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Popular culture studies

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Culture and Diversity

   Popular culture studies is the academic discipline studying popular
   culture. It is generally considered as a combination of communication
   studies and cultural studies. Academic discussions on popular culture
   started as soon as contemporary mass society formed itself and the
   views on popular culture that were developed then still influence
   contemporary popular culture studies.

   Following the social upheavals of the 1960s, popular culture has come
   to be taken more seriously as a terrain of academic enquiry and has
   also helped to change the outlooks of more established disciplines.
   Conceptual barriers between so-called high and low culture have broken
   down, accompanying an explosion in scholarly interest in popular
   culture, which encompasses such diverse mediums as comic books,
   television and the Internet. Reevaluation of mass culture in the 1970s
   and 1980s has revealed significant problems with the traditional view
   of mass culture as degraded and elite culture as uplifting. Divisions
   between high and low culture have been increasingly seen as political
   distinctions rather than defensible aesthetic or intellectual ones
   (Mukerji & Schudson 1991:1-2).

Traditional theories of popular culture

The theory of mass society

   Mass society formed itself during the 19th-century industrialization
   process through the division of labor, the large-scale industrial
   organization, the concentration of urban populations, the growing
   centralization of decision making, the development of a complex and
   international communication system and the growth of mass political
   movements. The term "mass society", therefore, was introduced by
   anticapitalist, aristocratic ideologists and used against the values
   and practices of industrialized society.

   As Alan Swingewood points out in The Myth of Mass Culture (1977:5-8),
   the aristocratic theory of mass society is to be linked to the moral
   crisis caused by the weakening of traditional centers of authority such
   as family and religion. The society predicted by José Ortega y Gasset,
   T.S. Eliot and others would be dominated by philistine masses, without
   centers or hierarchies of moral or cultural authority. In such a
   society, art can only survive by cutting its links with the masses, by
   withdrawing as an asylum for threatened values. Throughout the 20th
   century, this type of theory has modulated on the opposition between
   disinterested, pure autonomous art and commercialized mass culture.

The theory of culture industry

   Diametrically opposed to the aristocratic view would be the theory of
   culture industry developed by Frankfurt School theoreticians such as
   Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse. In their view,
   the masses are precisely dominated by an all-encompassing culture
   industry obeying only to the logic of consumer capitalism. Gramsci's
   concept of hegemony (see: cultural hegemony), that is, the domination
   of society by a specific group which stays in power by partially taking
   care of and partially repressing the claims of other groups, does not
   work here anymore. The principle of hegemony as a goal to achieve for
   an oppressed social class loses its meaning. The system has taken over;
   only the state apparatus dominates.

The theory of progressive evolution

   A third view on popular culture, which fits in the liberal-pluralist
   ideology and is often called "progressive evolutionism", is overtly
   optimistic. It sees capitalist economy as creating opportunities for
   every individual to participate in a culture which is fully
   democratized through mass education, expansion of leisure time and
   cheap records and paperbacks. As Swingewood points out (1977:22), there
   is no question of domination here anymore. In this view, popular
   culture does not threaten high culture, but is an authentic expression
   of the needs of the people.

Contemporary popular culture studies

   If we forget precursors such as Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes for a
   moment, popular culture studies as we know them today were developed in
   the late seventies and the eighties. The first influential works were
   generally politically left-wing and rejected the "aristocratic" view.
   However, they also criticized the pessimism of the Frankfurt School:
   contemporary studies on mass culture accept that, apparently, popular
   culture forms do respond to widespread needs of the public. They also
   emphasized the capacity of the consumers to resist indoctrination and
   passive reception. Finally, they avoided any monolithic concept of mass
   culture. Instead they tried to describe culture as a whole as a complex
   formation of discourses which indeed correspond to particular
   interests, and which indeed can be dominated by specific groups, but
   which also always are dialectically related to their producers and
   consumers.

   A nice example of this tendency is Andrew Ross's No Respect.
   Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989). His chapter on the history of
   jazz, blues and rock does not present a linear narrative opposing the
   authentic popular music to the commercial record industry, but shows
   how popular music in the U.S., from the twenties until today, evolved
   out of complex interactions between popular, avant-garde and commercial
   circuits, between lower- and middle-class kids, between blacks and
   whites.

Traces of the theory of culture industry

   Still the traditional views have a long life (overview based on Clem
   Robyns, 1991). The theory which has been abandoned most massively is
   the monolithic, pessimistic view on the culture industry of the
   Frankfurt School. However, it is still hotly debated. The criticism
   raised can be summarized in three main arguments. First of all, the
   culture industry theory has completely abandoned the Marxist dialectic
   conception of society. Every impulse, according to this view, comes
   from above. Resistance and contradiction are impossible, and the
   audience is manipulated into passivity. Alan Swingewood and others
   emphasize that the Frankfurt theory has to be seen in the light of
   left-wing frustrations about the failure of proletarian revolutions
   early this century, and the easy submission of the European nations to
   fascism.

   A second reproach is that this view may be as elitist as its
   aristocratic counterpart. Both establish the lonely, autonomous,
   avant-garde intellectual as the only light in a zombie society. Thus
   the former Marxists arrive at an uncritical praise of the elitist and
   antirevolutionary upper-class culture. This brings us to a third
   argument, already made in the sixties by Umberto Eco (1988). In a
   state-dominated mass society, the lonely, lucid, intellectual
   Übermensch can only retreat in his ivory tower. The historicity of the
   contemporary situation is not taken into account, so its internal
   contradictions are ignored, and thus revolution can only be seen as
   purely utopian. The culture industry theory, therefore, would lead to
   passivity and thereby becomes an objective ally of the system it
   pretends to criticize.

   It is of course mainly the influence exercised by the Frankfurt School
   which matters here: not all of their texts present the same rigid view.
   In Das Schema der Massenkultur (1973-86:331), for instance, Adorno
   discusses a "nucleus of individuality" that the culture industry cannot
   manipulate, and which forces her to continuously repeat her
   manipulation.

   However questioned this view on popular culture may be, it still leaves
   some traces, for instance, in theories depicting narrative as
   necessarily ideologically conservative, like Charles Grivel's
   Production de l'intérêt romanesque (1973). Such theories see dominant
   ideology as purely a matter of messages, propagated in this case
   through the forms of narrative fiction. Thus they easily arrive at an
   exaltation of experimental literature as necessarily revolutionary.
   However, they may neglect the fact that the ideology is never simply in
   the message, but in the position of the message in the general social
   discourse, and in the position of its producers in the social
   formation.

   Other theories easily yielding to monolithic thought stem from the
   emancipation movements of oppressed groups. Early feminist theory, for
   instance, often described society as universally and transhistorically
   dominated by patriarchy in every aspect of life, thereby presenting a
   pejorative view of the women they claim to defend. As Andrew Ross
   (1989) argues, the same remark goes for the widely accepted account of
   rock history as a continuous appropriation of black music by a white
   music industry. Only studies analyzing the cultural oppression of
   homosexuality seem to take a less deterministic position.

Contemporary liberal pluralism

   In liberal-pluralist accounts of popular culture, the theorizing on its
   supposedly liberating, democratizing function is nowadays most often
   pushed to the background. This type of criticism, often produced by
   people who are also active in popular literary writing themselves,
   often amounts to paraphrase and suffers from an uncritical
   identification with the study object. One of the main aims of this type
   of criticism is the establishment of ahistorical canons of and within
   popular genres in the image of legitimized culture. This approach,
   however, has been accused of elitism as well.

   To put it simply: the intellectual, in this view, can fully enjoy junk
   culture because of his or her high culture background, but the average
   reader can never raise to the learned intellectual discourse of which
   he or she is the object. An example of this form of appropriation is
   Thomas Roberts's An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (1990). Though Roberts
   claims to take a distance from studies of canonical fiction, he
   justifies his (implicit) decision to impose canonical models on popular
   fiction as follows: "If people who read Goethe and Alessandro Manzoni
   and Pushkin with pleasure are also reading detective fiction with
   pleasure, there is more in the detective story than its critics have
   recognized, perhaps more than even its writers and readers have
   recognized" (1989:5). This illustrates a frequent strategy: the
   legitimation of popular fiction on the basis of its use of canonized
   literary fiction, and of the legitimized public's response to it.

Contemporary apocalyptic thought

   Equally alive is the aristocratic apocalyptic view on mass culture as
   the destruction of genuine art. As Andrew Ross (1989:5) writes, a
   history of popular culture is also a history of intellectuals, of
   cultural experts whose self-assigned task it is to define the borders
   between the popular and the legitimate. But in contemporary society the
   dispersed authority is ever more exercised by "technical" intellectuals
   working for specific purposes and not for mankind. And in the academic
   world, growing attention for popular and marginal cultures threatens
   the absolute values on which intellectuals have built their autonomy.

   In the sixties, Marshall McLuhan caused wide irritation with his
   statement that the traditional, book-oriented intellectuals had become
   irrelevant for the formulation of cultural rules in the electronic age.
   This is not to say that they lost any real political power, which
   humanist intellectuals as such hardly ever had. It does mean, however,
   that they are losing control of their own field, the field of art, of
   restricted symbolical production ( Pierre Bourdieu). While in the 19th
   century, intellectuals managed to construct art as a proper, closed
   domain in which only the in-crowd was allowed to judge, they have seen
   this autonomy become ever more threatened by 20th-century mass society.
   The main factor here was not the quantitative expansion of consumption
   culture, nor the intrusion of commerce into the field of art through
   the appearance of paperbacks and book clubs. After all, protecting art
   from simplicity and commerce was precisely the task intellectuals set
   for themselves.

   More important is the disappearance of what has been called the "grand
   narratives" during this century, the questioning of all-encompassing
   world views offering coherent interpretations of the world and
   unequivocal guides for action. As Jim Collins argues in Uncommon
   Cultures (1989:2), there is no master's voice anymore, but only a
   decentralized assemblage of conflicting voices and institutions. The
   growing awareness of the historical and cultural variability of moral
   categories had to be a problem for an intellectual class which had
   based its position on the defense of secular but transhistorical
   values.

   This brings us to a second problem humanist intellectuals face, that
   is, the fragmentation of the public. 19th-century intellectuals could
   still tell themselves that they were either writing for their
   colleagues, or teaching the undifferentiated masses. 20th-century
   intellectuals face a heterogeneous whole of groups and mediums
   producing their own discourses according to their own logic and
   interests. Thus they cannot control the reception of their own messages
   anymore, and thereby see their influence on the structuring of culture
   threatened. Many neo-apocalyptic intellectuals, such as Alain
   Finkielkraut and George Steiner, emphasize their concern about the
   growing "illiteracy" of the masses. In practice they seem to be mainly
   concerned with high culture illiteracy, the inability to appreciate
   difficult art and literary classics.

   The neo-aristocratic defense of so-called transhistorical and universal
   human values may also often be linked to a conservative political
   project. A return to universal values implies the delegitimation of any
   group which does not conform to those values. It is no coincidence,
   therefore, that attempts in the United States to define a common
   "American cultural legacy" tend to neglect the cultures of ethnic
   minority groups. Or that the fight against franglais (French
   "contaminated" by American English) in France was mainly fought by
   intellectuals seeing their traditional position in French society
   threatened by the import of American cultural products, as Clem Robyns
   (1995) describes.

Recurring issues in popular culture studies

The interactions between popular and legitimized culture

   The blurring of the boundaries between high and low culture is one of
   the main complaints made by traditional intellectuals about
   contemporary mass society. It is hardly surprising then that a lot of
   studies deal with this topic. There are, for instance, a number of
   sociological studies on literary institutions which are held
   responsible for this mix. Among the first were the commercial book
   clubs, such as the Book-of-the-Month-Club, appearing from the twenties
   on. The aggressive reactions they provoked are described by Janice
   Radway (1989) in "The Scandal of the Middlebrow". According to Radway,
   the book clubs were perceived as scandalous because they blurred some
   basic distinctions of cultural discourse. In a society haunted by the
   spectre of cultural standardization and leveling towards below, they
   dared to put "serious" fiction on the same level as detective,
   adventure stories, biographies and popular nonfiction. Book clubs were
   scandalous because they created a space where high and low could meet.

   Soon, the term " middlebrow" was introduced to qualify this phenomenon,
   and to dismiss it as threatening the authenticity of both high and
   popular culture. A bit after the book clubs came the paperbacks, and
   their influence was even more wide-ranging. More about this can be
   found in Thomas Bonn's book (1989) on New American Library. It shows
   through what elaborate strategies the respectable hardcover editors had
   to go in order to hide the fact that, from the sixties on, paperback
   publishers had taken over the control on the production of serious
   literature.
   Image:HorrorFiction.jpg
   Horror fiction is a possible example of a "bad taste" product which
   draws its appeal from its expression of disrespect for the imposed
   lessons of educated taste.

The possibility of a "subversive" popular culture

   The question whether popular culture or mass culture is inherently
   conservative, or whether it can be used in a subversive strategy as
   well, is equally hotly debated. It seems widely accepted that popular
   culture forms can function at any moment as anti-cultures. "Bad taste"
   products such as pornography and horror fiction, says for instance
   Andrew Ross (1989:231), draw their popular appeal precisely from their
   expressions of disrespect for the imposed lessons of educated taste.
   They are expressions of social resentment on the part of groups which
   have been subordinated and excluded by today's "civilized society".

   The question whether popular culture can actually resist dominant
   ideology, or even contribute to social change, is much more difficult
   to answer. Many critics easily read popular fiction and film as
   "attacks against the system", neglecting both the exact ways in which
   the so-called revolutionary message is enacted, and the capacities of
   dominant doctrines to recuperate critical messages. Tania Modleski in
   "The Terror of Pleasure" (1986:159), for instance, presents
   exploitation horror films as attacks on the basic aspects of bourgeois
   culture. Thus a loving father cannibalizes his child, and priests turn
   into servants of the devil. Other scholars (e.g. Clem Robyns, 1991)
   claim that, by presenting their perversion as supernatural, or at least
   pathological, horror films precisely contribute to perpetuating those
   institutions.

   Similarly, many critics exalt stories which feature a lone hero
   fighting for his ideals against an inert and amoral system. Thus Jim
   Collins in Uncommon Cultures (1989:30-31) sees crime fiction opposing a
   smart private detective and an inefficient police force as a critique
   of state justice. On the other hand, Thomas Roberts demonstrates in An
   Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (1990:173-174), a study of the historical
   background of the private detective model, how the detective story came
   into existence in the middle of the 19th century, at the time the
   institution of state police was developed. This force consisted mainly
   of lower-class people, but nevertheless disposed of a certain authority
   over the upper class. The fears among the upper classes for this
   uncontrolled force were eased by domesticating the police in stories
   explicitly devoted to them. Their inability to pass on correct judgment
   was amply demonstrated, and forced them to bow for the individual
   intellect of the detective, who always belonged to the threatened upper
   class.

   Finally, Umberto Eco's studies on Superman and James Bond
   (1988:211-256, 315-362) as myths of a static good-and-evil world view
   should be mentioned as very early and lucid examples of a combination
   of semiotic and political analysis.

   Still, there may be ways to wage revolt in an age of mass media. One
   way could be to introduce small gradual changes in products otherwise
   conforming to the requirements of a dominant ideology. The problem
   here, of course, is that isolated messages get drowned in the discourse
   as a whole, and that they can be used to avoid real changes. Some
   scholars, however, describe how opposition forces use the logic of the
   media to subvert them. In No Respect (1989: 123), Andrew Ross mentions
   the late sixties Yippie movement. Yippies would stage media events,
   such as the public burning of dollar bills in Wall Street, thereby
   drawing heavy media coverage. This politics of the spectacle brought
   the counterculture right into the conservative media and filled their
   forms with subversive content.

   Whether this strategy is effective or not, it points to an important
   fact: the mass media are not above, but dependent on the public. As
   Alan Swingewood states in The Myth of Mass Culture (1977:84), the
   ideological messages the mass media receive are already mediated by a
   complex network of institutions and discourses. The media, themselves
   divided over innumerable specific discourses, transform them again. And
   finally the public meaningfully relates those messages to individual
   existences through the mediation of social groups, family networks,
   etc., which they belong to.

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