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Cultural Theory and Popular Culture "The battle of Cultures"
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Samenvatting Cultural Media Studies
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EXAMENVRAGEN Cultural Media Studies (100% SLAAGKANS)
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lOMoARcPSD|3930586Cultural Media Studies
1. What is popular culture
Introduction
- Can you think about what popular culture means to you?
Think about examples, memories about consuming popular culture, what emotions do
memories about consuming popular culture evoke, …
- What popular culture means to people varies greatly
Popular culture as a concept
Popular culture is always defines in relation to what it is not, implied otherness
- It’s always defined, implicitly or explicitly in contrast to other conceptual
categories (folk culture, mass culture, high culture, dominant culture, working-
class culture).
An empty conceptual category
- It can be filled in a wide variety of often conflicting ways, depending on the contextual use
- The study of popular culture in media and communication studies
- Thinking about popular culture has a history
- The study of popular culture is about relationships of power and ideology
- Popular culture gives meaning to the everyday lives of people, as well as structures
people’s everyday lives
- Varies study objects: film, television, gaming, social media, newspapers, data,…
Culture
Raymond Williams
- Cultural theorist, writer
- “culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language”
RW suggests 3 definitions
1. A General process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development
Western European culture (represented by intellectuals, philosophers)
2. A way of life (connected to place, time and communities)
Also referred to as lived cultures and practices
Western European culture: religion, sport, holiday celebrations (Christmas)
3. Products and practices of intellectual and artistic activity
The texts and practices whose principal function is to signify, to produce or to be occasion
for the production of meaning.
It’s a synonym for what structuralists and post-structuralists call signifying practices
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Philosophers, writers, painters, film directors: theatre, opera, dance, soap opera, music,…
Ideology
Ideology is a crucial concept in the study of popular (media) culture
In much cultural analysis the concept is used interchangeably with culture itself, and especially
popular culture (explains importance concept)
5 ways of understanding ideology
1. A systematic body of ideas articulated by a particular group of people
o Professional ideology: ideas that inform the practices of particular
professional groups
o Ideology of the labour party: the collection of political, economic and social
ideas that inform the aspirations and activities of the party
2. Masking , distortion or concealment.
= Ideology is used to present how some texts and practices present distorted
images of reality (they can produce false consciousness). These distortions work
in the interests of the powerful against the interests of the powerless.
o Capitalist ideology: the way in which ideology conceals the reality of domination
from those in power and the way in which ideology conceals the reality of
subordination from those who are powerless. Assumption that text is the
superstructural reflections or expressions of power relations (classical Marxism)
o Patriarchal ideology: feminists speak of the power of patriarchal ideology and how
it operates to conceal, mask and distort gender elations in our society.
3. Ideological forms: draws attention to the way in which texts always present a particular
image of the world (it always will take sides).
o Depends on a notion of society as conflictual rather than consensual,
structured around inequality, exploitation and oppression. Texts are said to
take sides consciously or unconsciously
o Hall: culture is a site where collective social understandings are created.
A terrain on which ‘the politics of signification’ are played out in attempt to win
people to particular ways of seeing the world
4. Myths, operation at the level of connotations (Barthes calls it myths)
o = Often unconscious, meanings that text and practices carry. The attempt to
make universal and legitimate what is in fact partial and particular. An
attempt to pass off that which is cultural as something natural.
o Deviation from the “universal” (White, masculine, heterosexual,
middle class) female pop singer, black journalist, gay comedian,
working-class writer …
5. Not simply a body of ideas , but a material practice (Althusser)
o Ideology is encountered in the practices of everyday life and not simply in
certain ideas about everyday life. The way in which certain rituals and
customs have the effect of binding us to the social order
o Communie, lentefeest, christmas
Ideology:
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- Brings a political dimension to the shared terrain (of ideology and culture)
- Suggests that relations of power & politics inescapably mark the culture/ideology landscape
- Particular ideas and justification of ideas of any social group (e.g. socialist ideology, capitalist
ideology)
- It is usually argued ideology supports the powerful to maintain their worldviews
- Often, ideology is presented as a ‘common sense’, ‘universal truth’
Gramsci
- Popular culture is political, because it is a continuous struggle over ideology – popular
(media) culture is a site of struggle.
Popular culture
Williams about ‘popular’
1. Well liked by many people
2. Inferior kinds of work
3. Work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people
4. Culture actually made by the people for themselves
Storey: 6 ways to think about popular culture
1. Popular culture as simply culture that is widely favoured or well liked by many people
o Quantitative index: includes so much that it’s virtually useless as a
conceptual definition of popular culture
2. Popular culture as inferior culture, the culture that is left over after we have
decided what high culture is: accommodate texts and practices that fail to meet
the required standards to qualify as high culture (so, an inferior culture).
o High culture = difficult exclusivity of its audience
↕
o Often supported by claims that popular culture is mass-produced
commercial culture, whereas high culture is the result of an individual act
of creation
o Bourdieu: it differentiates classes
o Division between high and pop: clear and trans-historical (fixed for all
time). Both have been proven not true (see commercial success:
Shakespeare, Pavarotti).
3. Pop culture as mass culture
o Pop culture is hopelessly commercial culture; audience: non-discriminating
mass
o Culture = manipulative an formulaic (passive consumption)
o Fear of Americanisation (linking America as the place popular culture is
invented)
4. Popular culture is the culture that originates from ‘the people’
o Folk culture: a culture for people from people
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o Highly romanticized concept of working-class culture construed as the major
source of symbolic protest within contemporary capitalism
o Television ad (Levi’s) = mass culture, but high culture (the Jam song) helps
selling it.
o Problem 1: who is qualified for the “inclusion” in the category “the people”?
o Problem 2: It evades (ontwijkt) the “commercial nature”, but
the materials are always commercially provided …
5. Popular culture and hegemony
o Hegemony: the way in which dominant groups in society, through a process
of intellectual and moral leadership seek to win the consent of subordinate
groups in society
o Popular culture:
• A site of struggle between the ‘resistance’ of subordinate groups
and the forces of ‘incorporation’ operating in the interests of
dominant groups
• Not an the imposed mass culture that consist of dominant ideology,
nor simply spontaneously oppositional cultures. It’s negotiation
between the 2
• Compromise equilibrium: a balance that is mostly weighted in the
interests of the powerful
• Contested site for political constructions of the people and their
relation to the power block -> to make popular culture a
profoundly political concept
• What people make from the products of the culture industries,
what they do with the commodities and commodified practices
they consume (<-> mass culture: the repertoire)
o Seaside resort was for the elite, but now popular culture
6. Postmodern culture is a culture that no longer recognizes the distinction between
high and popular culture
o Some celebrate the end of elitism constructed on arbitrary distinctions.
Other the final victory of commerce over culture
All definitions = insistence that whatever else popular culture is, it is definitely a culture that only
emerged following industrialization (changed the relationship between employees and employers)
and urbanization (produced a residential separation of classes) + panic by the French revolution.
Conclusion
Popular culture:
o Arises from the absent other
o Is not a historically fixed set of popular texts and practices, nor is it a historically fixed
category (it moves)
o Is about power and ideology: social conflict! Is about taste, values, norms and morals
o We can study it by looking at texts (television, music…) or cultural practices (going on a
holiday, Christmas)
Popular culture as other
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