WHAT IS CULTURE?
"One of the most complicated words in the English language" Raymond Williams
General process of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development of a particular society at a particular time.
A particular way of life.
Works of intellectual and artistic significance
Marx’s Concept of Base/ Superstructure:
BASE
Forces of production - materials, tools, workers, skills etc.
Relations of production - employer, employee, class, master and slave.
SUPERSTRUCTURE
Social institutions - legal, political, cultural.
Forms of consciousness - ideology.
Base determines content and form of Superstructure
Superstructure reflects form and legitimises Base
If you can change the base, you change the superstructure - the way people see the world.
Easy to determine a shift in the base but not in the superstructure.
IDEOLOGY
Definition -
-A system of ideas and beliefs.
-Masking, distortion or selection of ideas, to reinforce power relations through creation of ‘false consciousness’.
Raymond Williams 1983 ‘Keywords”
There are four definitions of the term ‘popular’
1. Well liked by many.
2. Inferior kinds of work.
3. Work deliberately setting out to win, favour with the people.
4. Culture actually made by the people themselves.
Inferior Culture vs Residual Culture.
- Popular press vs. quality press.
- Popular cinema vs. art cinema.
Both are aimed at different classes.
Graffiti culture - for the people by the people. Banksy piece taken from the street and now exhibiting in galleries. Is this then considered to be popular culture?
EP Thompson 1963
‘The making of the English working class’
The working class and the bourgeois are separated both physically, i.e. where they live, obviously the bourgeois are not going to live in the slums with the working class. But also by where they go, go out for dinner etc, and lastly separated by how they are educated.
They cannot afford to be a part of 'high culture'.
Matthew Arnold 1867
‘Culture and Anarchy’
Culture is:
- ‘The best that has been thought and said in the world’
- The study of perfection
- Attained through disinterested reading, writing and thinking.
- The pursuit of culture.
- Anarchy is really what Arnold sees as ‘popular culture’ talks about the working classes as being “Raw and half developed”.
- The upper class were considered to be cultured, whereas the working class were uncultured, should not set their own culture but should strive to be more like the bourgeoisie. Arnold considered it to be the only culture, the right culture for everyone.
Leavisism.
F.R Leavis and Q.D Leavis.
- Still forming repression and common sense attitude to popular culture
-“Mass civilisation and minority culture fiction and the reading public”
- Collapse of the ‘traditional’ culture. Authority comes at the same time as mass democracy (anarchy)
Frankfurt School. Critical theory.
The progress of the school:
• 1923-1933 - Institute of social research.
• 1933-1947 - University of New York Columbia.
• 1949 - University of Frankfurt.
When the Frankfurt school moved to NY they were initially shocked by the fact that this mass/popular culture was everywhere, they were not used to this.
Herbert Marcuse
Theodore Adorno &
Max Horkheimer.
Adorno and Horkheimer were critical thinkers of this mass culture they believed that by it being called a mass culture connotes that it is something that is mass produced, mechanically produced therefore it is all the same.
All of mass culture is identical rise of the TV etc. they defined the ‘culture industry’ two main products homogeneity and predictability, mass culture produces conformity as supposed to anarchy which is just as bad they would argue.
For example gives us an example of modern films, as soon as the film begins you know how it will end, this stops you having to think about the film at all.
Herbert Marcuse says Popular culture or affirmative culture locks you into the status quo and maintains structure that illusion of a one-dimensional thought makes us not want to change the world. Affirms the dominant system when we should be rising against it, we become too comfortable where we are and there is nothing pushing us to change it.
"A false way of looking at the world"
For example the che Guevara t-shirts, by having so many of them around now a days desensitises what he actually did, by wearing one of the t-shirts does not mean anything anymore, it does not mean that you are independent it just means that you are exactly the same as everyone else who owns one of those t-shirts.
Authentic culture vs. Mass Culture
- Qualities of authentic culture
- European - although America was the epitome of mass culture
- Negation.
- Autonomous (Against Marx)
- Active consumption
- A culture that is independent of the structure or system that it was born into.
Adorno ‘On popular music’
-Standardisation -Social Cement
- Produces passivity through ‘rhythmic’ and emotional ‘adjustment’.
- The working class should leave culture to those who understand it i.e. the bourgeoisie. By them trying to be cultural threatens the culture itself.
- Music is used to escape the horrors of the world
Walter Benjamin
‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ 1936.
Benjamin took a more positive approach towards the popular or mass culture.
The idea of new technologies was a good thing, shows that society is progressing toward the future. Opening up new possibilities, possibility of working against social repression.
Conclusion
- Somehow culture is civilising. They attack mass culture because it threatens cultural standards.
- Frankfurt school attacks popular culture also depoliticises the working class thus maintaining social authority.
- Popular culture is ideology
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