Lecture 6 22/11
Critical Positions on Popular Culture
Richard Miles
Aims:
-
critically define ‘popular
culture’
-
contrast ideas of ‘culture’
with ‘popular culture’ and ‘mass culture’
-
introduce cultural studies and
critical theory
-
discuss culture as ideology
-
interrogate the social function
of popular culture
What is culture?
A particular way of life
Works of intellectual and especially
artistic significance
Marx’s concept of base / superstructure
Base
Forces of production – materials, tools,
workers, skills etc
Relations of production –
employer/employee, class, master/slave etc
Supersctructure
Social institutions – legal, political,
cultural
Forms of consciousness – ideology
Base – determines content and form of
superstructure – reflects form of legitimizes – base etc.
Pyramid of Cappitalist System
The state ‘…but a committee for managing
the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’ (Marx and engels (1848) ‘Communist
Manifesto)
Capitilism
We rule you
We fool you
We shoot at you
We work for all
We feel all
Ideology
1.
System of ideas of beliefs
2.
Masking, distortion, or
selection of ideas, to reinforce power relations, through creation of ‘false
consciousness’
The ruling class has to represent its
interest as the common interest of all the members of society, to give its
ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational,
universally valid ones. Karl Marx, (1846) The German Ideology
Raymond Williams (1983)
4 definitions of popular
-
Well liked by many people
-
inferior kinds of work
-
work deliverately setting out
to win favour with the people
-
culture actually made by the
people themselves
Inferiour or Residual Culture
-
popular press vs quality press
-
popular cinema vs art cinema
-
popular entertainment vs art
culture
Matthew Arnold (1867) ‘Cultue and Anarchy’
Culture is
-
‘the best that has been thought
and said in the world’
-
study of perfection
-
attained through disinterested
reading, writing thinking
-
the persuit of culture
-
seeks ‘to minister the diseased
spirit of our time
Leavisism – F.R Leavis & Q.D Leavis
-
still forms a kind of
repressed, common sense attitude to popular culture in this country
-
for leavis – C20th sees a
cultural decline
-
Standardisation and leveling
down
‘Culture has always been
in minority keeping’
‘The minority, who had
hitherto set the standard of taste without any serious challenge have
experience a collaps of authority’
Popular culture offers addictive forms of
detraction and compensation
Frankfurt School – Critical Theory
Institute of social research, University of
Frankfurt 1923-33
University of Columbia New York 1933-47
University of Frankfurt, 1949-
Frankfurt School:
Theodore Adorno
Marx Horkeimer
Reinterpreted Marx, for the 0th
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.
Adorno & Horkeimer, Dialectic of
Enlightenment, 1944
Herbert Marcuse
Popular culture vs Affirmative culture
Cultural commodities
Negation – depriving culture of ‘its great
refusal’ – cultural appropriation
Actually depoliticies the working class
Authentic Culture vs Mass culture
Qualities of authentic culture
-
Real
-
European
-
Multi – dimensional
-
Active Consumption
-
Individual creation
-
Imaginiation
-
Negation
-
Autonomous
Products of the contemporary culture
industry today
Hollyoaks, Big Brother, The X Factor.
Adorno ‘On Popular Music’
-
Standardisation
-
Social Cement
-
Produces Passivity through
rhythmic and emotional adjustment
Walter Benjamin
‘The work of art in the age of mechanical
reproduction’ 1936
Hedbridge, D (1979) ‘Subculture; The
meaning of style’
Incorporation
Ideological Form
Commodity Form
‘Youth cultural styles begin by issuing
symbolic challenges but they must end byu establishing new conventions; by
creating new commodities, new industries, or rejuvenating old ones’
Conclusion
-
The culture and 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 depoliticies the working class, thus maintaining social
authority.
-
Pronouncements on popular
culture usually rely on normative or elitist value judgements
-
Ideology masks cultural or
class differences and naturalizes 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.
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