Lecture 2 - Critical positions on the media and popular culture

What is culture?
- 'one of the two or three most complicated words in the english language'
- General process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development of a particular society, at a particular time.
- A particular way of life.
- Works of intellectual are especially artistic significance.

Marx'x concept of Base and Superstructure
Base - forces of production - material, tools, workers, skills etc.
- relations of production ( master/slave etc) - employer/employee, class
Superstructure - social institutions - legal, political, cultural
- forms of consciousness - ideology
'the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles' (Marx, communist manifests)



Determines content and forms of
Base superstructure
Reflects form of and legitimises



The state

' But a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoise' (Marx and Engels - 1848)

Ideology

1. System of ideas or beliefs ( eg beliefs of a political party)
2. Masking, distorting or selection of ideas, to reinforce power relations, through creations of 'false consciousness'.

Raymond Williams (1983) 'keywords'

4 deffinitions of 'popular':
- well liked by many people
- inferior kinds of work
- work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people
- culture actually made by the people themselves.

Caspar David Friedrich (1809)
Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane (2005)
E.P Thompson (1963)

Matthew Arnold (1867) 'culture and Anarchy'

Culture is:
- 'the best that has been thought and said in the world'
- study of perfection
- attained through disinterested reading, writing and thinking
- the persuit of culture
- Seeks 'to minister the diseased spirit of our time'

Leavism - F. R Leavis and Q.D Leavis

'Still forms, a kind of repessed, common sense attitude to popular culture in this country'
-Leavis sees a cultural decline in the 20th century.
- 'culture has always been in minority keeping'
- collapse of traditional authority comes at the same time as mass democrocy (anarchy)

Frankfurt school: Thodore Anorno and Max Horkheimer

- Reinterpreted Marx, for the 20th century - era of "late capitalism"
- Defined " the culture industry":
2 main products - homogeneity and predictability.

- cultural commodities
- Negation = depriving culture of "it's great refusal" = cultural appropriation
ACTUAL DEPOLITICISES THE WORKING CLASS

gAuthestic culture vs Mass culture

Qualities of authentic culture:
-Real
- european
-multi-dimensional
-active consumption
- individual creation
- imagination
- negation
- AUTONOMOUS

walter Benjamin - 'the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction' 1936
Hebidge, D (1979) 'subculture: the meaning of style'
- incorporation
- ideological form
- commodity form

Althusser (1970)
Society = economic, political and ideological

Ideology is a practice through which men and woman 'live' their relations to the real conditions of existance.
Ideology offers false, but seemingly thrue resolutions to social imbalance.
Social authority mantained by:
R.S.A - repessive state apparatus
I.S.A - ideological state apparatus

The media as ideological state apparatus
- a means of production
- Disseminates the views of the ruling class (dominant hegemonic)
- Media creates a false consciousness
- The individual is produced by nature; the subject by culture (Fiske 1992)