good and bad? A taste setter makes a subjective judgement based on world view. The ruling class, since being able to be educated, make the tasters.
- Work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people. Anything that aims to be populist. Jack vettrinano prints. Works thats elitist and not understandable is of importance. 
- Culture actually made by the people themselves. Made by people for the people - organic. associated with the working class.


Which you decide upon depends on your political position.


High Culture - Caspar David Fridedrich (1809) 'Monk by the sea' 


Jenny Morrisons 'Sea and sky in watercolour' - popular culture




Inferior or residual culture
- Popular press VS quality press
- Popular cinema VS Art Cinema
- Popular Entertainment VS Art Culture


Quality newspapers aimed at...
Popular newspapers aimed at....




Examples of popular culture
Boby Sanders mural
Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane (2005) 'Folk Archive' - Went around the country looking for authentic forms of creativity, Potato structures, decorated eggs etc
The first thing you do is laugh...but why? What is it your laughing at? The objects are poor art attempts, why do we make judgements on whats good and bad. We are coded into a certain way of thinking whats correct and whats not in terms of aesthetics, thinking in an institutional way.  No experience of the elite artist movement - self taught - to judge by our aesthetic codes is flawed and informs class judgement. Are we laughing at the failure of the attempted art?


Popular culture exhibited in a place of high culture - Banksy exhibited in Covent Garden
Graffiti - translated to mainstream western culture (Banksy) 


Popular culture can start off as representing people and be incorporated the interest of a few or minority, to be bought and sold.


Dynamics between culture and popular culture, very complex. 
E.P.Thomson (1963) 'The making of the ~English working class' 
prior to modernity , society had a common culture
First changes with industrialisation and urbanisation, people are condensed and physically separated, working class condensed in factories as a mass, and clearly separated from owners of factories (Bourgeoisie), living/habitation is set to certain people. Works - Slums
You get a physical distinction between rich and poor, this starts to create a cultural separation, working class begin to author their own culture, create own cultural forms and activities, e.g playing piano,singing, own forms of literature.
Start to see emergence of working class voice, and organic culture.
Two competing cultures working against each other


Chartism - Campaign for working class to vote, seen as not important enough.
Political movements emerging


Mathew Arnold (1867) 'Culture and Anarchy'
Arnoldism - 


Culture is:
- 'The best that has been thought and said in the world' - Perfection, beauty
- Study of perfection
- Attained through disinterested reading writing thinking
- The pursuit of culture
- Culture is the force that can minister the diseased spirit of our times


Anarchy


Culture polices 'The raw and uncultivated masses'
Tell them to appreciate our culture, we can put them in line. Disallow creation of their own culture
Once hidden (working class) now emerging, beginning to do what 'they' like


Theories evolve
Deffend upper class culture




Leavisism - F.R Leavis & Q.D. Leavis
Mass civilisation and minority culture
Fiction and the reading public


- Still forms of a kind of repressed, common sense attitude to popular culture in this country
- For Leavis-
C20th see a cultural decline
Standardisation and levelling down
'Culture has always been in minority keeping;
'The minority, who has hitherto set the standard of taste without any serious challenge have experienced a collapse of authority'
Cultures coming down


-Collapse of traditional authority comes at the same time as the mass democracy
- Nostalgia for an era when the masses exhibited an unquestioning deference to authority
- popular culture offers addictive forms of distraction and compensation
- 'This form of compensation...is the very reverse of recreation, in that it tend, not to strengthen and refresh the addict for living, but to increase his unfitness by habituating him to weak evasions, to the refusal to face reality at all (Leavis and Thompson 1977:10)


Frankfurt school - Critical theory
Institute of social research, university of Frankfurt, 1923 - 33 (closed by Nazis, moves to New York)
University of Columbia New York 1933 - 47
University of Frankfurt 1949-


5 most Important writers:


Theodore Adorno
Max Horkheimer
Herbert Marcuse
Leo Lowenthal
Walter Benjamin


Theo and Hork


Reinterpretted Marx, for the 20th century - era of "Late capitalism"
defined "The culture industry"
2 main product - 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 forgotton'


'Movies and raio need no longer to pretend to be art. The turth, 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 rpide itself on having energetically executed the previously clumsy transposition of art.


Frankfurt writers
Think mass culture is so bad, cements authoirty and codes you into ways of thinking about the world. Watch such programs (x factor, dancing on ice) you don't begin to think about politics, its dumbs you down. Depoliticises the working class
e.g Hollyoaks calendar - Sexual objects (the characters are women in education) depoliticises young women, says its okay to be this way at university. 


Products of the contemporary 'Culture industry' 
- Big brother
- Holy oaks
- The X factor


Teaches us thats the only way we can succeed in the world. Lottery e.g.


Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialect of Enlightenment, 1944


Fordism (1910 onwards) Mass production, economic 


We identify ourselves by the culture we consume.


Andreas Gurksky (2000) May day


Adorno 'On popular music'
STANDARDISATION
'SOCIAL CEMENT'
- PRODUCES PASSIVITY THROUGH 'RHYTHMIC' AND EMOTIONAL 'ADJUSTMENT'


Dance music - Insistant rhythm is a kin to modern productions, slave to the beat.
Emotional adjustment , listen to music as an emotional escape, 


Authentic Culture VS Mass culture
Qualities of authentic culture
- real
- european
- Multi-dementional
- Active consumption
- Individual creation
- Imagination
- Negation
AUTONOMOUS


Walter Benjamin 'The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction'1936
Techniques of mass production change the status of the works of culture. e.g the mona lisa - once reproduced loses value, importance. We know not what its about, but that it is of cultural importance. We can change high culture into low culture.Technological reproduction.
In amongst this, there is a chance to define our own meaning.


Hebdige, D (1979) 'Subculture: The meaning of style'