Culture

culture

the way of life of a people; including language, values, beliefs, etc.

ideology

the facets of culture which shape social relations and governance.

Pop culture

Pop (cultural) studies

• It sits alongside high culture (New Yorker), low culture (tabloids), mass culture (Micky Mouse), etc.
• Created by (post-)Marxist scholars, including Stuart Hall.
• Focuses on issues of ideology, hegemony, class, agency, and “texts.”

What is popular?

The study of popular culture keeps shifting between these two, quite unacceptable, poles: pure “autonomy” or total encapsulation. (Hall 1983/2005, p. 67)

3. the social and material conditions of particular classes … embodied in popular traditions and practices. (Hall 1983/2005, p. 69)

1. Dupes

This sense is associated with manipulation and debasement; it presumes people live in a permanent state of passive “false consciousness” and must be “cultural dupes.”

Hall: this isn’t true, and is un-socialistic.

2. Vital culture

Popular is a vital “alternative” culture of the “real” working-class.

Hall: there is no such thing, and this “greatly underestimates the power of cultural implantation.” (Hall 1983/2005, p. 66)

The problems with 1 & 2

Their categories are too general and could include anything from “pigeon-fancying and the stamp-collecting, flying ducks on the wall and garden gnomes.” (Hall 1983/2005, p. 68)

Hall: the content/categories are not important, the process is. (Hall 1983/2005, p. 68)

Cyclic

The popular is in tension “between what belongs to the central domain of the elite or dominant culture, and the culture of the ‘periphery.’”

The contents of a category change from one period to another, but what of the forces and relations driving those changes (e.g., the education system)? (Hall 1983/2005, p. 68)

This year’s radical symbol or slogan will be neutralized into next year’s fashion; the year after, it will be the object of a profound cultural nostalgia. (Hall 1983/2005, p. 69)

Yesterday’s rebellious subculture is today’s commercial pap and today’s pap can become the basis for tomorrow’s culture of resistance. (Hall 1981/2002, p. 185)

Contested

Cultural forms “are deeply contradictory; they play on contradictions, especially [in] ‘popular.’” (Hall 1981/2002, p. 188)

[Cultural form] conceived out of separate ‘ways of life’ … [but are] “ways of struggle” … [and] takes many forms: incorporation, distortion, resistance, negotiation, recuperation. (Hall 1983/2005, pp. 69-70)

Studying popular culture

We should look “at the process by which these relations of dominance and subordination are articulated.” (Hall 1981/2002, p. 189)

eg, the swastika

What does the swastika signify when worn by rebellious kids, by skinheads, by fascists? (Hall 1983/2005, p. 70)

Jojo Rabbit

Process

Culture is the constant process of producing meanings of and from our social experience, and … necessarily produce a social identity for the people (Fiske 1990, p. 1)

Context

Popular culture is always in process; its meanings can never be identified in a text, for texts are activated or made meaningful, only in social relations and in intertextual relations. (Fiske 1990, p. 3)

Contestation

Culture (and its meanings and pleasures) is a constant succession of social practices; it is therefore inherently political, it is centrally involved in the distribution and possible redistribution of various forms of social power. (Fiske 1990, p. 1)

What is “popular”?

a process of circulation and contestation between elite/dominant culture and peoples’ culture.

What are the “logics” of the popular?

cyclic, contested

Wrap up

• Write down the most complex or confusing topic that you would like more clarity on.

• What was the most complex or confusing topic from last class?
• What were Hall’s two dismissed notions of culture?
• What is popular and its “logics”?
• What is the meaning of the swastika?