Culture and Ideology Notes

Questions of Culture and Ideology

Thompson's View on Class

E.P. Thompson views class not as a static entity but as a dynamic, historical phenomenon created by people through shared experiences and interests. Class identity emerges when individuals recognize common interests among themselves and in opposition to others. Thompson emphasizes the active role of the English working class in shaping their own history and seeks to reclaim the stories of marginalized individuals from historical condescension.

Raymond Williams and Cultural Materialism

Raymond Williams' legacy is significant in cultural studies, defining culture as everyday meanings and values within a totality of social relations. He identifies three levels of culture:

1. Lived culture: The culture of a specific time and place, accessible to those living within it.

2. Recorded culture: Cultural artifacts ranging from art to everyday facts.

3. Culture of the selective tradition: Connects lived culture and period cultures through selective preservation.

Williams advocates for cultural analysis to explore recorded culture and reconstitute the 'structure of feeling' of a culture. He introduces cultural materialism, which analyzes signification within the means and conditions of its production. This involves examining:

• Institutions of artistic and cultural production.

• Formations or schools of cultural production.

• Modes of production and their relation to cultural forms.

• Identifications and forms of culture, including aesthetics and meaning generation.

• Reproduction of selective traditions involving social order and change.

• Organization of the 'selective tradition' as a 'realized signifying system'.

He sees culture as:

• Meanings generated by ordinary people.

• Lived experiences.

• Texts and practices in daily life.

Williams emphasizes that cultural meanings are explored within their conditions of production, defining culture as a 'whole way of life'.

High Culture/Low Culture: Aesthetics and the Collapse of Boundaries

Figures like Leavis and Arnold distinguish between high and low culture based on aesthetic quality. Historically, this led to the exclusion of popular culture due to class-based hierarchies of cultural taste. However, these aesthetic judgements are contestable.

Critics began to argue against drawing strict lines between worthy and unworthy cultural forms, shifting the focus to describing and analyzing cultural production. This opened up new avenues for discussing previously marginalized texts like soap operas.

Soap Operas

Soap operas, such as Neighbours, EastEnders, and The Days of Our Lives, are long-running, melodramatic serial dramas. Despite declining ratings, some remain popular, attracting millions of viewers daily.

A Question of Quality

Mainstream criticism traditionally viewed soap operas as superficial expressions of mass culture. However, concepts of beauty, harmony, form, and quality are culturally relative. Art is a socially-created category recognized through specific signs, labeled by Western cultural and class elites. Popular cultural forms, like soap operas, have been bypassed for social reasons. Both high art and popular forms involve labor and the transformation of material, operating within the laws of profit.

There is little justification for excluding television programs from the artistic domain based on aesthetic quality.

Form and Content

Formal criteria for distinguishing quality work, such as subtlety and complexity, are difficult to sustain due to the indistinguishable nature of form and content. The idea that good art illuminates the real world is challenged by writers who argue art is not a copy but a socially constructed representation.

Vulgarity

Terms like 'vulgar' and 'trashy' have been used to criticize popular entertainment, reflecting a stable deployment over time. Cultural commentators often criticize the consumption of popular materials, projecting their own value systems onto others.

The Problem of Judgement

The relativity of value in cultural studies leads to a dilemma: the desire to legitimize popular and non-Western culture versus the reluctance to abandon judgement. Rejecting judgement would mean accepting whatever is produced by culture industries. Judgements are unavoidable, but must be political rather than aesthetic.

A universal distinction between high and low culture is unsustainable. Though cultural analysts may question these boundaries, they are actively utilized to maintain social power. Cultural taste, as argued by Pierre Bourdieu, marks out class boundaries, cultural competencies, and cultural capital.

Mass Culture: Popular Culture

Commodity-based culture is often criticized as inauthentic, manipulative, and unsatisfying. This perspective reinforces the inferiority of popular culture. 'Mass culture' is seen as:

• Inauthentic because it is not produced by 'the people'.

• Manipulative because it is designed for purchase.

• Unsatisfying because it requires little effort to consume.

These views are held by both conservative critics and the Marxist-inspired Frankfurt School. Critics emphasizing production talk of 'mass culture,' while those emphasizing consumption prefer 'popular culture.' These terms are evaluative regarding the worth of commodities and the capacities of consumers.

Culture as Mass Deception

Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School argue that cultural products are commodities produced by the culture industry. These commodities, while appearing democratic, are authoritarian, conformist, and standardized. The apparent diversity is an illusion, ensuring no one can escape. Adorno views popular music as stylized and lacking originality. He argues that standardized music aims for standardized reactions, structuring the human psyche into conformist ways. The culture industries, along with the family, produce 'ego weakness' and the 'authoritarian personality'. Critical art, in contrast, challenges societal standards.

Criticisms of the Frankfurt School

The Frankfurt School's analysis is pessimistic, with a monolithic view of culture industries, and it denies the affectivity of popular cultural politics. It relies on textual analysis, called 'immanent criticism,' assuming audiences take up meanings in an unproblematic fashion. This approach over-emphasizes aesthetics and internal construction, challenged by active audience paradigm research.

Creative Consumption

While popular music, film, television, and fashion production are mostly in the hands of transnational capitalist corporations, consumption-oriented cultural studies argues that meanings are produced, altered, and managed at the level of use by active producers of meaning. In an environment of 'semiotic excess,' it is harder for dominant meanings to stick. Buyers become bricoleurs, selecting and arranging elements of commodities and meaningful signs.

Meaning and value are constructed through actual usage. People actively produce sense within terrains and sites of meaning not of their own making. Michel de Certeau argues that consumption is a devious production that uses products imposed by a dominant economic order. John Fiske focuses on popular tactics to cope with, evade, or resist these forces. He finds 'popular vitality and creativity' leading to social change and argues that consumers are active producers of meaning, not passive dopes. Fiske argues that popular pleasure in media consumption contains semiotic strategies of resistance.

Popular Culture

The term 'popular culture' can refer to what is left over after high culture or to the mass-produced culture of culture industries. Cultural studies works against elitist definitions by taking popular culture seriously. Some critics contrast mass culture with an authentic folk culture, but Fiske argues that there is no authentic folk culture against which to measure mass culture in capitalist societies. Popular audiences make their own meanings with popular culture texts, bringing cultural competencies and discursive resources to commodity consumption. The study of popular culture centers on the uses to which commodities are put.

These arguments reverse the question of how culture industries turn people into commodities, exploring instead how people turn industry products into popular culture that serves their interests.

Evaluating the Popular

Arguments in the media about studying 'high' versus 'low' culture form the 'culture wars.' Cultural studies identifies and unpacks the aesthetic criteria consumers use to judge various forms of popular culture, and it dismisses elitist intellectuals who complain about mass culture. Everyday consumption involves discrimination, decision-making, and assessment of competing criteria. The best popular culture works on multiple levels and rewards detailed study.

Personal anecdotes, like buying the wrong type of romance novel, demonstrate the errors of ill-informed assumptions about mass culture consumption and illustrate consumers' capacity to actively discriminate. The assessment of music quality also depends on the listener.

The Popular is Political

Cultural studies values and critically analyzes popular culture, rejecting elitist notions of high-low culture, and has a populist bent. Popular culture is constituted through the production of popular meanings at the moment of consumption, which serve as sites of contestation over cultural and political values. Popular culture is an arena of consent and resistance in the struggle over cultural meanings, where cultural hegemony is secured or challenged. Popular culture challenges distinctions between high and low culture and the act of cultural classification by power.