Lecture 6//critical positions on 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 *

Ideology 1.  system of ideas or beliefs (eg beliefs of a political party)
2.  masking, distortion, or selection of ideas, to reinforce power relations, through creation of 'false consciousness'.

Raymond Williams (1983) ‘Keywords’

•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

Inferior or Residual Culture

•Popular Press vs Quality Press
•Popular Cinema vs Art Cinema
•Popular Entertainment vs Art Culture

Caspar David Friedrich (1809)‘Monk by the Sea'

Matthew Arnold (1867) ‘Culture & Anarchy'

•Culture is 

–‘the best that has been thought & said in the world’
–Study of perfection
–Attained through disinterested reading, writing thinking
–The pursuit of culture
–Seeks ‘to minister the diseased spirit of our time’

Frankfurt School – Critical Theory

Institute of Social Research, University of Frankfurt, 1923-33  University of Columbia New York 1933-47

University of Frankfurt, 1949-

  

Theodore Adorno
Max Horkheimer
Herbert Marcuse
Leo Lowenthal 

Walter Benjamin 

‘Authentic Culture vs Mass Culture’

Qualities of authentic culture 

•Real
•European
•Multi-Dimensional
•Active Consumption
•Individual creation
•Imagination
•Negation
•AUTONOMOUS 

Products of the contemporary ‘Culture Industry’

Walter Benjamin
‘The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction’

1936

‘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.'