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Cultural studies - analysing the idea of it
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Throw away culture - mass culture
Who sets ideas of culture - whats important and whats not
How it effects us and how we think - it social function
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Most famous in culture studies
Every time you try and define it more come away
Process of intellectual production
Very difficult to define
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Karl Marx - way of thinking about the world
Direct materialism
Split into two things - base and superstructure
Base - economic - forces and relations of production
Superstructure - culture
We live in capitalised society - this methods would argue that all parts culture, art, consciousness in some way are a direct reflex of it
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Direct product of our society
Capitalism produces capitalised culture
Not just reflect but support and maintain
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Early american trade union
Pyramid of capitalised society
Two parts to the base - industrial holding up the rich (Proletariat and Bourgeoisie)
They produce politics, law and the army
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Culture is produced by the material reality of the world
What is popular culture?
It is liked by loads of people - strange definition
Value judgements - it is inferior to real culture
Like a base version of culture
Populism - purposely tries to be commercialism - aims to be snobby or elite
Made by the populuruse - made by the masses for the masses
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Sublime and fertility
Folk Archive
All types of creative practice that wouldn't normally be shown in galleries
Street culture - organic
Graffiti and hip hop
What happens if it gets stolen by popular culture
Distinct divide
Trace it back specifically to a particular moment in industrial capitalism
Heavy industrialisation
Growth of the city
Mass factory work - people started making a lot of money
Clear line between status in society
Different stratas
Force of ghettoisation - prior to this moment there was a shared common culture
In reality the only people who made it where the rich because they didn't have to work all day and had time to think about poetry and art and literature
Illusion culture was a shared thing
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Back lash against that
First person to write or define culture - defiantly from the ruling class
Culture & Anarchy book - study of perfection
Anything with an agenda isn't culture
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Culture is there to police the raw and uncultivated masses
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This attitude thats its like a disease is still lingering today
This guy was a real member of the elite
Culture is the thing we should strive for
Gradually since the 20th century everything in decline
People who no about culture should set what other people should follow
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Its away of zoning out - switching off
Collapse of traditional society
Threat
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Equally critical of popular culture but exactly opposite position
Pyhlopsys
Around the time of Hollywood, movie stars, magazines, radio
Maintain social order - not a challenge or threat
Perpetrates it
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Culture is produced as everything as in capitalism
Mass produced like a car on a production line
Churns out the same thing over and over and over - e.g.. horror film
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What happens if you feed this monotonousness rubbish to people
Reduces peoples capacities for theoretical thought
Why are people so pacified, why not resist?
In correct view of the world
Firms and conceals the reality of life - culture act as a fog
Depoliticise us - stops us revolting
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Culture industry - churns out cultural commodities
Xfactor - produces a firmative culture
People who invest in it - exploiting the person on it - just earning loads for the top people it
Only way out working class is to perform and be judged for the higher status and they give you a little bit of what they have
Political feature - reduces to this symbol
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All popular culture is rubbish - stops us rebelling
Hates all music - in particular jazz
Produced on this production line
Covering the song - new product but the exact same thing
Mindless by it
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Actively engaging with it
Not being mindless
Instead of seeing the mona lisa in the gallery behind bullet proof screen
Its a master piece because someone told you it is
Adapt to the behaviour - in the gallery
Redefine it now - recreate/manipulate/combine
Challenge old views of culture
Experiencing a work of art and experiencing a movie
Everyone would feel comfortable judging a new film but would feel uncomfortable in judging a new piece of art
World of art as a particular judging culture of people
Popular culture we decide
Not just victims of mass culture
People form there own identities in contrsat or rebellion to it
Really important book
Punks - people who bought it weren't being mindless
About revolution and smashing the system
Popular culture giving people a direction - a chance to change the world
Always starts as being a challenge
BUT
What always seems to happen - start off as symbolic challenges but end with commercial conventional
Expression and individuality becomes bought and consumed
Critical Positions on Popular Culture
‘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 corresponded 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 production 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. Then begins an era of social revolution.
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.’
Marx, (1857) ‘Contribution to the critique of Political Economy’
‘[ 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 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 privilege to do a she likes, and beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, breaking what it likes.
Matthew Arnold (1960) Culture & Anarchy
‘This form of compensation... is the very reverse of recreation, in that it tends,
not to strengthen and refresh and the addict for living, but to increase his unfitness by habituating him to weak evasions, to the refusal to face reality and all’
F.R.Leavis & Denys Thompson, (1977) Culture And Environment
‘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 (1944) Dialectic of Enlightenment,
At a certain stage in their development, the material production 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. Then begins an era of social revolution.
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.’
Marx, (1857) ‘Contribution to the critique of Political Economy’
‘[ 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 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 privilege to do a she likes, and beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, breaking what it likes.
Matthew Arnold (1960) Culture & Anarchy
‘This form of compensation... is the very reverse of recreation, in that it tends,
not to strengthen and refresh and the addict for living, but to increase his unfitness by habituating him to weak evasions, to the refusal to face reality and all’
F.R.Leavis & Denys Thompson, (1977) Culture And Environment
‘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 (1944) Dialectic of Enlightenment,
Critical Positions on Popular 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, (1968) One Dimensional Man
‘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’
Walter Benjamin (1936) The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction
[...] in our society, where the real distinctions between people are created by their role in the process of production, as workers, it is the products of their own work that are used, in the false categories invoked by advertising, to obscure the real structure of society by replacing class with the distinctions made by the consumptions of goods.
Thus, instead of being identified by what they produce, people are made to identify themselves by what they consume. From this arises the false assumption that workers ‘with two cars and a colour TV’ are not part of
working class. We are made to feel that we can rise or fall in society through what we are able to buy, and this obscures the actual class basis which still underlies social position.
The fundamental differences in our society are class differences, but the use of manufactured goods as means of creating classes or groups forms an overlay on them.
Judith Williamson (1978) ‘Decoding Advertisements’
‘Youth cultural styles begin by issuing symbolic challenges, but they must end by establishing new conventions; by creating new commodities, new industries, or rejuvenating old ones’
Hebdige, D (1979) ‘Subcluture: The Meaning of Style’
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, (1968) One Dimensional Man
‘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’
Walter Benjamin (1936) The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction
[...] in our society, where the real distinctions between people are created by their role in the process of production, as workers, it is the products of their own work that are used, in the false categories invoked by advertising, to obscure the real structure of society by replacing class with the distinctions made by the consumptions of goods.
Thus, instead of being identified by what they produce, people are made to identify themselves by what they consume. From this arises the false assumption that workers ‘with two cars and a colour TV’ are not part of
working class. We are made to feel that we can rise or fall in society through what we are able to buy, and this obscures the actual class basis which still underlies social position.
The fundamental differences in our society are class differences, but the use of manufactured goods as means of creating classes or groups forms an overlay on them.
Judith Williamson (1978) ‘Decoding Advertisements’
‘Youth cultural styles begin by issuing symbolic challenges, but they must end by establishing new conventions; by creating new commodities, new industries, or rejuvenating old ones’
Hebdige, D (1979) ‘Subcluture: The Meaning of Style’
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