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
- 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.’
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
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