Lecture 4 - Popular Culture

Critical positions on the media and popular culture

What is culture?

1.    Way of life

2.    General process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development of a particular society, at a particular time.

3.     Works of intellectual and especially artistic significance.

Marx’s Concept of Base/Superstructure

Where the base directly determines the content and form of the superstructure, the super structure then reflects on the base and influences it.

Raymond Williams (1983)

4 definitions of popular

Lesser then a real culture such as art and mass production. Needs a taste setter, historically the ruling classes are the taste setters.

·      Well liked by many

·      Inferior kinds of work

·      Work deliberately setting out to win favour with people

·      Culture actually made by the people themselves

Inferior or residual culture

·      Popular press vs quality press

·      Popular cinema vs art cinema

·      Popular entertainment vs art culture

Mural paintings, people have no right to judge them by societies standards because they have been tought in a different way.

Popular culture can start off by representing the people then then end up representing a few.

Society had a comman culture and there was a tiny  superculture

the first time this changes (base/superstructure) is with industrailsation and urbanisation, people are condensed together physically but clearly separated.

working class moved into slums. The higher class retreat to the nicer areas of the city’s.

This physical separation causes a change in culture to keep the lower class occupied. (own forms of litrature, music, pub…). After years you will see a working class culture which is very much different to a upper class culture.

Matthew Arnold (1867) Culture & Anarchy

Culture is:

·      The best that has been thought and said in the world

·      Study of perfection

·      Attained through disinterested reading, thinking and writing

·      The pursuit of culture

Anarchy

·      Culture polices “the raw and uncultivated masses”

·      “The working class… raw and half developed… long lain half hidden amidst its poverty and squalor…”

Leavisism – F.R Leavis & Q.D Leavis

“Culture has always been in minority keeping” – there has always been an elite to defend the culture.

Says basically working class culture is a form of distraction. Drugs, cheap trills, ways to break away fro reality.

Frankfurt School

Theodore adorno & max Horkheimer

Reinterpreted marx, for the 20^th 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, its quite clear how it will end, and who ill be rewarded punished or forgotten”

Popular culture vs affirmative culture

Holy oaks:

They way it has been marketed into and repackaged through the culture industry.

Adorno on popular music

Standardisation

Social cement

Produces passivity through rhythmic and emotional adjustment.

Real culture has been lost:

Individualisation

Imaginisation

Benjamin Walter

Mass production and new production technology has allowed us to redefine culture into how we want and the possibility of challenging high culture.