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'

CTS - Marxism and Design Activism Lecture - 4

 Marxism and Design Activism

Aims:

Introduction of ideology

Introduction of the basic principles of Marxist philosophy

Explain to the extent to which the media constitutes us as subjects

Introduce 'Cultural jamming' and the idea of design activism - trend among activist designers

"The philopsohers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change is."

Marx, k. (1845) Theses on Feuerbach

There no point in just thinking without combining it without actions

To find some kind of synthesis between theory philopshy and thought and action

Marxism is:

• Policitcal manifesto leading to socialism, commiunism and the twentieth century conflicts between capital and Labour.
• A philosophical approach to the social sciences, which focuses on the tole of society in determining himan bahaviour, based on the concept of dilectical materialism
• Revolutionary policatl movement

What is capitalism

Bourgeoisie, the commodity, proletariats

_ Control of the means of production in private hands

- Markete where labour lpower is bought and sold (inc humans - almost commodities)

- Production of commodities for sale 

- Use of money as a means of exchange

- Competition / meritocracy 

'Best suceed' etc 

Stature in society , to be at the top, its a competition

Communist evolution

1. Primitive communism - hunter gather societys - co-operated at every level, no such thing as monogamous relationship (social and sexual freedom)
2. Slave society - birth of aristocracy - Develops when the tribe be becomes a city state
3. Feudalism - Aristocracy becomes the ruling class, merchant develop into capitalists
4. capitalism - Ruling class, employ the real working class
5. Socialism - Workers gain consciousness, overthrow the capitalists and take control over the state (revolution) 
6. Communism - a classless and stateless society (never properly materialised)

Marx concept of base / super structure

Base (economic)

Forces of production - Materials, tools, workers, skills, etc

Relations of production - Employer, class, master, slave etc

Superstructure

Social institutions - Legal, political, cultural (art , design, education) Can be traced back to issues of class, gender/racial politics, everything bears this stamp

Forms of consciousness - Ideology

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

Capitalism (the society were in) produced laws, culture, law, politics, education which reflects the capitalist attitude

Base > Determines content and form of > super structure

> Superstructure > reflects form of legitimises> base

Educator > instrcuts (form of education)  Work > instructs (act although its normal, marxist reading into education)

Super structure > Education, family, religion, mass media, politics > Base - Relations of production, means of production

Super structure - maintains and legitimates the base

Base - Shapes the structure

Reading - Marx, (1857) "contribution to the critique of political economy' :

In conclusion:

Society produces our life's, not us, the accident of our birth produces what were are going to be. Where we are in life we are forced into relations and situations, these relations which reflect the society we live in. the base determines the superstructure, which determines our consciousness ( to rebel, to take it as normal etc) our society condition everything, philosophy, interaction etc. Social being dtermines our consciousness. Change the base> change our attitudes, arts and culture. 

1917 poster international workers of the world, pyramid of capitalist system.

The capitalism > 'We rule you'  king / queen > We fool you > religious statures > We shoot at you (Army) > We eat for you (upper class - bourgeoisie) > We feed all and work for all (workers)

control subjects in society - by ideology, controlling way they think

To set up an organised religion , e.g - religion teaches us how to think, is we're good and honourable, work hard for family, doesn't matter if were poor, as long as we're moral, to die and be rewarded in heaven. But your dead, so wheres the reward? Religion a trap - a form of mental control.

One can have an ideology, system of ideas and beliefs (e.g Christianity, conservatives) 

Ideology - The way in which a system of ideas masks, distorts a way of thinking about the world, which covers ove glass/gender/race discriminations. Legitimises over certain classes/races - false consciousness - exploited

Karl Marx (1846) ' [the ruling class has] To represent its interest as the cmoon interest of all members of society,...to give its dieas the form if universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.

'Religion is the opiate of the masses' - Marx

Art as ideology

Only people who became artists, had money to be taught, rich people making art. Women not allowed to make art. White rich men making art. Who buys art? Kings / queens. dictate what is painted. How does it reflect interest of common man?

Modern time - Reflecting a certain ruling class thinks. We can be fooled to think this way.

'Guerrilla girls' 2007 and 1989

Althusser (1970) 'Ideology and ideological state apparatuses'

Society = economic, political and ideological. Mechanism to the way we live our lives.

Ideology is a practise which men and women 'live' their relations to real conditions of existence.

Ideology offers false, but seemingly true resolutions to social imbalance.

Ideology offers reasons why we are in our situation. E.g women - ogled - well actually, thats okay as women are more beautiful than men (art - studies perfect female form)

The media as ideology state apparatus

• Means of production
• Disseminates the views of the ruling class
• Media creates false consciousness
• The individual is produced by nature; the subject by culture. (fiske, 1992)

- The constitution of the subjects

Newspapers have ideological assumptions when approaching language to their target audience. The sun - working class people - talks of tv, uses slang etc. The times - political, literature etc.

Student riot articles - Headlines - not discussion, just opinion , assumption, ideological

Darcus Howe - BBC interview on London riots - Youtube

Ideology:

- System of beliefs

- Masking, distortion, selection of ideas, reinforce power relations

- False consciousness

'Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most of the relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves' - Berger ways of seeing

Wonderbra adverts

"double major' 

'I cant cook, who cares' Patriarchal views - Women should automatically cook for men

Through buying, consuming we make ourselves poorer through buying, never gain status in society.

Commodity fetishism (marx, capital Vol.1)

Fetisise commodities

Something that gets in the way of something else, used as a substitute

Trainers taking appearance of 'cool' , you being 'cool' mediated by trainers

The assets of the worlds top three billionaires are greater than those of the poorest 600 million on the planets

'The life of Bryon'

'Occupy wall street'  Organised events / protests through media , twitter etc
These need visualisation 


Adbusters & cultural jamming
'Buy nothing day' etc
techniques - do something to a piece of work / object to alter message. E.g - `billborad - used to give a message - Distort this - its still a strong message.
Look at youtube videos


'Clean city law' banned advertising - Visual garbage

CTS Seminar - 1

Panopticism 


Key points from lecture

• Conformity 
• Being watched subconsciously makes you act in a certain way
• Relies on surveillance , or at least that idea that you are always under surveillance
• Panopticon - Jeremy Bentham 1791 (political philosopher) Design - not particularly for prison
• Michel Foucault - Interested in the mechanism for discipline, Panopticon secluding people to be on their own, the way in which its a metaphor for the way society controls its citizens, an allergy of how we're controlled in our day to day lives. Panopticon symbolises our day to day lives. Figure for how we're controlled.

• Panopticon

1. Isolation - Your own thoughts an lack of influence from anyone else, to one to relate to, can't plot, can't misbehave, gossip, stop working. IT begins the process of you internalising mentally of self discipline. The feeling of individualisation and isolation.
2. Visibility - Unknown if someone's watching. Backlit. They are permanently lit, visible, puts them on display. The watcher visible.
3. Behaviour and self control - Doesn't need anyone to exercise power over someone else, once internalised that your isolated, permanently visible, you conform to a set of idea that you think the person watching you wants to behave like. You start to control yourself.
4. Surveillance
5. Society - Shift from methods of physical control to much more subtle mental methods of control. Use of Asylum is where shift begins. Asylum - treats given as rewards, coersed subtly. First (ish) instance of modern disciplinary submerge. More effective to train people to behave than 'make' them.
6. Physical control > Mental control (doesn't make it more humane) Old ways didn't correct the defects of people. Panopticon trains, and alters behaviour.
7. Productive - e.g School - Panoptic system - makes children work harder, more focused. e.g Prison - Produces a form of behaviour in a person. E.g - Hospital - stop people spreading disease.
8. Making people control themselves - Self regulation (as said by Foucault) 
9. Power - The power to control or exercise - Power is a relationship that we enter into willingly, Foucault thinks its a fiction that people have to use of someone else. Marxism and feminism - " theres a rule and class, in which the higher have power over the poor' ' Society is patriarchal, in which men have power over women' - Foucault - power only exists because a person lets themselves be exploited by such power. Panopticon - prisoners being exploited, people choosing to be controlled by tower, isolation etc to behave a certain way. Always a possibility of resistance (a lot of the time we don't see this opportunity and just conform).
10. Panopticon makes your conform to the expected behaviour by the system, it disindivudualises the power relation - you never know the guard watching you, no personal relationship. Institutional gaze - e.g prison - act like the institution of law would want you to act like.
11. For panopticism to work, there must always be a physical reminder. You can't be oblivious to it, otherwise it wouldn't work. E.g - Speed cameras - Visual reminder, may not even have a camera in. You become so trained you react to such visual reminders, and think nothing of it. Foucualts opinion - perfectly trained individual - 'Docile body'. Someone who won't resist and will conform. You don't question anything, you just act in a way.
12. Method of control of supervised and supervisor. 

Reading from Michel Foucault






Tasks: Analyse a piece within society which is panoptic (will be on blog)


Write about 300words - Choose some aspect of contemporary society which you think is panoptic / has a panoptic mechanism (e.g cctv) Polished piece of critical writing. Use technical terminology e.g docile body, self regulation. Weave five quotes from given text into the writing. Choose a fragment of a sentence to weave into my own writing. Don't skim read, read, read again, underline, use markers in margins etc. Highlight words I don't understand to look up later.

• CCTV (fake?) Fake security camera - LED light, to make it look like its working
• Speed cameras (is there even a camera in it)
• Suburban street - Houses facing onto road - can be seen by everyone, your garden can be seen my neighbours, feel the need to improve it. Feel its for their own pleasure - they're actually doing it as there aware someone is looking at it, to impress others.
• Open flan
• Teachers computer history is available.

Read and highlight given hand out - make notes 'Michel Foucault' - Panopticism 

Makes notes on already highlighted areas

Bibliography to looks at - Michel Foucault - 'History of sexuality'

.....


TASK ONE


Response to task:


Subject matter: Modern technologies releasing your location


Quotations to use from 'Panoptism' handout by Michel Foucault






Plague; understood as a metaphor of social disorder; Foucault explains societies response to the threat of the plague as: 'a surveillance system of permanent registration: reports', a physical form of panopticism. Modern technologies, such as 'Google Maps' and Facebooks 'Places' app, allow us to invade others, to gain knowledge of their location, to subtly gain control unbeknown to the person, 'He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object'. As opposed to the panopticon, the 'inmate will constantly have before his eye the tall outline of the central tower', thus knowing they are possibly being watched upon, more so than those subject of such digital programs in the modern online age. We know such programs exist , but become, as Foucault describes as a 'Docile body', in conforming; allowing such information from being withheld; lacking to respond to such exploit of our privacy, becoming unresponsive, we fail to actually think about the affect such information could have in the hands of another, to ourselves.


Using the 'places' app; To give your 'Facebook friends' knowledge of your location, as a method of gaining feedback, to find and converse with others who find themselves within the same area. We fail to realise (Again relating to docility) the 'place' is released on the 'News feed' for all to see, it's become panoptic, 'Visibility is a trap'; the illusion to be open with your location, is some how protective, is a myth. It's a danger, once such information is realeased, you can't hide. In regard to 'Google maps', once an subject knows of your postcode, street, or city, it can be searched and looked upon. A panoptic view of someones house can be seen through a 'street view' option, it is a 'constant visability' to others. Such technologies are becoming panoptic and an intrusion to our privacy, yet, we don't react to it. For panopticism to work, there needs to be a physical reminder; the 'google maps' application works through word of mouth, through societys reliance on the internet. When visiting a new place, many of us immediately think to use the program, to then tell others the method in which we found the 'place', so there is a constant reminder of the ease of the programs use. 

Lecture - Technology will liberate us

CTS lecture - "Technology will liberate us" - Joanna Geldard

Art and its emergence with design in and through technology

What are the implications of technology on our design

Technological conditions can effect the collective consciousness. Technology can trigger important changes in cultural development.

Walter Benjamins essay - 'The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction " (1936)

Technology - An instrument for change

A work in its own right , or an image representation of the of the original.

Machine age; Modernism

Walter Benjamin + Mechanical reproduction

- The age of technology and art

- Parallel and specific to new developments ; a duality expressing the zeibeist 

- Dialectical due to copy, reproductive nature and the role of the original

- The aura and uniqueness of art

"Not as good as the original"

Photography at beginning of relation between art and design

John Berger - Looks at Benjamins essay - Thoughts and critiques on photography

'Dziga Vertov' man with a movie camera

'The camera eye has a variable gaze' - camera eye represents technological eye and progress.

Photograms - Early experiments with photography and technology

Benjamin and two parallels Freud and Marx

Photography had overturned the judgement seat of art - a fact which the discourse of modernism found hard to repress

(Lovejoy Pg 36)

Once art and design enter consumerism the values can be distorted

Original may be valued, but copy in reproduction and consumerism can make it become more valuable

Modernism - Stability

Post Modernism - Not stable

Freud - Exploring what the material aspects of technology no terms of how it can express our subconscious.

Film and virtual reality - how it plays with the subconscious

Kineticism - Capturing movement with photography 

1888 successful movements of human

Krono - photography - When we represent time and movement

Dematerialisation of art

One you look at a movement image, from a video - its now just an image, a copy, reproduction which has been transformed

Richard Hamilton - DaDa movement, photography duplication

Using technology to create an image

'Just what is it that makes today homes so different, so appealing.'

Art and Design merging together distorted and styled in context of Art and Design.

Convergence

Karl Marx and technology 

Assocoiated with the technological determinism - How it determines economical production factors and affects social conditions

The relationship of technological enterprise to other aspects of human activity

Alienation

Dialectical issues

- Technology drives history

- Technology and the division of labour

- Materialistic view of history

- Technology and capitalism and production

- Social alienation of people from aspects of their human nature as a result of capitalism

Electronic age: Post modernism

- Many electric works were still made with modern aesthetics

- Emergence of information and conceptual based work

- The computer a natural metaphor

- A spirit of openness to industrial techniques

- Collaborations between art and science

We consume technologies and new techniques

Because of collaboration between technology and industry , creates collaborations between art and science.

Seeps across boundaries - Result of technology

Computer allows art to go across other forms and contexts

Chalayan

Falling/falling , multimedia installation by Douglas Rosenberg (1998) Video become a form, object, installation

Venous Flow, states of graces performance still collaboration between Douglas Roasenberg and Li  Chiao - ping

Lori Anderson - video work (70s) Viophoneography music/video/performance/installation

' I will not make any more boring art ' Defaced and burnt artwork

Sumulation and simulacrum 

The reflection of profound reality

Makes and denatures a profound reality

Makes the absence of a profound reality

Copy of a copy of a copy

It has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure pure simulacrum

Jean Beauddrillard (1981)

Copy of an object becomes a form in its own right.

Hyper reality

Boundaries blurred between copy and original

Seen as real / understood as real

Fantasm - illusion to what is real

Word of mouth - take it as real, it masks original truth

Nam june pek

Panopticism - who is the  viewer, person of power, illusion of power

John `Walker and Art and mass media 2001 e.g Andy Warhol

The artist as media celebrity art in advertisement

Marylin Monroe Dublication - no longer art - Used in Design now

Design Age

- Digital potential leads to multimedia production

- Technological reproduction of all images so they are addressed by the computer

- New Contexts

'Blue tilt' 

Baltic flour mill - Gateshead Projection

Frank Giilette - Monkeys Birthday

The human race machine

Multimedia work

- interactivity 

- Performance 

-  Transdiciplinary

- time, space and motion explored in art use art

- Collaboration 

- Computer as a tool of integrating that media

Hyperreal ; reality by proxy bank

To conclude

Art comment on the ideology of everyday life.

Art can be expressive or progressive

Technological tools can blur the line between production of fine art works and commercial and design productions.

Panopticism - Lecture One

Panopticism

Institutions and institutional power

Notes taken in lecture

The panopticon design. Made so each cell holds a prisoner. The central tower, the guards accommodate, the tower unlit so whether there were guards in there or not, was un recognisable to prisoners. To there knowledge they were being watched 24 / 7. It was a mental state. Prisoners, not knowing this, would behave.

The pillory, a public humiliation torture device. Shoiwng society what would happen if they behaved in a way outside of the 'norm'.

A modern panopticon prision

A modern panopticon, the Brotherton reading library within Leeds university. Designed for the purpose of giving each student the space to read in peace, it in fact breaks apart the students, blocking them from seeing one another. Librarians and teachers have the ability to see what everyone is doing within the library.

Vito Acconci 'following piece'