Aims
- critically define 'popular culture'
- contrast ideas of 'culture' with 'popular culture' and 'mass culture'
- introduce cultural studies and critical theory
- discuss culture as ideology
- interrogate the social function of popular culture
What is culture?
Gain culture - they grow and as they grow they gain culture - the process of general emancipation
A way of living - a certain subculture, values, attitudes, certain ways of thinking about the world.
Global cultures - thinking globally.
It can be used to describe a cannon of really important artworks or type of literature, i.e Shakespeare, Beethoven.
A marx's reading of culture is that you have a particular class/relations, and because of these relations a superstructure forms ideology.
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Culture emerges from the base, then culture almost legitimises and makes possible the relation of base production.
Culture could be a site of political conflict.
Popular culture
If you think about popular culture instead of culture, you get different answers. Theres 4 answers for this all of which are different.
1. The idea of popular culture as an idea of something that is popularly measured. The problem with this is that it leads to confused results.
2. Different but most common is that popular culture is a somewhat inferior form of culture, work that is mass produced as opposed to individually produced. Works that aspire to be important but for various reasons they fail.
3. Anything that aims to be populist comes under popular culture.Work that is easy and for the people is easy and less important. There's an elitism.
4. Culture that's made by people for themselves. By the people for the people. The working class popular culture would be brass bands.
Inferior or Residual Culture
- popular press vs quality press
- popular cinema vs art cinema
- popular entertainment vs art culture
The reason why we question wether something is good or bad comes from the fact that we're coded to think and accept certain things - to do this is flawed.
There are different levels to popular culture, and the dynamics.
Prior to modernity and urbanisation, society had a modern culture on top of a shared common culture. The first time this changes is with industrialisation and urbanisation, people are condensed together but aso physically separated. Where these people now start to live when industrialisation comes in to action the classes get really separated, working class, elite, etc.
You get a physical distinction between the rich and the poor. This starts to create a cultural separation. Classes then start to create their own culture forms, and activities- such as drinking, playing piano. They find their own form of literature and music.
This starts to emerge a working class voice/working class culture. Before this moment in charge of setting what was important culturally was the ruling class. Now there is two voices competing against each other.
Massing people together gets them to start thinking about how their culture should be, writing new ones.
Culture and Anarchy - M Arnold (1867)
He tried to define what culture was. The book's about him defining what culture is. 'The best that has been thought and said in the world'. He explains how one gains culture by the perceit of culture.Culture is the force that can minister the diseased spirit of our times - meaning the opposite to culture. Anarchy, that has its own voice heard. If we teach them how to respect our culture, they can be welcomed in, but if they start to develop their own then its classed as anarchy.
These theories start to emerge when the control of the working class starts to be questioned.
Leavisism- F.R Leavis & Q.D Leavis
- still forms a kind of repressed, common sense attitude to popular culture in this country.
Throughout the 20th Century, we have seen a dumbing down of culture. A cultural decline. 'Culture has always been in minority keeping'.
It's a form of snobbery that can still be seen now in attitudes towards popular culture - such as attitudes towards x factor and big brother, the snobbery in the way that people just dismiss these programmes emerges from Arnold and Leavis. They have an agenda.
Frankfurt School
Theodore Adorno & Max Horkheimer
'the culture industry'
At this time there was the start of mass production in America.
Frankfurt School
Herbert Marcuse
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