WHO SETS IDEAS OF CULTURE.
we are emersed in popular culture. How does it makes think?
Culture is a slippery term.
Could be a set of ideas, a body of artistic works,
a process of intelectual production.
Dialectical Materialism Method is about firstly thinking about the BASE wish is the economic situation at the time. From that everything else emerges as a result of that. Laws politc's consciousness the way we think about the world and each other. All forms of art and design are a direct reflect of all of this.
Culture can be a direct product of a reaction from our society.
The base produces the superculture and culture can reflect and strengthen and maintain the culture.
The base reality of the world.
that holds up the super structure.
systems of ideology
religion
the state and politics
These relations produces systems like the army etc. which in ways maintain the system.
If we have culture which is a product of the base. What is popular culture?
Popular culture is inferior to real culture. Its a base version of culture.
Popular culture could be seen as populism.
Popular culture is made by the masses for the masses. Opposite of traditional culture.
What politics lead to these distinctions?
Left contemplate the sublime.
Made by people but not classed as culture. More throw away
GRaffiti and Hip Hop culture.
What happens when its stollen by culture.
Is this art or graffiti
Evolution of debate.
Heavy industrialisation, process of urbanisation, growth of the city
a hyper development of industrial capitalism.
Very clear class divides happened. very clear who was the worker and bosses, rich and poor.
This was noticeable in Manchester. What happened was that because of the separation an autonomous independence of the working class emerged. The idea was there was a shared common culture. Literature art Philosophy shared culture for all the country, but the only people that made it were the rich. Too much time on there hands. In reality culture always was and has been produced by the rich. This brought out the division. Because of this the working class developed. They made things for the workers. New forms of music appeared.
A tendency appeared to talk about working class life. Literature popped up. this directly lead to the birth of chartism - movement of working class people to vote.
There was a backlash to this movement. Matthew Arnold was part of the upper class.
He wrote a book to define culture.
Anything with an agenda is not really culture.
Culture is this beautiful thing and if everyone went back to thinking about what the ruling class like the world would be a better place. Getting rid of working class culture.
Low culture.
This approach continues through the 20th century.
The attitude that pop culture is a disease or a base form of real culture.
Levis saw the growth of industrial capitalism and the industry surrounding popular culture, gradually the world has been on a decline towards the gutter as the 20th century goes on.
As culture has been mass produced its ruining the world.
Popular culture is not about living its about tuning out.
For Arnold and Leavis Pop culture represents a threat to high culture and social autority.
These were equally critical of popular culture but from the opposite position.
They argued popular culture maintains social order. There is no threat or challenge. It maintains and perpetuates it. Its one of the tools that capitalism uses to perpetuates itself.
All forms of culture is produced in exactly the same way.
The movie industry churns out the same kind of tales.
Cars industry making profits for big business.
Everything is the same its all uniform.
What happens if you feed people this mass production stuff.
Why are people so pacified in the modern world? They believed it was due to popular culture
It promoted false consciousness. An in correct view of the world that makes you not want to change it.
Strengthens the structure.
The X Factor - exploits people. They are popular at the time, then they will just be thrown away
by next series. This isn't teaching us the way to solve the problems. Its teaching you there
is an illusionary route of mass consumption.
All pop culture is rubbish - Adorno
Pre - programed, standardized music.
Chain of consumption.
He says it changes our behaviour.
Everything that was mass produced, can only be mindless.
To engage with it will cause you to be mindless.
You can create meaning at the point of consumption.
We can actively pick our way through culture.
Not mindlessly tricked, but aware of whats going on.
We can create our own meaning.
We are told things are masterpieces so we believe it but Why?
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.
Hand Out
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,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’
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