Culture Wars and Social Justice: Week 2 Popular Culture

On Pop Culture as a tool for rebellion, and Nationalism

Raymond Williams and Culture

• Culture is historically variable. Fragments across space-time.

• Culture is abstract/concrete. Material/symbolic.

• Culture is used to make distinctions and establish power hierarchies.

Cultural Materialism

• Studying culture and signifying practices by means of their construction and conditions of production.

• Culture and its artefacts cannot be reduced to their economic conditions of production

• NOR can they be abstracted into standalone expression of individual genius

Stuart Hall’s Conjuncture

• war of position; struggle of hegemony. the exact balance of forces, state of overdetermination of the contradictions at any given moment to which political tactics must be applied

• something to intervene in, a configuration whose components were to be rearranged through practice

• call to action—intellectual, social, cultural, political.

Pop Culture as Mass Culture

• Criticism: Not always ad populum (subcultures)

• Criticism: Assumes people are passive

Pop Culture as “Authentic”

• Criticism: Deceptively descriptive/empirical

• Criticism: High vs. Low binary

Pop Culture as Counter-culture

• emerges in tension with hegemonic understandings

• struggle for hegemony

• emergent, residual, incorporated

Cultural Struggle

• Incorporation

• Distortion

• Resistance

• Negotiation

• Recuperation

Cultural Change

How cultural forms/practicies are drive out of the center of popular life so something new can take its place.

Stuart Hall on Culture

• Avoid traditionalism, it is a conservative impulse.

• Culture as something that evolves within a community/class.

Stuart Hall on Popular (autonomy vs encapsulation)

• Market definition: ad populum. To consume and enjoy the culture industry alone is a sense of false consciousness, but to look down on mass culture is… not very praxis.

• The Heroic counter-culture: authenticity in mass working-class culture. Ignores power relations between classes and cultural implantation (Gramscian hegemony)

Cultural Domination and Agency

• People have agency to self-reflect

• But cultural industries can rework/reshape what they represent. Reform their ideals to assimilate with the zeitgeist.

Definitions of the popular

• Folkways. Things people do. Overextention of “culture” as definition.

• Elite and Periphery. They feed on each other, loop back. Institutions sustain, morph these categories.

• Stuart Hall Proposes: forms/activities that develop within the social/material conditions of particular classes.

Class Struggle in Culture

• Symbols and signs are fads. Focus on positions of groups.

• More interesting is how these fads change. The power relations between something being meaningful to one group then ceasing to be.

• mapping the struggle

Anderson’s Theses on Nationalism

Nations are affective and cultural phenomena, not geographical.

• Asks: What makes people die for an idea?

Nation as Imagined Political Community

• Imagined: Relation with other members not based on kinship but assumed shared values, practices

• Limited: In-group vs Out-group; boundary-making

• Sovereign: Nation state as highest authority (Morgenthau vibes)

Paradoxes in Nationalism

• The Nation is new to a historian, old to a nationalist

• In the modern world, everyone “has” a nation, but everyone’s conception of theirs will be different

• Nationalism is a “powerful” myth but has no philosophical or rational bearing/value

Cultural Manifestations of Nation-Feeling

• Standardization of languages

• Vernacular languages/regional communities

• Emergence of maps - border-making

• Creation of symbols of national unity and attachment

Benedict on Gellner

• Yes, nationalism is the creation of a nation where it did not used to exist

• But creation/imaginary is not falsity