Name- Vyas Nupur Hiteshbhai
Roll number- 39
Batch year- 2015-2017
Subject - paper- 8 cultural studies
Topic- popular culture
Submitted to Department of English, MKBU, India, Gujarat
(Bhavnagar).
Email id- nupurvyas1995@gmail. com
What do you mean by culture?
Culture derives from 'cultura' and colere, meaning 'to cultivate'. It also meant 'to
honour' and 'protect'. By the nineteenth century in Europe it meant the habits
, customs and tastes of the upper classes (also known as the elite).
What 'culture' means now in Cultural Studies:
'Culture' is the mode of generating meanings and ideas. This
mode is a negotiation over which meanings are valid.Meanings are governed by
power relations.Elite culture controls meanings because it control the terms of
the debate. Non- elite views on life and art are rejected as 'tasteless,' 'useless'
or even stupid by the elite.
Popular culture
Cultural Studies
looks at mass or popular culture and every day life. Popular culture is the
culture of the masses.It is graffiti, comic books, mass cinema (as opposed to 'art
cinema'),popular music (as opposed to classical music), the open spaces of the
city( as opposed to art galleries), sports.... it is the culture of the every
daylife of the larger number of people.
For a very long
time such forms of art were dismissed as 'inferior'. The term 'mass culture'
was used pejoratively. The only 'true' culture was that of the elite members of
society. The culture of the wealthy minority selction of the population
was projected as the ' 'standard' or ' 'true' culture was that of the elite member
of society. The culture of the wealthy minority section of the population was
projected as the 'standard' or 'true' culture.so academic studies would look at
'great work of art' or 'classical authors', ignoring the fact that the greater
number of people never viewed these are forms or read these classical authors.
Standards of judgment and ideas of taste were framed using these elite forms as
examples. Certain authors, forms and genres were given repeatability as 'culture'.
That is, the very term 'culture' came to be associated with a smaller section of
the population and their tastes.
What this means is
that the upper classes in a society legitimize certain artefacts as 'culture'.
Some objects - a painting by M.F.Hussain, the writings of ravindranath Tagore
and William Shakespeare, the films of satyajit Ray- acquired an aura of respectability as 'culture'. Most
critics did not discuss Sidney Sheldon or the films of Manmohan Desai as' art',
relegating them to the realm of 'popular culture'.
In the 1950s and
1960s a change in focus came about in cultural analysis. Scholars started
taking popular culture seriously. In 1969 the Department of popular culture at
Bowling Green University (USA) launched the journal of popular culture. The
journal carried essay on Spiderman comics, rock music, amusement Park, the
detective film and other such forms of popular culture. It is in popular
culture studies that Cultural studies finds its first moments.
Cultural studies argues that culture
is about the meanings a community /society generates. This process is not easy,
as those in power seek to control meanings. For this purpose certain forms of
art and their meanings are treated as inferior. Cultural studies argued that
the objects and artefacts that are used- made sense of - by the masses must be
taken seriously. Such forms of art as comic strips or the detective novel are
made by the people for themselves, as Raymond Williams pointed out (1983).
Popular culture is, for cultural studies , the set of beliefs, values and
practices that are widely shared. Popular culture is the set of practices , aartefacts
and beliefs shared by the masses , and is constituted by the every day life of
the masses; the food habits, fashion, forms of transport, the music, the
reading habits, the spaces they occupy and traverse.
Popular culture studies is the academic discipline studying
popular culture from a critical theory perspective. It is generally considered
as a combination of communication studies and cultural studies. The first
department to offer Popular Culture bachelor and master degrees is the Bowling
Green State University Department of Popular Culture which was founded by Ray
B. Browne.
Following the work of the Frankfurt School, popular culture
has come to be taken more seriously as a terrain of academic inquiry and has
also helped to change the outlooks of more established disciplines. Conceptual
barriers between so-called high and low culture have broken down, accompanying
an explosion in scholarly interest in popular culture, which encompasses such
diverse media as comic books, television, and the Internet. Reevaluation of
mass culture in the 1970s and 1980s has revealed significant problems with the traditional
view of mass culture as degraded and elite culture as uplifting. Divisions
between high and low culture have been increasingly seen as political
distinctions rather than defensible aesthetic or intellectual ones.
Mass society formed during the 19th-century
industrialization process through the division of labor, the large-scale
industrial organization, the concentration of urban populations, the growing
centralization of decision making, the development of a complex and
international communication system and the growth of mass political movements.
The term "mass society", therefore, was introduced by anticapitalist,
aristocratic ideologists and used against the values and practices of
industrialized society.
As Alan Swingewood points out in The Myth of Mass Culture,
the aristocratic theory of mass society is to be linked to the moral crisis
caused by the weakening of traditional centers of authority such as family and
religion. The society predicted by José Ortega y Gasset, T. S. Eliot and others
would be dominated by philistine masses, without centers or hierarchies of
moral or cultural authority. In such a society, art can only survive by cutting
its links with the masses, by withdrawing as an asylum for threatened values.
Throughout the 20th century, this type of theory has modulated on the
opposition between disinterested, pure autonomous art and commercialized mass
culture.
Diametrically opposed to the aristocratic view would be the
theory of culture industry developed by Frankfurt School critical theorists
such as Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse. In their view,
the masses are precisely dominated by an all-encompassing culture industry
obeying only to the logic of consumer capitalism.[citation needed] Antonio
Gramsci's concept of hegemony (see: cultural hegemony), that is, the domination
of society by a specific group which stays in power by partially taking care of
and partially repressing the claims of other groups, does not work here
anymore. The principle of hegemony as a goal to achieve for an oppressed social
class loses its meaning. The system has taken over; only the state apparatus
dominates.
Aside from precursors such as Umberto Eco and Roland
Barthes, popular culture studies as we know them today were developed in the
late seventies and the eighties. The first influential works were generally
politically left-wing and rejected the "aristocratic" view. However,
they also criticized the pessimism of the Frankfurt School: contemporary
studies on mass culture accept that, apparently, popular culture forms do
respond to widespread needs of the public. They also emphasized the capacity of
the consumers to resist indoctrination and passive reception. Finally, they
avoided any monolithic concept of mass culture. Instead they tried to describe
culture as a whole as a complex formation of discourses which correspond to
particular interests, and which can be dominated by specific groups, but which
also always are dialectically related to their producers and consumers.
An example of this tendency is Andrew Ross's No Respect.
Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989). His chapter on the history of jazz,
blues and rock does not present a linear narrative opposing the authentic
popular music to the commercial record industry, but shows how popular music in
the U.S., from the twenties until today, evolved out of complex interactions
between popular, avant-garde and commercial circuits, between lower- and
middle-class youth, between blacks and whites.
The question whether popular culture or mass culture is
inherently conservative, or whether it can be used in a subversive strategy as
well, is equally hotly debated. It seems widely accepted that popular culture
forms can function at any moment as anti-cultures. "Bad taste"
products such as pornography and horror fiction, says for instance Andrew Ross,draw
their popular appeal precisely from their expressions of disrespect for the
imposed lessons of educated taste. They are expressions of social resentment on
the part of groups which have been subordinated and excluded by today's
"civilized society".
The question whether popular culture can actually resist
dominant ideology, or even contribute to social change, is much more difficult
to answer. Many critics easily read popular fiction and film as "attacks
against the system", neglecting both the exact ways in which the so-called
revolutionary message is enacted, and the capacities of dominant doctrines to
recuperate critical messages. Tania Modleski in "The Terror of Pleasure",
for instance, presents exploitation horror films as attacks on the basic
aspects of bourgeois culture. Thus a loving father cannibalizes his child, and
priests turn into servants of the devil. Other scholars claim that, by
presenting their perversion as supernatural, or at least pathological, horror
films precisely contribute to perpetuating those institutions.
Similarly, many critics exalt stories which feature a lone
hero fighting for his ideals against an inert and amoral system. Thus Jim
Collins in Uncommon Culturessees crime fiction opposing a smart private
detective and an inefficient police force as a critique of state justice. On
the other hand, Thomas Roberts demonstrates in An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction,a
study of the historical background of the private detective model, how the
detective story came into existence in the middle of the 19th century, at the
time the institution of state police was developed. This force consisted mainly
of lower-class people, but nevertheless disposed of a certain authority over
the upper class. The fears among the upper classes for this uncontrolled force
were eased by domesticating the police in stories explicitly devoted to them.
Their inability to pass on correct judgment was amply demonstrated, and forced
them to bow for the individual intellect of the detective, who always belonged
to the threatened upper class.
Finally, Umberto Eco's studies on Superman and James Bond as
myths of a static good-and-evil world view should be mentioned as very early
and lucid examples of a combination of semiotic and political analysis.
Still, there may be ways to wage revolt in an age of mass
media. One way could be to introduce small gradual changes in products
otherwise conforming to the requirements of a dominant ideology. The problem here,
of course, is that isolated messages get drowned in the discourse as a whole,
and that they can be used to avoid real changes. Some scholars, however,
describe how opposition forces use the logic of the media to subvert them. In
No Respect,Andrew Ross mentions the late sixties Yippie movement. Yippies would
stage media events, such as the public burning of dollar bills in Wall Street,
thereby drawing heavy media coverage. This politics of the spectacle brought
the counterculture right into the conservative media and filled their forms
with subversive content.
Whether this strategy is effective or not, it points to an
important fact: the mass media are not above, but dependent on the public. As
Alan Swingewood states in The Myth of Mass Culture, the ideological messages
the mass media receive are already mediated by a complex network of
institutions and discourses. The media, themselves divided over innumerable
specific discourses, transform them again. And finally the public meaningfully
relates those messages to individual existences through the mediation of social
groups, family networks.
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