Sociology of Popular Culture - Module 2 Vocabulary

Module 2 Introduction

Introduces sociology and the sociology of popular culture.
Encourages:
- Familiarity with core sociological concepts like social conflict theory and structural functionalism.
- Applying theoretical perspectives to analyze popular culture.
- Familiarization with cultural studies and critical theory.
- Engaging in critical thinking exercises with media images, TV clips, and film screenings.
Centers media images, television, and cinema as central areas of exploration.
Focuses on media that predate the post-2000s internet age but continue to thrive.

Topics and Learning Objectives

Topics:
- Cultural Studies
- Encoding and Decoding
- HBO as “high class” television
- Cultural Capital and Taste
- Ideology and Spectatorship
Learning Objectives:
- Organize a sociological argument using introductory concepts, theories, and ideas.
- Analyze popular culture in terms of cultural studies and class.
- Prioritize issues regarding class, gender, race, and sexuality when examining popular culture.
- Recognize language use as a key area of study.

Cultural Theory and Cultural Studies

Draws on hegemony, the theory developed by Antonio Gramsci.
Places ideology, meaning, and power at the center of its theoretical ambition.
Reiterates the importance of popular culture for the formation and analysis of social subjectivity.

Key Point

Cultural studies examines popular culture and its relationship with representation, cultural production and consumption, and identity construction.
Academic interest in popular culture is fundamental within contemporary cultural studies as an interdisciplinary field exploring the production and inculcation of maps of meaning.
Popular culture is an arena of consent and resistance in the struggle over cultural meaning.
Addresses the high culture versus low culture binary opposition.
Popular culture possesses an antagonistic element that sparks debate and has a socio-political dimension.
The study of popular culture is essential for understanding contemporary culture.

Raymond Williams on the "Popular"

Identified through four characteristics:
1. That which is liked by many people
2. That which is deemed unworthy or inferior
3. Work deliberately seeking to win favor with people
4. Forms of culture made by people for themselves (Williams, 1983)
Popular culture is debated, valued, and devalued.
The popular is a site of power and the struggle over meaning.
Challenges notions of high/low culture.

Example: High vs. Low Culture

Categories of high and low are largely bound up in subjective arguments regarding value, originality, and authenticity.
The categories themselves are arbitrary.
Popular culture’s value is largely determined by elements outside the source of examination itself.

Interdisciplinary Nature of Cultural Studies

Draws on communications, media theory, feminist and queer theory, and critical race theory.
Borrows from sociology, anthropology, and criminology.
Example: Study of youth culture intersecting sociological and criminological perspectives with gender-based critical theories.
Counter-hegemonic subcultures (goth, punk, emo) challenge dominant gendered codes through music, art, clothing, and social beliefs.

Cultural Studies and Subjectivity

Links subjectivity and popular culture in relation to individual lives and experiences.
Addresses social issues often obscured within popular culture.
Recalls the role of ideology in culture, specifically popular culture.
Ideology, in reflecting ideas articulated by a specific group, is understood in terms of power and power relations.
Example: Feminist theories reveal how representations of gender come from predominantly patriarchal points of view.
Problematic representations of gender are disrupted and challenged by feminism and feminist theory.

Encouragements of Cultural Studies

Scrutinizing cultural texts – consider how they are not restricted to holding and communicating only one meaning.
- Example: Advertisements include both an image and text, leading to different interpretations.
Recognizing the act of interpretation of cultural texts as socially and politically engaged.
- Example: A viewer may identify as “in opposition” to dominant codes reflected in dominant culture.
Challenging the binary opposition positioning so-called high and low culture in opposition to each other based on subjective valuation systems.
- Example: Module 1 collapsed the boundary between hip-hop and jazz.

Intersection of Sociology and Cultural Studies

Often intersect in ways that encourage examining popular culture in diverse and illuminating ways.
Cultural studies pays particular attention to representations of social groups in popular culture and the social world itself.
Sociology examines the social structures and structuring practices that the representations portrayed in popular culture are often reflective of in terms of gender, race, sexuality and class.
Sociology’s study of social institutions and structures informs cultural studies' text and image-based examinations of representation.

The Encoding/Decoding Model (Stuart Hall)

Pairs interacting concepts to integrate textual analysis and audience studies.
Scrutinizing a cultural text must include an examination of both the production and the reception of the text.
Example: Encoding is done by producers, directors, and editors; decoding is done by the audience.
Television shows reflect particular points of view, attempt to elicit specific responses, and privilege representations of characters or social groups.
Hall encourages the active participation of the audience to examine “the degree of ‘understanding’ and ‘misunderstanding’” between the arrival of the text and the receiving audience member’s reception of that text.
Hall sees the space between producer and receiver as where “distortion” can occur; the message itself not traveling on an uninterrupted and linear path to the receiver.

Encoding/Decoding Model - Meaning & Interpretation

Any meaning the message may contain is only activated and thus to be able to “have an effect” it must be first decoded by the receiver (Hall, 1980, 130).
Audiences generate meaning rather than discover meaning upon their reception of the message.
The text cannot fully be in charge of its final meaning or interpretation as each individual receiver’s experiences, beliefs and social and cultural perspectives contribute to the interpretation and meaning making of the text for that receiver.

Hall's Varied Interpretations

Hall theorized that these varied interpretations of the same cultural text were able to be categorized in three ways:
1. Dominant (Hegemonic) Reading: the viewer’s interpretation of the text is in agreement with the dominant or obvious meaning system operating within the cultural text. Simply, you agree with the obvious message.
2. Oppositional Reading: the viewer rejects the dominant (mainstream, “normal”) message and meaning in their interpretation of the text. This oppositional reading may create a new meaning for the specific text, a point Hall makes in maintaining receivers generate meaning rather than passively accept it as a receiver.
3. Negotiated Reading: a compromise is drawn between the dominant and oppositional readings in which a viewer accepts part of the dominant meaning, but rejects certain elements of it as well.
Hall's model reveals the active participation of the receiver as opposed to a simple passive acceptance of the text.

Discourse (Michel Foucault)

Addresses our relationship to knowledge, subject matter, behavior, and events as they are represented and constituted in our language use, declarations and statements, as well as through shared ideas as they exist socially.
Discourse constitutes the world by shaping the way knowledge is produced (Foucault, 1980, 131).
Provides a framework through which to see, negotiate, and interpret the social world around us.
Refers to the entire range of signifying practices in a society, composed not only of language but also of the codes that structure our daily practice, production, use, and interpretation of media (Haslam, 2016, 125).
Typically, dominant media institutions give rise to discourses surrounding social issues, current affairs or history, and the ways in which narratives surrounding those topics are structured then take root in larger social contexts through news media or popular culture, and as such discourse then frames and shapes our knowledge of the issue.
In recognizing the role discourse plays in the social world and our place within it then, discourse is examined in a wider social and political context as a reflection of its existence within the entirety of our social lives and living conditions.
Sociology sees discourse as a characteristic of power as those controlling institutions such media, politics and education are also those producing discourse.
Discourse, power, and knowledge are intimately bound up together.

Examining Discourses: Key Questions

How and why was a particular text articulated?
To whom is it addressed, and for what purpose?
What are the assumptions or surmises that are concealed in a text?
How do texts “organize in” and “organize out” certain interests and values?
In what ways, if any, are texts complicit with dominant and oppressive power structures? (Scott, 2006, 57)

These characteristics empower students of sociology in their critical examinations of popular culture

Discourse and Cultural Texts

Discourse, as inextricably linked to cultural texts such as an advertisement, cannot be fully and entirely in charge of determining the meaning or interpretation of any given text.
Discourse "is too multifaceted for its meanings to be completely determined by the culture producer… To put it simply, clearly different readings, some often counter to the producer’s intent, do occur” (Haslam, 2016, 126).
Dominant culture may attempt to transmit and legitimize specific discourses reflecting its interests, dominant culture, like discourse, cannot possibly succeed in gaining the agreement of us all.
Any act of mass communication “must be made within discourse, or more generally within ‘language’” (Haslem, 2016, 126) and it is ultimately “within the slippery realm of language that meaning is created. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to control the meaning from the ‘production’ end of culture” (Haslem, 2016, 126).

Activity: Hall’s Encoding/Decoding Model

Example: "Chink in the Armour" headline on ESPN.com regarding Jeremy Lin.
Consider how this image of Lin alongside the headline reflects each of those characteristics.

HBO and “Quality” Television

Addresses the difficulties in empirically distinguishing between high and low culture.
Efforts to differentiate are rooted in subjective characteristics, not objective determinants.
Classical categorization of television as low culture is increasingly outdated.
Catherine Johnson regards “quality” television as shows with “sophisticated scripts, complex multi-layered narratives, and visually expressive cinematography, combined with its exploration of contemporary anxieties” (Johnson, 2005, 61).
Feuer, Kerr, and Vahimagi stress the audience's role in elevating the quality of television.

HBO as Quality Television (1990s-2000s)

The 1990s is seen as a defining decade due to the mainstreaming of cable television, DVD collections, the internet, and HBO's rising prominence.
Shows like The Larry Sanders Show, Sex in the City, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and The Wire solidified HBO's popularity.
Later hits include Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, and True Detective.

HBO Branding

HBO was savvy in not only its programming itself, but also in its branding (like Nike, Starbucks, Disney).
NBC with "Must See TV" vs. HBO's 1996 advertising logo explaining that “It’s Not TV. It’s HBO”
HBO's slogan was a subtle shot at NBC, claiming that its shows surpassed mainstream television quality and were elevated and “originals.”
HBO has a proven track record in producing what it calls “original programming.”
HBO questions the high-low binary opposition.

HBO as a Site of Cultural Legitimization

HBO's programming is meant to uphold the high culture versus low culture binary opposition with the goal being that its shows be defined as better quality, smarter, more sophisticated than the repetitive and formulaic programming offered by mainstream networks.
HBO sought to foster an identity as a network that was exclusive, its customers recognizing the monthly subscription rate as a portal to original programming for those with critical, intellectual and discriminating taste in television.

Pierre Bourdieu: Cultural Capital and Taste

Explored through Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural capital and taste.
Structured in ways that reveal presumptive differences in social class.
HBO is considered a “premium subscription” channel with a reputation for “quality” programming reflective of its exclusive subscribers.
Cultural capital produces a value system that permits “maintaining different, and even antagonistic, relations to culture” depending on the social group or class to which an individual belongs (Bourdieu, 1984, 12).
HBO may thrive by rejecting “program standards that appeal to the mass audience, and [thus] succeed by exploiting the limited access as a means of acceptance as high (or at least higher) elite art” (Lotz, 2007, 56).

Taste as an Expression of Social Power

Our preferred texts and objects can reflect our good taste in culture and act as an expression of social power on the basis of cultural distinction.
Taste classifies and brings together things and people that go together (Bourdieu, 1984, 241).
Individual tastes are “the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference” (Bourdieu, 1984, 56).

Bourdieu: Elitism and Education

Strong correlation between educational attainment and engagement in traditional cultural practices.
Formal education plays a decisive role in developing the habit of cultural practice (Rigby, 1991, 96).

Critiques of Bourdieu

Accused of condescension and elitism.
Assumes the superiority of high bourgeois culture may not be as enduring as it once was.
Cultural industries compete in an open marketplace.
Taste is often socially ambiguous, allowing experimentation with cultural identities (Scott, 2006, 46).

It’s Not HBO, It’s TLC: Class, Elitism and Bad Taste

Example: Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.
TLC has been accused of exploiting a lower working class family.
From Bourdieu’s perspective, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo succeeds in fulfilling its primary function: putting on display and legitimizing social differences by way of differences in economic status and social class while reaffirming the belief that the more capital one has, the more powerful a position they hold in the social world.

Cultural Capital & Distinguishability

Bourdieu explains, one’s perceived level of cultural capital typically ensures one’s ability to distinguish between themselves and others in terms of their own credentials regarding education, knowledge and culture.
Questions raised about power, representation, and exploitation.

Activity: Bourdieu’s Cultural Capital

Watch "Cooking with June Recipes" from Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.
Consider Bourdieu’s ideas on cultural capital, taste, and elitism.
Questions:
- How may a viewer of this show construct their own identity in opposition to the Thompson family’s identity?
- How can a viewer identify the presumed lack of cultural capital and status the Thompson family holds in an effort to construct their own identity as socially and culturally superior?
- Does the show construct the family as inferior, as a source of humour and contempt?

Submit An Introduction to Film Studies and Popular Cinema

Investigates the ways popular cinema may influence viewers in terms of how they consume and interpret images, as well as in ways the images themselves structure the viewer’s consumption of what appears on the screen.
The viewer is a major collaborator in the production of a film’s meaning (Gianetti and Leach, 2005, 19).

Spectator Influence in Film

In order to understand the unfolding of the story structuring a film, the viewer must actively participate in an interplay with the images and the story (Gianetti and Leach, 2005, 19)
Possible dominance over viewers: limitations of the medium of cinema itself.
Importance of the viewer to the overall film itself, and in this manner, popular cinema is regarded as democratic, meaning is up for interpretation, debate, consensus and speculation.
Illustrates many of the concepts this module has explored, including encoding/decoding, “quality,” taste and spectatorship.

Popular Culture & Cinema

Relationship between popular culture and the so-called “culture wars” is a compelling one.
Those issues existing in the “real world” often continue to exist in the representational worlds the culture industry produces through the popular culture of advertising, television and cinema.
Viewers are central players in the generating of meaning in popular cinema (Hall, 1980).

Ideology (Louis Althusser)

Ideologies are not just a group of ideas normalized as common sense to a population through the dominant culture, but ideology “works beneath the level of the conscious mind and persuades us to accept the values of our culture as if they were produced by nature” (Gianetti and Leach, 2005, 380).
Normalized institutions understood as structuring a stable and orderly society: the military and police, capitalism and consumerism, and democracy and voting.
Hegemony as a process that operates in protecting the dominant ideas – ideologies – that come to be understood as common sense and “normal.”

Ideology & Popular Culture

Popular culture has the capacity to structure our views of the world as well.
Much like government, political parties and education are capable of producing ideologies that produce “subject positions through which we view the world and construct our identities” (Gianetti and Leach, 2005, 380).
Popular cinema can “‘interpellate’ or ‘hail’ us and by responding, we accept our assigned subject positions and the ‘dominant ideology’ on which the existing social order depends” (Gianetti and Leach, 2005, 380).

Classical Narrative Cinema

Have prioritized creating the illusion of reality while encouraging and guiding viewers towards identifying with the main character(s).
While watching a romantic comedy, viewers may gravitate towards identifying with the male or female lead and in doing so may sympathize accordingly while drawing one their own experiences or beliefs surrounding romance and relationships.
Althusser stresses the need to make visible the invisible nature of ideology, and in terms of the romantic comedy genre, Althusser is suspicious of its motives in arguing that the illusion of reality further naturalizes the ideology structuring the genre
Film spectators are “passive victims of the imaginary illusions conjured up by mainstream cinema” (Gianetti and Leach, 2005, 381).

Critiques of Althusser & Hall

Cultural studies “challenged the idea that audiences are ‘cultural dopes’ at the mercy of an all-powerful ideological apparatus” (Gianetti and Leach, 2005, 381).
The labour hegemony must engage in to maintain and protect dominant ideologies renders it vulnerable to challenge as opposed to defining ideology itself as unquestioned and impervious to challenge.

Empowering the Spectator

- Prioritizes the value of “what people do with texts rather than on what texts do to people” and within the process of protection and challenge Hall also maintains that “audiences are neither completely controlled by the film industry nor completely free to make their own choices and construct their own meanings” (Gianetti and Leach, 2005, 381).