Popular culture, contrast ideas of culture with popular culture and mass culture, cultural studies and critical theory, discussing culture as ideology, and 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 aestehtic development of a paticular society at a particular time. A particular way of life that works that is intellectual and of especially artistic significance.
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 conciousness - Ideology.
‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’.
Culture is a direct product of our society.
Pyramid of the Capitalist System
We Rule You
We Fool You
We Shoot You
We Eat For You
We Work For All, We Feed All
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 - culture made by the populous’.
‘Populism’ - something that strives to become popular.
Caspar David Friedrich (1809) - ‘Monk by the Sea’ - contemplate the sublime and the eternal and our fragility, the frailty of existance.
Jenny Morrison - ‘Sea, Sky and Watercolour’.
Jeermy Deller & Alan Kane (2005) (Folk Archive)
Matthew Arnold (1867) - ‘Culture and Anarchy’.
Cultire is ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’, study of perdection, attained through disinterested reading, writing and thinking and in the pursuit of culture. Seeks ‘to minister the diseased spirit of our kind’.
The working class.. raw and half developed.. long lain half hidden amidst it’s poverty and squalor... n o issuing from it’s hiding place to assert an Englishman’s heaven born priveliege to do as he likes, and beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes.’
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. Standardization and 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.
Frankfurt School - Critical Theory. All mass culture is identical.
‘As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, who will be rewarded, punished or forgotten’.
‘Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be the art. The truth, that they are just business, is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce’.
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 promotes a false m which is immune to it’s 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 behavior in which ideas, aspirations, and objectives that by their content transcend the established universe of discourse and action.
Culture industry - Hollyoaks ‘Babes Calendar’, Big Brother, The X Factor, Che Guevara shirt. Adorno - ‘On Popular Music’.
Mona Lisa, popular image / pop culture staple. 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 characterized 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.
Youth Culture styles begin by issuing symbolic challenges, but they must end the establishing new conventions. By creating new commodities, new industries, or rejuvenating old ones.
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