What is Popular Culture Summary, Notes
What is Popular Culture? by John Storey
John Storey wishes to map out the general conceptual landscape of popular culture. It is a daunting task. When we use the term ‘popular culture’ there stems from it an implied otherness. Popular culture is always defined, in contrast to other conceptual categories; folk culture, mass culture, dominant culture, working-class culture etc.
To study popular culture we must first confront the difficulty posed by the term itself. Depending on how it is used, quite different areas of inquiry and forms of theoretical definitions and analytical focus are suggested. The main argument the readers will take from this book is that popular culture is in effect an empty conceptual category, one which can be filled in a wide variety of often conflicting ways, depending on the context of use.
Tony Bennett “the concept of popular culture is virtually useless, a melting pot of confused and contradictory meanings..”
Culture
What is Culture? Raymond Williams, one of the founding fathers of cultural studies provides three broad definitions of culture.
Culture is ‘a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development’
Culture can suggest ‘a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group’ - they are lived cultures
Culture can be used to refer to ‘the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity’ - whose principal function is to signify. Structuralists call this ‘signifying practices’ - they are cultural texts
To speak of popular culture is to combine the second and third meanings of culture.
Ideology
Graeme Turner calls ideology “the most important conceptual category in cultural studies”. Like culture, ideology has many competing meanings. It is often used interchangeably with culture and popular culture. Though popular culture, ideology and culture address the same terrain, the terms are not synonymous.
Stuart Hall “something is left over when one says ‘ideology’ and something is not present when one says ‘culture’ ”.
The following are five of the many meanings of the concept of ideology
Ideology refers to a systematic body of ideas articulated by a particular group of people
Eg: professional ideology, the ideology of the Labour Party
A second definition suggests certain masking, distortion, and concealment.
Indicates how some cultural texts and practices present distorted images of reality. They produce ‘false consciousness’. Such distortion work in the interest of the powerful and against the interest of the powerless
Eg: Capitalist Ideology. Ideology conceals the reality of domination from those in power; the dominant class do not see themselves as exploiters or oppressors. Ideology conceals the reality of subordination from those who are powerless.. The dominant ideology is the supernatural reflections or expression of the power relation of the economic base of society.
Karl Marx “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, it is their social being that determines their consciousness”. The way a society organises the means of its economic production will have a determining effect on the type of culture that society produces. The base/superstructures are ideology as the dominant groups socially, politically, economically and culturally benefit from the economic organisation of society.
Patriarchal ideology conceals, masks and distorts gender relations in society.
This definition is related to the second definition. Ideology means ‘ideological forms’
Texts always present a particular image of the world. It depends on a notion of society as conflictual rather than consensual. All texts are ultimately political. They offer ideological significations of the way the world is or should be. To particular ways of seeing the world
Hall on popular culture, a site where “collective social understanding is created”
This definition is developed by French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. For Althusser ideology is not a body of ideas but a material practice. That is ideology is encountered in the practices of everyday life.
Certain rituals and customs have the effect of binding us to the social order which is marked by enormous inequalities of wealth and power.
Christmas celebrations offer pleasure and release us from the demand of social order but ultimately they return us to our places in the social order.
Ideology works to reproduce the social conditions and social relations necessary for the economic conditions and economic relations of capitalism to continue.
This definition is by the French cultural theorist Roland Barthes. Barthes argues that ideology operates mainly at the level of connotations, the secondary often unconscious meaning that text and practices carry or can be made to carry. Ideology or myth is the terrain on which takes place a hegemonic struggle to restrict connotations, fix particular connotations, to produce new connotations.
An example: A Conservative Party political broadcast in 1990 ended with the word ‘socialism’ being transposed into red prison bars. What was being suggested is that the socialism of the Labour Party is synonymous with social economic and political imprisonment. The broadcast was attempting to fix the connotations of the word socialism. Moreover, it hoped to locate socialism in a binary relationship in which it connoted freedom while conservatism connoted freedom.
The attempt to make universal and legitimate what is in fact partial and particular; is an attempt to pass off that which is cultural as something which is natural.
Female pop singer, gay comedian, black journalist - the first term is used to qualify a deviation from the universal categories.
To summarise, the ideology landscape is inescapable, marked by relations of power and politics. It suggests that the study of popular culture amounts to something more than a simple discussion of entertainment and leisure.
Popular Culture
Raymond Williams suggests four current meanings of popular.
Well-liked by people
Inferior kinds of work
Work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people
Culture actually made by the people for themselves.
Popular culture is to say that popular culture is simply culture which is widely favoured or well-liked by many people. We can understand this by examining the sales of books, movies, concert tickets, sporting events, festivals etc. Such counting would undoubtedly tell us a great deal. The difficulty might prove to be that paradoxically it tells us too much. Unless we can agree on a figure over which something becomes popular culture and below which is just culture, we might find that widely favoured or well-liked by many people including so much as to be virtually useless as a conceptual definition of popular culture.
Any definition of popular culture must include a quantitative dimension. The ‘popular’ of popular culture would seem to demand. A quantitative index on its own is not enough to provide an adequate definition of popular culture because such counting would almost certainly include the officially sanctioned high culture.
The second way of defining popular culture is to suggest that it is the culture which is left over after we have decided what is high culture. Popular culture in this definition is a residual category there to accommodate cultural text and practices which fail to meet the required standards to qualify as high culture.
It is a definition of popular culture as inferior culture.
To be culturally worthwhile it has to be difficult. being difficult shows its exclusive status as high culture.
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues that cultural distinctions of this kind are often used to support class distinctions. Taste is a deeply ideological category: It functions as a marker of class. For Bourdieu, the consumption of culture is ‘predisposed’ consciously and deliberately or not to fulfil a social function of legitimate eating social differences’. Such distinctions are often supported by claims that popular culture is mass-produced commercial culture, whereas high culture is the result of an individual act of creation.
This division is transhistorical - fixed for all time.
For example, William Shakespeare is now seen as the epitome of high culture as in the late 19th century his work was very much a part of popular theatre. Similarly, film noir can be seen to have crossed the border supposedly separating popular and high culture. Another work was started as popular cinema and is now the preserve of academic and film clubs. Eg : luciano Pavarotti’s recording of Puccini's ‘Nessun Dorma’.
something is said to be good because it is popular. An example of this usage would be it was a popular performance. Yet on the other hand something is said to be bad for the very same reason.
A third way of defining popular culture is as ‘mass culture. The first point that those who refer to popular culture as a mass culture want to establish is that popular culture is a hopelessly commercial culture. It is mass-produced for mass consumption. Its audience is a mass of non-discriminating consumers. The culture itself is formulaic and manipulative. It is a culture which is consumed with brain-numbed and brain-numbing passivity.
But as John Fiske points out “Between 80 to 90 films fail despite extensive advertising…Many films fail to recover even their promotional cost at the box office”.
The golden age is lost and cannot be depended on for authenticity.
Some cultural critics opine that mass culture is imported American culture. The claim that popular culture is American culture has a long history within the theoretical mapping of popular culture. Which operate under the term ‘americanization’. Its central theme is that British culture has declined under the homogenising influence of American culture.
There are reasons for this according to Andrew Ross. One, popular culture has been socially and institutionally central in America for longer and in a more significant way than in Europe. Second, the influence of American culture worldwide is undoubted. In 1950 for many young people in Britain and American culture represented a force of Liberation against the grace certainties of British cultural life. What is under threat is either the traditional values of high culture or the traditional way of life of a ‘tempted’ working class.
Popular culture is understood as a collective dream world. As Richard Malthy claims popular culture provides an ‘escapism that is not an escape from or to anyway but an escape of our Utopian selves’
Malthy “ It is a crime of popular culture that it has taken our dreams and packaged them and sold them back to us, it is also the achievement of popular culture that it has brought us more and more varied dreams than we could otherwise ever have known”.
A fourth definition contends that popular culture is the culture which originates from ‘the people.
It takes issues with any approach which suggests that popular culture is something imposed on ‘the people from above. It indicates an authentic culture of the people. It is popular culture as folk culture.
It is a culture of the people for the people. It is often equated with the highly romanticised concept of working-class culture.
One problem with this approach is the question of who qualifies for inclusion in the category’ the people’. Another problem with it is that it evades the commercial nature of much of the resources from which the culture is made. Eg Levis jeans commercial.
The fifth definition of popular culture, then, is one which draws on the political analysis of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, particularly on his development of the concept of hegemony. Gramsci uses the term ‘hegemony’ to refer to the way in which dominant groups in society, through a process of ‘intellectual and moral leadership’ seek to win the consent of the subordinate groups in society.
Neo-Gramsci hegemony theory - Popular culture as a site of struggle between the ‘resistance of subordinate groups in society and the forces of incorporation operating in the interest of dominant groups in society. It is a terrain of exchange and negotiation between the two - the dominant and the subordinate. The texts and practices of popular culture move within what Gramsci calls a ‘compromise equilibrium’. For instance, seaside holiday began as an aristocratic event and within 100years it had become an example of popular culture. Film Noir started as the despised popular cinema and within 30 years had become cinema.
The compromise equilibrium of hegemony can also be employed to analyse different types of conflict within and across popular culture.
Popular culture is said to be marked by what Chantal Mouffe calls ‘a process of disarticulation-articulation’.
Raymond Williams suggests that we can identify different moments within a popular text or practice - what he calls ‘dominant’, ‘emergent’, ‘residual’.
Stuart Hall uses Willaims insight to construct a theory of reading positions: ‘subordinate’, ‘dominant’, ‘negotiated’.
The sixth definition of popular culture is one informed by recent thinking around the debate on postmodernism.
Postmodernism and Popular Culture
Postmodern culture does not recognise the distinction between high and popular culture. There is a blending and blurring of authentic and commercial culture. Example: television commercials and pop music.
Popular culture is definitely a culture that only emerged following industrialisation and urbanisation. As a result of industrialisation and urbanisation, three things happened.
i) industrialisation changed the relations between employees and employers.
ii) urbanisation produced a residential separation of classes
iii) the panic engendered by the French Revolution encouraged successive governments to enact a variety of repressive measures aimed at defeating radicalism.
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