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Cultural Media Studies Samenvatting
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- Universiteit Gent (UGent)
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CULTURAL MEDIA STUDIES: SAMENVATTING CARO VANHOORENH1: WHAT IS POPULAR CULTURE?
How to define it: first define 1) culture, 2) ideology, 3) the absent other and 4) the contextuality of meaning
Culture:
3 defs by Williams:
1. A general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development
= referring to great philosophers, artists and poets
2. A particular way of life, whether of a people, period or group
= the lived culture, literacy, holidays, sport, festivals
3. The works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity
= the texts and practices whose principal function is to signify, to produce the production of meaning
= signifying practices, f.e. soap operas, music, comics..
Ideology:
= a crucial concept in the study of popular culture, often presented as a common sense or universal truth
5 ways to understand the concept
1. A systematic body of ideas articulated by a particular group of people
2. A certain masking, distortion or concealment
= ideology used through texts and practices to present distorted images of reality and create false
consciousness (= mostly a capitalist, Marxist ideology)
= ideology used to conceal the reality of the powerless
3. Ideological forms: the way in which texts always represent a particular image of the world, depending
on the notion of society as conflictual and texts are said to take sides in this conflict
= popular culture is said to be a site where collective social standings are created and where the
politics of signification are played out in attempts to win over the people (Hall)
4. Ideology as a myth that operates on the level of connotations creating secondary meanings that texts
and practices carry (Barthes)
5. Ideology is a material practice and encountered in the practices of everyday life such as rituals and
customs that bind us to the social order (Althusser)
popular culture is political, because it is a continuous struggle over ideology
Popular culture:
Any definition brings out a complex combo of the different meanings of the term ‘popular’ and the term
‘culture’
6 ways of thinking about popular culture:
1. A culture widely favoured and well liked by many people
= a quantitative dimension
2. A residual category, the opposite of ‘high culture’, texts and practices that fail to meet the high
standards of high culture = cultural distinctions
Bourdieu: cultural distinctions used to support class distinctions, our cultural taste is ideological and
communicates our social positions
this definition claims that popular culture is a mass-produced commercial culture, high culture is
the result of an individual act of creation
this cultural division between high and popular culture doesn’t seem obvious
3. A manipulative and brain numbing mass culture
= an ideological machine that reproduces the prevailing structures of power
= an imported, American culture (Americanization) that represented a force of liberation against the
grey certainties of British everyday life
= collective (but repressed) wished and desires of the public , a form of escapism
,CULTURAL MEDIA STUDIES: SAMENVATTING CARO VANHOOREN
= a culture that takes our dreams, packaged them and sold them back to us (but it showed us a
variety of dreams that we didn’t know that existed), readers are locked in reading positions
4. A folk culture that originates from the people
= a highly romanticised concept of working class culture
2 problems:
1) who are ‘the people?’
2) it ignores the commercial nature, culture is commercially provided
5. Hegemony theory
= dominant groups of society seek to win the consent of subordinate groups in society through a
process of intellectual and moral leadership (Gramsci)
= popular culture as a site of struggle between the resistance of the subordinate groups vs the forces
of the dominant groups, a terrain of exchange and negotiation
= texts and practices move within a compromise equilibrium, mostly balanced in the interests of the
powerful
= the concept of articulation and disarticulation (Mouffe)
6. Postmodernism culture
= a culture that no longer recognizes the distinction between high and popular culture
= a culture that only emerged following industrialization and urbanization
= Britain had 2 cultures: a common culture and a separate elite culture after industrialization and
urbanization:
1) industrialization changed the employer-employee relationship
2) urbanization produces a residential separation of classes
3) French revolution created panic and encouraged governments to defeat radicalism
created a cultural space outside of the paternalist considerations of the earlier common culture
Popular culture as other:
Importance of acknowledging that with which it’s being contrasted
The contextuality of meaning:
Importance of context: to join together, to weave together
A text joins together with other texts and creates meaning, presuppositions and assumptions help us construct
a specific context a context is only a temporary fixing of meaning, as contexts change meanings change, it’s
an active and interactive relationship
Where should we situate media?
Mass media have been the vehicle for communicating the many texts of popular culture and have also become
increasingly interwoven into our ways of life
Conclusion:
- Popular culture is not a historically fixed set of popular texts and practices, nor is it a historically fixed
category
- Culture is plural and should be situated contextually
- Popular culture is about power and ideology: a social conflict
- Popular culture is about taste, values, norms and morals
- We can study popular culture by looking at texts and cultural practices
,CULTURAL MEDIA STUDIES: SAMENVATTING CARO VANHOOREN
H2: THE CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION TRADITION
The ‘culture and civilization’ tradition represents a ‘school’ of thought with common characteristics:
- Situated mainly in Britain, but some ideas expanded to U.S., Western Europe
- 19th C until 1950’s – but ideas still persist today
- Cultural critics/intellectuals
- Binary thinking about culture: High vs low
- Elite Minority vs majority/masses
- Culture vs anarchy
- Conservative
- Nostalgic: Pre-industrial society
- Top down: social order
Context:
19th century = a period of important social change
1) Industrialization
2) Urbanization
the masses are organising themselves, a meaningful popular culture of the working class comes into being,
which functions notonly as a means of cohesion and pleasure, but also to express political agitation
a political study of popular culture emerges
A first attempt to look at the politics of popular culture: the culture of the people
Popular culture = an uncontrolled form of leisure, which was dangerous to society:
- Threatens religion
- Threatens morals
- Threatens social order
threating culture and civilization
Matthew Arnold
“The very principle of the authority which we are seeking as a defence against anarchy is right reason, ideas,
light." = Het principe van de autoriteit die we zoeken als verdediging tegen anarchie is verstand, ideeën, licht
- 1822 – 1888
- Cultural critic, poet, educator
- Victorian England: a time of economic prosperity, strong conservative morals
- Culture = “the best that has been thought and said”, and: “culture being a pursuit of our total
perfection”
- Start cultural criticism
- Normative: defense of the dominant order
- Victorian, bourgeois morality and values
His ideas:
- Culture as having a ‘social function’
Policing the ‘raw and uncultivated masses’
- The role of the State
A strong state that claims cultural authority to overcome anarchy
- The role of education
The ‘road to culture’
The civilization of the middle and working class through ‘culture’
- Upward mobility
Through culture/art
Yet limited for the working class
, CULTURAL MEDIA STUDIES: SAMENVATTING CARO VANHOOREN
The role of media in Arnold’s ideas:
- Gradually, mass media output
- High-speed press technology
- Different relationships between bourgeoisie, aristocracy and workers Distinct cultural production
and consumption
Matthew Arnold’s ideas about culture are political because he argues:
- ‘Anarchy’ needs to be overcome:
Prevent social/democratic organization (e.g. political protest/disorder/unions)
Education is the road to culture
Intellectuals (‘apostles of equality’ vs ‘aliens’)
The role of the government
- Nostalgia, romantic dream of the past (‘lost paradise’)
Leavisism:
Frank Leavis and Queenie Leavis: writers and cultural critics
“There seems every reason to believe that the average cultivated person of a century ago was a very much
more competent reader than his modern representative”
Differences with Arnold:
- Empirical: first attempts to research popular culture
- Contemporary mass culture: advertising
- Pessimist: the threat of mass democracy
- Context: a supposed ‘cultural crisis’ (radio, film, …), but also political polarization in Europe (extreme
right, extreme left)
Mass media culture:
- Cheapest emotional appeals
- Passivity
- Leveling-down effects in a machine age
- Culture: minority in a hostile environment because their status has experienced a collapse of authority
Definition of Leavism:
Nostalgia towards a ‘golden age’, when the masses exhibited an unquestioning assent to authority
- The minority keeps alive the perishable parts of tradition, keep culture alive
- Shakespeare represented the culture of an ‘organic community’
- Resist mass through education (by learning people about poetry, art, theatre)
Fearful of commercialization
- Americanization: popular culture from the US starts to invade Europe
- Massafication: technological innovations make it possible to distribute popular culture to the masses
- A new culture of standardisation and levelling down
- The citizen must be trained to discriminate and resist it
Importance of Leavism:
- Took popular culture seriously as an object of study
- Big influence on authors of culturalism (Williams, Thompson, Hoggart and Hall)
- Took action in education
- Critical towards American import in Europe
Criticism of Leavism
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