Lecture SIX// Critical Positions on Popular Culture

Critical Positions on 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’

The State

‘…but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’ (Marx & Engels (1848) ‘Communisit Manifesto)

Instruments of the State

Ideological & Physical Coercion

The Bourgeoisie

The Proletariat

Ideology

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 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, 

Caspar David Friedrich (1809)‘Monk by the Sea’

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

Banksy piece exhibited in Covent Garden

Graffiti in South Bronx

E.P. Thompson (1963) ‘The Making of The English Working Class’

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

–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 & 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’

•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)

    Frankfurt School – Critical Theory

  Institute of Social Research, University of Frankfurt, 1923-33

  University of Columbia New York 1933-47

  University of Frankfurt, 1949-

  Theodore Adorno

  Max Horkheimer

 

  Herbert Marcuse

  Leo Lowenthal 

  Walter Benjamin

Frankfurt School :
Theodore Adorno & Max Horkheimer 

  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

Frankfurt School : Herbert Marcuse

  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

  (of affirmative culture): a realm of apparent unity and apparent freedom was constructed within culture in which the antagonistic relations of existence were supposed to be stabilized and pacified. Culture affirms and conceals the new conditions of social life.

  Herbert Marcuse, Negations, 1968

  -  Cultural Commodities

  -  Negation  = Depriving culture of “its great refusal” = Cultural Appropriation

  ACTUALLY DEPOLITICISES THE WORKING CLASS

‘Authentic Culture vs Mass Culture’

Qualities of authentic culture

•Real

•European

•Multi-Dimensional

•Active Consumption

•Individual creation

•Imagination

•Negation

•AUTONOMOUS

Products of the contemporary ‘Culture Industry’

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

‘One might generalise by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own situation, it reactivates the objects produced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition… Their most powerful agent is film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage’

Aura

Louise Lawler 

‘Pollock and Tureen, Arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine, Connecticut,’ (1984)

Max Ernst ‘The Wavering Woman’ 1923

‘Nosferatu’ 1922

Mechanical Reproduction changes the reaction of art towards the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into a progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterised by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert’

(Benjamin, The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936)

The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies- CCCA (1963 - 2002)

Hebdige, D (1979) ‘Subculture: The Meaning of Style’

•INCORPORATION

•IDEOLOGICAL FORM

•COMMODITY FORM

Conclusion

•The culture & 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 depoliticises 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 naturalises 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.