Introduction to British Cultural Studies

Culture

• one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language

• intricate historical development

• important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought

Raymon Williams Culture

• Culture as „a particular way of life“; „Culture is ordinary.“ (opposed to Arnold‘s understanding of culture as extraordinary)

Stuart Hall Cultural Studies

• Central line of thinking in Cultural Studies, considered by some as the dominant paradigm.

• Culture is interwoven with social practices and understood as sensuous human praxis through which history is made.

• Defines culture as:

  • Meanings and values emerging among social groups/classes based on historical conditions and relationships.

  • Lived traditions and practices expressing and embodying these understandings.

  • Focus on experiential aspects and emphasis on creative and historical agency.

  • Highlights humanism through experience and agency.

Popular Culture and Ideology: Definition 1

• Introduction of the concept of ideology highlights the connection between culture/ideology and power/politics

• Indicates that popular culture is deeply influenced by power dynamics and political relations

• Suggests that studying popular culture goes beyond analyzing entertainment and leisure

  1. popular culture is simply culture that is widely favoured or well liked by many people

  • quantity

Popular Culture and Ideology: Definition 2

2. culture that is left over after we have decided what is high culture

• popular culture: a “residual category”: “texts and practices that fail to meet the required standards to qualify as high culture” (5-6) → popular culture is “inferior culture”

• high culture: requires some form of test (most often: test of “formal complexity”

  • knowledge of culture functions as a means to secure social exclusivity (6): notion of taste (= aesthetic judgement) → ‘cultural capital’ and ‘social capital’ complement each other (cultural and social capital are terms used by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu)

Popular Culture and Ideology: Definition 3

3. popular culture is ‘mass culture’

• 1) “popular culture is a hopelessly commercial culture.” (8)

• 2) “It is mass-produced for mass consumption.”

• 3) “Its audience is a mass of non-discriminating consumers. The culture itself is formulaic, manipulative (to the political right or left, depending on who is doing the analysis). It is a culture that is consumed with brain-numbed and brain-numbing passivity.”

  → mass culture as imposed from above / culture industries (i.e. the aspect of production is emphasised)

• problematic aspects

1) studies have shown that we do not consume whatever is offered: many products fail

2) inherent nostalgia for a lost ‘Golden Age’: 2a) “a lost organic community” 2b) “a lost folk culture”

3) “mass culture is not just an imposed and impoverished culture – it is, in a clear identifiable sense, an imported American culture”: “Americanization” → yet: American culture has often acted as “a force of liberation”

”benign version” of mass-culture theory: popular culture as providing a “collective dream world”

Popular Culture and Ideology: Definition 4

• popular culture as folk culture: a culture of the people for the people

• top-down → bottom-up

Popular Culture and Ideology: Definition 5

• popular culture refers to “a site of struggle between the ‘resistance’ of subordinate groups and the forces of ‘incorporation’ operating in the interests of the dominant groups.” → cultural hegemony

  • hegemony theory puts its focus on analysing “different types of conflict within and across popular culture”

Popular Culture and Ideology: Definition 6

• postmodern culture is a culture that no longer recognizes the distinction between high and popular culture

  • this does not imply that there are no value judgments, but that the boundaries have become blurry (and the distinction becomes futile)

Storey‘s exampleof Pavarotti singing„NessunDorma“

• Who decideswhat is ‚high‘ and what is ‚popular‘? Whoseideology? Does contextmatter? Isn‘t this rather about the exclusion of other things? 37 Dr. Piskurek, TU Dortmund

• mindset translates into contrasting ways in which different cultural forms of expression are appreciated: a) popular culture: without any proper qualitative standard of ‘taste’ b) works of high culture as “the result of an individual act of creation” (6)

• “The latter, therefore deserves a moral and aesthetic response; the former requires only a fleeting sociological inspection to unlock what little it has to offer.” (6)