Chapter 11: Four Areas of Cultural Studies (Popular Culture)

Different perspectives on cultural phenomena

• Four areas that are of central interest to Cultural Studies: popular culture, visual culture, material culture, and convergence culture

• Distinction not always very clear (what is being studies as popular culture could be studied as visual culture or even convergence culture)

• Depending on which perspective one choses, different questions are being asked, different theories applied

Popular culture as a contested concept

• Popular culture as part of everyday discourse

• Some people look down on it - distinction to what they call real culture, with capital C

• “Different evaluations of popular culture stem from the fact that people have very different definitions of the phenomenon in mind.”

• Referring to John Storeys distinction of five different definitions of pop culture

Quantitative definition

• Purely quantitative definition by John Storey

• “Culture is widely favoured by or well-likes by many people”

• Putting popular culture into opposition of “unpopular” culture (only liked by a small group)

• Very neutral definition, no opinion on why people like it

The shortcomings of the quantitative definition

• It is too obvious to be enough

• Too vague and not sufficient

• Examples: Bible, The Great Gatsby (in beginning not very popular)

• Not everything that is (un)popular is the same (can be treated the same)

Popular culture as the other of high culture

• Adding qualitative dimension

• Defined as “the other of high culture”

• Defining popular culture as: “culture taht is left over after we habe decided what high culture is”

• Rather schematic definition

• High culture seen as 

  • Complex,

  • Said to be focused on the outcome of individual creation

  • Art produced without economic interest

  • Difficult to understand, requires active reception

  • Made for a small group of people who possess genuine taste

  • = art

• popular culture seen as

  • Simple

  • Seen as focused on content alone and the outcome of industrial mass production

  • Commodity produced to make money

  • Consumed passively by the masses 

  • Without taste

  • Does not qualify as art

Idealized image of high culture

• This is still a very famous way to think about culture

• But very little of it is true

• Distinction between high culture and popular culture does not hold

• Relies on idealized image of high culture, assuming that true art exists outside of the circuit of culture, severed from economic needs and everyday politics, untouched by the discourse of time

Taste as an ideological category

• Storey / Bourdieu

• Taste is “a deeply ideological category”

• Not naturally given, but culturally constructed

• Often serves the purpose to present the consumption of one particular group and thus the group itself as superior to the consumption of another group

• → form of othering

The Writings of William Shakespear

• “the cultural status of different cultural phenomena changes over time, which further challenges the allegedly natural division of the cultural field into high and popular culture”

• Example: Writings of William Shakespear

• Shakespear as the epitome of high culture

• Intertextual references to Shakespear to introduce characters as particularly high cultured / intellectual

TV shows

• General understanding of TV shows has changed (recently)

• Were regarded most exclusively as popular culture, not requiring serious engagement with it, cheaply produced

• Narratives being perceived as formulaic and predictable, characters as flat and stereotypical

• Change by now to “Quality TV” / “complex TV” (Mittell)

• “TV shows and their aesthetics, their narrative structures, and character conceptions are by now considered a perfectly le gitimate topic of scholarly work.”

Popular culture as “mass culture”

• Storey

• Defined popular culture “as ‘mass culture’”

• This too, includes quality distinction

• Focus on political dimension of popular culture → this understanding being problematic and dangerous

• Frankfurt School critic

  • Working to maintain the status quo and prevent the working class from developing a genuine class consciousness (alienating the masses from their true needs, creating artificial ones and pacifying the consumer) - old fashioned Marxist critic

F.R. Leavis’ Critic

• English literary critic, influenced by Mathew Arnold

• Worried about mass culture threatening the established social order, which he wanted to defend (because he was a conservative)

• Be bemoaned the impact of the industrial revolution on culture

• Concerned about Americanization of the European cultures

• Fear of it instigating rebellion and insubordination

• > Frankfurt School hoped for a revolution, Leavis was afraid of it

A problematic theory

• This understanding of popular culture as folk culture is – in both the Marxist and the conservative version – still fairly widespread

• Idea of Leavis still popular among conservatives; Ideas of Frankfurt School still popular among left-wing scholars

• Binary opposition between high culture and popular culture does not hold

• Consumers are not the passive victims of the producers and easily manipulated all the time → instead actively engage with representation and artefacts, often creating own meanings

Americanization

• Americanization = a far more complex process than the Marxist and conservative versions of the mass culture theory

• Simply not true, that American popular culture corrupts or replaces traditional European cultures

• Process of Americanization is one process of exchange, mutual influencing, and selected appropriation 

• Europeans and other cultures no passive victims of American culture

Popular culture as folk culture

• Storey’s third definition of popular culture, closely tied to the theory of the production of consumption & theory of consumption as appropriation and resistance

• “Popular culture as folk culture” → culture of people

• Not contrasted with mass culture

• See consumers of culture as active

• Differentiation: local music society (culture completely produced by the people) and fanfiction (appropriation and changing of mass culture)

• folk culture is seen as a vehicle for the people to express dissatisfaction with the status quo and to resist the meanings imposed on them by mass culture

Strengths and weaknesses

• Stress the active role of consumers, does not seem as entirely passive

• But it goes to the other extreme ans ascribes too much power and agency to consumers

• “even if they renegotiate the meanings of cultural phenomena, these transformations do not necessarily stand in opposition to the meanings inscribed during the process of production”

• “And if the mea nings are in fact reversed in a process of appropriation, it does not follow automatically that the new meanings are better and more democratic, as the proponents of this theory usually assume”

• Unsure where mass culture ends and folk culture begins

Popular culture from the perspective of hegemony

• Definition by Storey

• Understands popular culture from the perspective of hegemony

• Popular culture “is not imposed culture of the mass culture theorists, nor is it an emerging from from below, spontaneously oppositional culture of ‘the people’ - is is a terrain of exchange and negotiation between the twi: a terrain [...] marked by resistance and incorporation” 

• = a site of ideological struggle where different texts and practices are positioned differently and allow for different interpretations

More strengths than weaknesses

• This last definition of popular culture has more strengths than weaknesses

• Good: acknowledges the power of the producers to establish meaning as well as the power of the consumers to resist these meanings and to appropriate cultural phenomena for their own purposes

• Good: it requires a differentiation within the vast field of popular culture → we can use it to identify texts and practices that tend to uphold the status quo, texts and practices which are ambivalent, and texts and practices that are rather subversive of the status quo

• Problematic: still based on the distinction between high and popular culture, and continues to transport romanticised notions about high culture

The Hunger Games - Example

• Might lead us to the conclusion that we should stop using the concept of popular culture

• This will not happen for the foreseeable future

• When one uses this concept for one’s own analysis, point out on which theory one is drawing

• Different theories → make us see different things

• According to this theory: Hunger Games is “just” mass culture, but fanfiction based on Hunger Games are popular culture

Different theories lead to different insights

• Understanding of the Hunger Games changes depending on which definition of popular culture we are drawing on

• Quantitative definition → does not help a lot; can just say that both films and vowels are popular / consumed by many people

• The other than high culture → draws our attention to the formulaic aspects of the narratives (typical piece of Young adult fiction, with first person narrator, who comes of age over the course of the story; the film rather standard Hollywood)

• Mass culture perspective → both films and novels are rather a cheap escape from the contradictions of contemporary capitalism (address some negative effects but invite us to entertainment)

The ambivalence of The Hunger Games

• Favouring: understanding popular culture from the perspective of hegemony as a site of ideological struggles

• Highly ambivalent novels and films (the hunger Games)

• Their critic of capitalism is not as superficial as the mass culture perspective would have it

• But also complete incorporated into the logic of capitalism

• Representation of katniss is quite progressive, bus representation of sexuality is conservative

• → understanding popular culture through the lens of hegemony is more productive than the other approaches - allows a more nuanced analysis