Cultural Studies and History: Popular Culture and Modernity - Research Paper Example

Cultural Studies and History POPULAR CULTURE AND MODERNITY Introduction The term culture means a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development as in philosophy, art and poetry (Storey, 2006: 1). Williams (1983: 87) suggests that culture also can be used to refer to those texts and practices whose principal function is to signify, to produce or to be the occasion for the production of meaning. In this definition, culture is synonymous with the structuralists and post-structuralists’ term “signifying practices” for which examples are in drama, ballet, opera, fine art and novel. Culture also suggests a particular way of life, of a people, a period or a group. The term “popular culture” is based on the meanings of culture as a particular way of life, as in the celebration of festivals, seaside holidays, or youth subcultures; and are referred to as lived cultures or practices. Popular culture that relates to culture as signifying practices are exemplified in the soap opera, pop music and comics. Modernity was the era during which the meaning underlying overt appearances was interpreted; and reality was sought out. The main impact of modernism on popular culture was its claim that any difference between “high” and “low” culture was obsolete (Storey, 2006: 1-2, 130). Thesis statement: The purpose of this paper is to draw on at least two theoretical approaches to popular culture, and discuss the ways in which modernity produced new meanings, new debates, and new tensions around popular culture. Discussion From its early roots in Britain, in the course of its development cultural studies has challenged established cultural norms and disciplinary boundaries. It has focused attention on aspects such as cultural theory, popular culture and the media (Knellwolf et al, 2001: 155). The development of cultural studies have influenced other disciplines such as history, drama and literary studies, encouraging a more inclusive approach to the range of concepts. According to Bennett (1980: 18), “as it stands, the concept of popular culture is virtually useless, a melting pot of confused and contradictory meanings capable of misdirecting inquiry up any number of theoretical bling alleys”. The difficulty arises partly from the implied otherness which is related to the term “popular culture”. Popular culture is always defined implicitly or explicitly, in contrast to other conceptual categories such as folk culture, mass culture, dominant culture, working class culture, etc. Whichever conceptual category is employed as popular culture’s absent other it will always strongly affect the meanings brought into play by using the term “popular culture”. The German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1978: 150-151) states that good or bad a play always includes the image of the world. There is no play that does not reflect the actual happenings in the basic fabric of society. All plays and theatrical performances in some way are related to the dispositions and conceptions of the audience. Art always has particular consequences. Brecht’s belief can be applied to all texts, and it may be argued that all texts are ultimately political. That is, they offer competing ideological significations of the way the world is or should be. Thus, popular culture is an area where collective social understandings are created, and the politics of signification are played out in attempts to win people to particular ways of seeing the world. Ideology is a crucial concept in the study of popular culture. Turner (1996: 182) describes it as the most important conceptual category in cultural studies. This is supported by Carey (1996: 65) who adds that “British cultural studies could be described just as easily and perhaps more accurately as ideological studies”. Like culture, ideology has many competing meanings. In much cultural analysis the concept is used interchangeably with culture itself, especially popular culture. Texts from television fiction, pop songs, novels, feature films, etc. always present a particular image of the world. This definition depends on a notion of society as conflictual rather than based on agreement, full of inequality, exploitation and oppression. Texts from the media, films, novels and pop songs are said to take sides consciously or unconsciously in this conflict. Modernity and Theories of Popular Culture Modernism is the term used to designate a distinct literary movement between the 1850s and the 1950s. It is defined as the “thought and action characteristic of modern life”. The social dimension of modern societies and the cultural movements within these societies need to be taken into account. Modernity refers to a form of society or social organisation characterised by industrialisation, high capitalism, etc, and modernism includes products of both high culture and mass culture (Schulte-Sasse, 1987: 5-6). Modernist culture has become bourgeois or conventional middle-class culture. Its power to undermine established traditional modes has been eliminated by the academy and the museum; and it is now the rule against which the avant garde or those intent on applying new cultural codes have to struggle. The cultural elitism of modernism is marked by a deep suspicion of all things popular. Because of modernism’s equality in level with the elitism of class society, its entry into the academy and the museum was made easier. The postmodernism of the 1950s and the 1960s was supportive of the rights and power of the people in their struggle against the priveleged elite, and was to some extent a populist attack on the elitism of modernism. Postmodernism refused to distinguish between high art and mass culture. The distance travelled from the great divide between mass culture and modernism, is a measure of one’s own postmodernity (Storey, 2006: 130). The argument that popular culture is ephemeral and thus unworthy of sustained critical attention, misses the fact that popular culture is both ideologically encoded and encoding. Mass media which are pieces of political and social recommendation joined together constitute popular culture as understood by everyone, and together they form world-views which are hegemonic or influential on other groups. For example, advertising instructs the public not only on the differentiated commodities to consume, but also to want them all, thus promoting capitalism. Further, the portrayal of women in fiction and magazines suggests appropriate gender relations and representations of women; and academic writing in the social sciences suggests an unchanging social world (Agger, 1992: 33). Marxist Theory of Popular Culture Historians of early modern popular culture have had little association with the richest theoretical perspective for social history, Marxism. The theory of Marxism assumes a series of both positive and negative concepts in relation to popular culture. Cultural studies has provided a fundamental and philosophical critique of behaviourism that is important not just as a scientific methodology, but as a component in a larger set of cultural practices that constitute a dominant code and ideology. Marxist works have also provided an alternative to the shallow and unproductive debate on popular culture between the conservatism of cultural elitists and the libetralism of consumer capitalists. Marxism has been essential in developing the third world critique of cultural domination through popular culture. Neo-Marxist cultural studies also assess and reject “State centralism and authoritarianism as well as the automatic and vulgar Marxism that defended them” (Browne & Fishwick, 1988: 156). Concurrent with the above negative functions of critique, Marxism’s positive role holds out for more genuine, democratic, participatory culture than current exploitative systems generate. Today Marxism defends the people’s culture as seen in uniting music and political concern in Latin America. To counter the centrally controlled, undirectional, politically disengaging culture of the dominant structures of popular media, Marxism demands participatory structures and practices. The call for equality in political-economic structures leads to demands for structural revolution and for the creation of empowering, motivating images, narratives and ideals to strengthen the subordinate and oppositional codes. Marxism should be in the end of the struggles towards a democratized popular culture which carries with it feminine liberation, racial justice, protection of minority rights and demilitarization (Browne & Fishwick, 1988: 156). Gradually, Marxism’s contribution is readily documentable in the past and promising for the future. In the contested area of culture, popular culture is the foremost part where human activity takes place. At the same time, Marxism continues to learn from its complex encounters with popular culture. Concurrently, popular culture analysis will continue to benefit from Marxist terminology, insights and methods in the form of cultural studies, political economy, and the structural analysis of texts. Marxism and popular culture are mutually supportive (Browne & Fishwick, 1988: 156). Marxist popular culture analysis has been most significant in examining the configurations of ownership, economics, transnational markets, and concentrations of cultural industry power. To focus on the combined power of political and economic institutions, Marx founded the study of political economy. In order to uncover the size, organisation and influence of current monopolies and cartels of media and popular culture, the best political economists draw from tangible economic and political data. The historical and materialist thrust of Marxism is used for explaining the political economy of popular media power today. “No longer can one assume that a Marxist analysis will condemn out of hand all the expressions arising out of a capitalist context or all the possibilities of cultural power present in that privately controlled, consumerist context” (Browne & Fishwick, 1988: 149-150). By offering pleasant, undemanding diversions, popular culture prevented people from sharing the challenging, deeply religious, and intensely therapeutic experiences of real literature and drama. The deepest needs of those involved in literature and related arts were trivialized by shallow satisfactions. Modernism combined with Marxism created additional impediments on the path to popular culture. To the Marxist, popular culture was like religion, another opiate of the people. It held no inherent interest, and was merely a transparent manipulative propaganda used to brainwash the proletariate (Browne & Marsden, 1999: 160). Marxism precisely established the degree to which history is determined (Waites et al, 1982: 86). Examining the forms of mass media and popular culture, Marxism sees them as occasions for more complex relations of power and meaning. To construct a well-informed Marxist analysis of literature, it is essential to take into account popular culture, recent work in historiography, theories of otherness and analyses of the contemporary political scene. It is essential to note why art schools in Britain should give shape to popular cultural ambition. This involves contrasting ideologies of social and geographical mobility. Such ideologies shape mass cultural forms only because a core function of “popular culture in capitalist societies is to handle the problem of individual success and failure” (Nelson & Grossberg, 1988: 1, 467). Adorno’s Theory of Popular Culture Popular culture lacks the possibility for creative, productive, or authentic forms of expression. Popular culture is an area of ideology that is imposed on the masses in order to integrate them into the existing social order. Popular culture produces people characterized by standardization, uniformity and passivity. The structuring principle at work in this view of popular culture is one of total dominance and utter resignation. People are equated to cultural dupes, incapable of either mediating, resisting, or resisting the imperatives of the dominant culture (Giroux, 1992: 183). According to Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), one of the most important philosophers and social critics, popular culture was equated with mass culture. This was seen as a form of psychoanalysis in reverse: that is instead of curing socially induced neuroses, mass culture produced them. Similarly, popular forms such as television, radio, jazz, or syndicated astrology columns were seen as nothing more than a form of ideological shorthand for those social relations that reproduced the social system as a whole. According to Adorno, popular culture was simply a form of mass culture whose effects had no redeeming political possibilities. The people or masses in this view lacked any culture through which they could offer any resistance or an alternative vision of the world (Giroux, 1992: 183). Adorno believed that the total effect of the culture industry is one of anti-enlightenment in which the progressive technical domination of nature or enlightenment becomes mass deception used for fettering consciousness. It impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves (Giroux, 1992: 183). In the decades since his death, Adorno’s thinking has lost none of its capacity to unsettle the settled, to discomfort those who believe, implicitly or explicitly, that the world can be mastered or even that they have a secure home in it. Adorno struck out against modern popular culture in all its forms. His critique was relentless. To most people, the comforts of modern living including the entertainment provided by television, radio, film, newspapers, astrology charts and compact disc players seem harmless enough. The media give pleasure but the people in touch with the wider world give amusement, excitement and entertainment, improve the access of all social classes to what were till then the cultural goods of the rich, relieve the boredom and loneliness of living alone and so forth. The best of their contents are genuinely popular. However, for Adorno, this popularity becomes part of the reason for criticism. He believes that the elements of popular culture are harmful, and insists on treating popular culture as deadly serious business, as something that is ultimately toxic in its effect on the social processes. (Witkin, 2003: 1). To appreciate the force of Adorno’s critique of popular culture, it is necessary to set aside any judgment regarding his criticism as a snobbish reaction to the vulgarity of popular art, advanced by a devotee of so-called high art. What Adorno offers is not a judgment of taste but a theory concerning the moral and political projects inherent in both serious and popular art. He was not incapable of appreciating popular culture, and he was certainly responsive to the films of Chaplin and the anarchist humour of the Marx brothers. It is evident from his writings that he kept abreast with developments in the major media: films, radio, television and advertising. Some of his implicit preferences are betrayed in his occasional comments. Adorno also did not fail to realize that there were highly skilled and talented artists and musicians working in the culture industries. But, rather than the skill or talent, what mattered to him were the interests they served and the uses to which they were put (Witkin, 2003: 1). Adorno took all art, including that produced by the culture industry very seriously. His critics have sometimes found his judgments extreme or unwarranted. Rather than the terms popular culture or popular art, he preferred the terms culture industry and mass culture. The latter terms carried the connotation of coming from the people. The products of the culture industry did not come from the people, they were not an expression of the life process of individuals or communities, but were manufactured and disseminated under conditions that reflected the interests of the producers and the market conditions, both of which demanded the domination and manipulation of mass consciousness (Witkin, 2003: 2). At the heart of his considerations, was the disparity in power between the individual and the rational-technical monolith of modern capitalism that dominated every waking and sleeping moment. The machinery of this system was ultimately disempowering to the society. This was true at work, where the individual was reduced to a more or less deskilled and disempowered cog in the machine because of the advances of the microdivision of labour. This was also true for the individual in his leisure time where films, radio, television and the music industry were disempowering him further by rendering him even more conformist and dependent. The entertainment industry directed its appeal to the more regressive aspect of a collectice self-centredness and conceit akin to narcissism. Adorno agreed that people desired the products of the culture industry; and he saw that desire as an index of the pathology of the modern industry, as a submissive acceptance to the domination of the system. It is difficult for the individual to resist this process; it requires both an appreciation of the fact that it is actually happening and some understanding of how it all works (Witkin, 2003: 2). The theoretical roots of Adorno’s thesis on popular culture are as wide as they are deep; steeped in German idealist philosophy. He was a Marxist sociologist, though an unorthodox one, and together with Horkheimer and others, developed the critical theory of modern culture along Marxist lines. He was also a student of psychology and a Freudian thinker. Adorno’s theoretical contribution was built on the central themes of German idealist philosophy, Marxist sociology and Freudian psychopathology. Adorno does not attempt to unify theories, or create a master system that covers them all. “Adorno’s critique of modern culture, the commodification, fetishization, and standardization of its products, together with the authoritarian submissiveness, irrationality, conformity, ego weakness and dependency behaviour of its recipients” are developed by him in ways that forge links among diverse theoretical sources (Witkin, 2003: 2). Conclusion This paper has highlighted popular culture, and discussed two theoretical approaches to popular culture: Marxism and Adorno’s theory of popular culture. The ways in which modernity produces new meanings, new debates and new tensions around popular culture have been determined. The two theoretical approaches that were selected were Marxism and Adorno’s theory. Marxism constitutes a series of both positive and negative concepts in relation to popular culture Adorno’s theory is based on the Marxist approach to popular culture. He equates popular culture to mass culture and emphasizes that popular culture produces people characterized by standardization, uniformity and passivity. Popular culture involves different areas of inquiry, forms of theoretical definition, and analytical focus. It is stated that “popular culture is fundamentally an empty conceptual category, one which can be filled in a wide variety of often conflicting ways, depending on the context of use” (Bennett, 1980: 20). In the area of drama, literature, the arts, economy, business, etc. popular culture is an area where collective social understandings are created. Various concepts have been focused on, in attempts to win people to particular ways of seeing the world. It can be concluded that the theoretical approaches to popular culture explain the various ideas inherent in the concept. Storey’s (2006: 1) statement that “The experience of industrialisation and urbanisation changed fundamentally the cultural relations within the landscape of popular culture” is found to be true, based on the theories of popular culture. Bibliography Agger, B. (1992). Cultural studies as critical theory. London: Routledge. Bennett, T. (1980). Popular culture: a teaching object. Screen Education, 34: 17-29. Brecht, B. (1978). Brecht on theatre: the development of an aesthetic. Translated by J. Willet. London: Methuen. Browne, R.B. & Fishwick, M.W. (1988). Symbiosis. The United Kingdom: Popular Press. Browne, R.B. & Marsden, M.T. (1999). Pioneers in popular culture studies. The United Kingdom: Popular Press. Carey, J.W. (1996). 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