Lecture 4. Critical positions on the media and popular culture.

Lecture4
- 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 & Critical Theory
• 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 & aesthetic development of a particular society, at a particular time
- A particular way of life
- Works of intellectual and especially artistic significance’
Raymond Williams – keywords
Due to relations of class a super structure forms along with culture.
Culture emerges from the base then almost legitimises.
If you think about pop culture instead of culture.
4 definitions of ‘popular
– 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
Popular culture is seen as a inferior to culture such as the arts and ballet etc.
Work that seems to be elited and obscure is seen s important whereas work that is understood by all is not.
Caspar David Friedrich (1805) monk by the sea.
Inferior or residual culture
• Popular Press vs Quality Press
• Popular Cinema vs Art Cinema
• Popular Entertainment vs Art Culture




Jeremy Deller & Alan Kane (2005) ‘Folk Archive’






Were coded into a certain way of thinking about good/bad aesthetics , so we judge cultural art from ‘folk’ because we thinks its terrible.


The problem is we judge things that aren’t in our class but with our class judgement which doesn’t make sense.


If we saw a painting by someone that had no experiences in our class of art, we would judge it as bad compared to ours when we shouldn’t due to the fact that they do not have the education we’ve had.






Graffiti went from being against the law to being shown in galleries, (Banksey) it went from authentic culture to being popular culture.






Before urbanisation society had a common culture,






E.P Thompson - working class people are condensed together but also physically separated from the owners of factories.


You get a physical distinction; this physical separation creates a cultural separation.


So being cut of and ghettoised they create there own culture of drinking in the pub and create comical music.






Chartism – campaign for the working class to vote in their own country.






Matthew Arnold (1867) Culture Anarchy.






• Culture is


– ‘the best that has been thought & said in the world’


– Study of perfection


– Attained through disinterested reading, writing thinking


– The pursuit of culture






•Culture polices ‘the raw and uncultivated masses’


–‘The working class… raw and half developed… long lain half hidden amidst it’s poverty and squalor… now issuing from it’s 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 & 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 & levelling down


‘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.






F.R. Leavis


Mass Civilisation & Minority Culture


Fiction & the Reading Publi

Q.D.Leavis


Culture & Environment


• Collapse of traditional authority comes at the same time as mass democracy (anarchy)


• Nostalgia for an era when the masses exhibited an unquestioning deference to (cultural)authority


• Popular culture offers addictive forms of ditraction 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’ (Leavis & Thompson, 1977:100)


Reinterpreted Marx, for the 20th century – era of “late capitalism”



Defined “The Culture Industry” :


2 main products – homogeneity & 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


Mass produced culture, all the same, just generated from masses of people.


As we continue to consume this mass produced culture, it codes us into certain ways of thinking in the world, because we are fed a 1 dimensional sight.


We are 1 dimensional beings, and it stop us having free and independent thought, it makes us robots that think the same as everyone else thinks.

‘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

Lecture 3. Marxism and Design Activism.

Lecture 3 – Marxism and Design Activism

Aims.

-       To introduce a critical definition of ideology

-       To introduce some of the basic principles of Marxist philosophy

-       To explain the extent to which the media constitutes us as subjects.

-       To introduce ‘ culture jamming’ and the idea of design activism

‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways the point however is to change it.’ Marx, K (1845) ‘Theses On Feuerbach’

Marxism is : was both a political manifesto which outlined what Marx saw as a better way of organising a society, Communists.

What is Capitalism?

-       Control of the means of production in private hands

-       A market where labour power is bought and sold

-       Production of commodities for sale

-       Use of money as a means of exchange

-       Competition / Meritocracy

Communist Evolution

-  Primitive Communism: as seen in cooperative tribal societies.

-  Slave Society: develops when the tribe becomes a

      city-state. Birth of aristocracy.

-  Feudalism: aristocracy becomes the ruling class. Merchants develop into capitalists.

-  Capitalism: capitalists are the ruling class, who create and employ the real working classes.

-  Socialism: (“Dictatorship of Proletariat"): workers gain class consciousness, overthrow the capitalists and take control over the state.

-  Communism: a classless and stateless society.

This is a competition that’s put upon us since we were young, to be better than our peers and to excel more.

Marx’s Concept of base /superstructure

Base             

Forces of production          -         materials, tools, workers, skills, etc.

             

Relations of production      -         employer/employee, class, master/slave, etc

                                                                                       

Superstructure

social institutions             -           legal, political, cultural

forms of consciousness  -            ideology *

Everything  - law, culture, art, education, and philosophy can be traced back to issues of class gender politics, racial politics.

When hunter Gather were thriving there were no single relationships and the women were in dominant  because every one had sex with every body, only women knew who their children were.

‘In the social production of their life men enter into definite, necessary relations, that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary it is their social being that determines their consciousness.

At a certain stage in their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production..…From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters.

With the change in economic foundation the whole immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic, in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.’

The state – but a committee for managing the common affairs f of the whole bourgeoisie (Marx & Engels (1848) ‘Communist maifesto’

Instruments of the state ideology and physical coercion

The Bourgeoisie

The Proletariat

Religion in a Marxist reading can be the ultimate form of mental control, because it states that if you poor an live a moral life you will be rewarded in heaven.

Ideology

-  System of ideas or beliefs (eg beliefs of a political party)

-  Masking, distortion, or selection of ideas, to reinforce power             relations, through creation of 'false consciousness'

Religion and things alike create a false consciousness; we don’t understand our relationship to society.

[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,

The ones in control must create these false common interests to make the society believe that its what they want.

Art as ideology, art has always been ideology, it isn’t about one persons free expression.

-       Classical art, the only people who could do art would have been high class rich people.

-       Women weren’t allowed to be artists

-       Only kings and queens could buy art, so it was them dictating what was painted

-       It reflects the ways a ruling class thinks.

Althusser, (1970) ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’

SOCIETY = ECONOMIC, POLITICAL & IDEOLOGICAL

Ideology is a practice through which men and women ‘live’ their relations to real conditions of existence.

Ideology offers false, but seemingly true resolutions to social imbalance

Ideology becomes a mechanism in which we live our lives, it offers reasons for why we are in our situation.

-       A means of production

-       Disseminates the views of the ruling class (dominant hegemonic)

-       Media creates a false consciousness

-       The individual is produced by nature; the subject by culture. (Fiske, 1992)

-       The constitution of the subject

-       Interpellation (Althusser)

All of the media outlets are owned by 8 superior forces,  which in turn means the control everything we think.

Rupert Murdoch boasts how he has the power to control elections, historically the SUN was a torrie paper but it turned to back labour due to government funding.

Daily star – working class people

The Times – higher class

Even in classes we are fed what to read etc.

1. System of ideas or beliefs (eg beliefs of a political party)

2. Masking, distortion, or selection of ideas, to reinforce power relations, through creation of 'false consciousness'

[The ruling class is] compelled ... to represent its interests as the common interest of all members of society ... to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.

Karl Marx, The German Ideology, 1846.

Saying women don’t need to do anything but shag their way to success.

Commodity fetishism – A fetish is something that gets in the way of an act – e.g. sexual fetish.

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

-       More than a third of the worlds population (2.8 billion)live on less than two dollars a day

-       1.2 billion live on less than one dollar a day

-       In 2002 34.6 million Americans lived below the official poverty line (8.5 million of those had jobs!) Black American Poverty double that of whites

-       Per capita income in sub-Saharan Africa =$490

-       Per capita subsidy for European cows = $913

Since 1989 all communists countries died and we live in the age of no appearance.

Lecture 2. Technology will liberate us.

Lecture 2

Technology will liberate us

Joanna Geldard 2010-2011

Digital current

Art in the age of mechanical reproduction – walter Benjamin

·      Technological conditions can affect the collective conciousness

·      Technology trigger important changes in cultural development

·      Walter benhamins essay the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (1936) significantly evaluates the role of technology through photography as an instrument of change.

Reproducing or copying work becomes work in own right ir merely a copy of the original.

The relationships between art and design and media born from thes scenario between who is copying who, who is reproducing who.

 

 Dziga Vertov –Man with  movie camera 1929 The variable gaze of the camera eye. Benjamin claims a new consciousness as a result. i.e represented idealism of faith and progress through technological progress.

Freud explores the instinctual subconscious side of human behaviour 2. Marx economic gave new political models of thinking over new criteria for value of the work of art.

Kineticism

Etienne-Jules Marey. French photographer. 1888 series of successive images of the human body, kroner photographer, preperser to photography.

Etienne-Jules Marey. French photographer. His photographic research was primarily a tool for his work on human and animal movement. A doctor and physiologist, Marey invented, in 1888, a method of producing a series of successive images of a moving body on the same negative in order to be able to study its exact position in space at determined moments, which he called ‘chronophotographie’. He took out numerous patents and made many inventions in the field of photography, all of them concerned with his interest in capturing instants of movement. In 1882 he invented the electric photographic gun using 35 mm film, the film itself being 20 m long; this photographic gun was capable of producing 12 images per second on a turning plate, at 1/720 of a second. He began to use transparent film rather than sensitized paper in 1890 and patented a camera using roll film, working also on a film projector in 1893. He also did research into stereoscopic images. Marey’s chronophotographic studies of moving subjects were made against a black background for added precision and clarity. These studies cover human locomotion—walking, running and jumping (e.g. Successive Phases of Movement of a Running Man, 1882; see Berger and Levrault, cat. no. 95); the movement of animals—dogs, horses, cats, lizards, etc.; and the flight of birds—pelicans, herons, ducks etc. He also photographed the trajectories of objects—stones, sticks and balls—as well as liquid movement and the functioning of the heart. He had exhibitions in Paris in 1889, 1892 and 1894, and in Florence in 1887.

Karl marx and technology

·      Associated with the term technological determinism. How technological determines economical production factors and affects social conditions.

·      The relationship of technological enterprise to other aspects of human activity

Dialectical issues

·      Technology drives history

·      Technology and the division of labour

·      Materialist view of history

·      Technology and capitalism and production

·      Social alienation of people form aspects of their human nature as a result of capitalism.

Lecture 1. Panopticism.

Lecture 1

Panopticism

Institution and institutional POWER

‘Literature, art and their respective producers do not exist independently of a complex institutional framework which authorises, enables empowers and legitimises them. This framework must be incorporated into any analysis that pretends to provide a thorough understanding of cultural goods and practices’

Randal Johnson in Walker & Chaplin (1999)

Lecture Aims

·      Understand the principles of the Panopticon of ‘Disciplinary society’

·      Understanding Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘Disciplinary society

·      Consider the idea that disciplinary society is a way of making individuals productive and useful

·      Understand the Foucault’s idea of techniques of the body and docile bodies

Michel Foucault

(1926-1984)

-       Madness and civilisation  - surveys the rise of asylum and psychiatry

-       Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison – surveys the prison mainly the modern prison

-       The Great Confinement (late 1600’s)

Those who couldn’t of wouldn’t work were stigmisised and thrown into th great confiment, usually mentally ill, single mothers, lazy people etc. in these house people were put to work and forced.

-       ‘Houses of correction’ to curb unemployment and idleness

Houses of protection rather than make people productive corrupted people more insane made the sane people more deviant

Specialist institutions were born and asylums were invented.

The birth of the asylum.

Asylums were different to houses of correction, inside asylums inmates were controlled in different ways, not shackled and beaten to work, instead they were treated like children and rewarded if they did things right.

This was the moment for fuco when they realise there are better ways to control people, with the birth of the asylum there was a shift from controlling people physically to mentally

-       The emergence of forms of knowledge –biology, psychiatry, medicine, etc. – legitimises the practises of hospitals, doctors, and psychiatry’s.

Those who were abnormal, were punished in spectacular ways, in public embarrassment, these weren’t a personal attack on an individual these were to show others what would happen.

Disciplinary SOCIETY

And

Disciplinary POWER

Discipline Is a technology is a technique and its not just about showing your power to the world its about controlling your conduct and behaviour and how to improve your performance and making yourself useful to society.

Jeremy Bentham’s design

the Panopticon

proposed 1791

IMAGE

Multitude of functions, a school an asylum, a prison.

Each cell had a wall with a window in the back so the cell was constantly backlit

A central tower with guards keeping watch over.

‘Millbank Prison’

Institutional ‘gaze’

It is described as the ideal mechanism for the institutional

Each prisoner cannot see each other but there always being watched, but they never know if they in fact are, the central tower wasn’t lit so they didn’t know if there were guards in their.

‘knowing you could be being watched but never knowing if your actually being watched has a peculiar feeling, it makes the person being watched act as the watcher would want them to act.

This automatically makes the building work exactly how they want it to act.

This stopped people from trying to escape, this eventually meant there would be no need for guards to be in the tower.

-       Allows scrutiny

-       Allows supervisor to experiment on subjects

-       Aims to make the productive

The way lectures work, with the tutor sat  observing us all, and us only looking at him and knowing we are being watched then makes us do work more.

-       Reforms prisoners

-       Helps treat patients

-       Helps instruct school children

-       Helps confine but also study the insane

-       Helps supervise workers

-       what Foucault is describing is a transformation in weterns societies from a form of power imposed by a ruler of sovereign to…. A NEW MODE OF POWER CALLED PANOPTICISM

Open plan office isn’t just a trendy design, its efficient for the boss, it allows the boss to see if people are on the internet and not doing work, this makes people realise there being watched there stopping them from not working.