Critical Positions on Popular Culture

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’ 

Marx's Concept of Base / Superstructure 

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 consciousness - ideology *

‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’ (Marx, Communist Manifesto) 

We live in a capitalist society with capitalist relations.  This argues that all forms of culture are a direct reflex and are conditioned by that form of material reality.

Culture is produced by the material reality of the world

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 is inferior to real Culture

Popularism  and trying to be commercialised, popular culture made by the masses for the masses, the direct opposite of traditional culture.

Culture made by urban youth for urban youth... What happens when that gets stolen does it become culture?

Heavy industrialisation and urbanisation, a hyper development under capitalism.  Clear class divides started to emerge.  Mass factory work, very clear who the rich were and who the poor were.  Working class area's slums and ghettos and affluent area's for the upper class.  Because of this separation an autonomous separation of the working class began, a culture made by the workers for the workers which was made for profit.  Entrepreneurs started selling and making a living off things like music halls.  What occured here was not just entertainment but a tendency to talk about working class life, political experiences and this gave birth to chartism - to give working class people the vote.

"Culture is disinterested, it doesn't have politics because it's more important than that"  Seeks to minister the diseased spirit of our times

High Culture and Anarchy or High Culture and Low Culture.

Culture polices ‘the raw and uncultivated masses’

‘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 privelige to do as he likes, and beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, breaking what it is"

Mass culture represents a threat to social authority

They argued that popular culture actually maintain the ruling class, the social system that we live in.  

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.’ 

‘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’