What is the difference between high culture and popular culture/mass culture?
The social function of culture.
What is culture?
Raymond Williams
One of the most complex words in the english language.
More definitions become apparent, it can mean several things.
A culture that is had by people, a set of ideas, a body of artistic works, a process of intellectual spiritual and aesthetic development of a particular society at a particular time.
Marx's Concept of Base/Superstructure
Base
Forces of production - Materials, tools, workers, skills etc
Reactions of production - Employer/employee, Class, Master, Slave etc
Superstructure
Social Institutions - Legal, political, cultural
Forms of Consciousness - Ideology
"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles"
Everything about society is borne from the Base.
We live in a capitalist society, with capitalist production methods.
Some provide a service (the labourers/workers), some make money off of the service being created (employers/employees).
Culture emerges from and reflects the base. Culture can then structure the base.
Culture is a product of capitalism, capitalism solidifies it. Cycle produced.
The proletariat - The workers and labourers. The base reality of the world.
The bourgeoisie - The privileged class who take advantage of the proletariat.
Culture produced by the material reality of the world.
What is Popular Culture?
Raymond Williams (1983) 'Keywords'
4 definitions 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.
Culture made by the masses for the masses.
High vs Low
The difference between what is deemed as high culture and what is seen as popular culture.
Value judgement required by the viewer to decide what they view as a high or low.
High often seen as of a higher quality, often favoured by the elite.
Low is often favoured by the masses.
Graffiti - Authentic popular culture.
Was created by the base for the base.
But high culture has then taken it into the context of the art gallery and it has become seen as a form of art.
Does it then belong to the masses, or is it now deemed as high culture?
High culture stealing what is seen as popular culture.
The development of popular culture mid 19th century.
The development of heavy industrialisation and the process of urbanisation.
Hyper development of industrial capitalism.
There were very clear class divides that began to emerge, particularly because of mass factory work. It became clear who was working and who was the boss. The employers (seen as the bourgeoisie) benefited from their physical labour and became the affluent class.
High culture was created by the rich, but there was an illusion that culture was a shared thing.
A division between the classes was obvious.
Autonomous working class culture began to develop. Made by people for people.
Entrepreneurs began to emerge from the working classes.
Working classes produced literature based on the class experience.
The taste makers (the rich) created a backlash against the working class culture.
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. Anything with an agenda isn't culture.
The pursuit of culture
Seeks "to minister the diseased spirit of our times."
Argued that the world wouldn't be such a terrible place if we had only high culture created by the bourgeoisie.
Culture polices 'the raw and uncultivated masses'
The working class...raw and half developed...long lain half hidden amidst it's poverty and squalor...now issuing from it's hiding place to assert the englishmans heaven born privilege to do as he likes..."
Popular culture is like a disease.
Leavisism - F.R Leavis and Q.D Leavis
Still forms a kind of repressed, common sense attitude to poplar culture in this country.
For Leavis - C20th sees a cultural decline.
Standardisation and levelling down.
'Culture has always been in 'minority keeping'
'the minority, who has hitherto set the standard of taste without any serious challenge have a experienced a 'collapse of authority'
Collapse of traditional authority comes at the same as mass democracy (anarchy)
Nostalgia for an era when the masses exhibited an unquestioning deference to cultural authority.
Popular culture offers addictive forms of detraction and compensation.
'This form of compensation...is the very reverse of recreation, i that it tends not to strengthen and refresh the addict for living, but to increase his unfitness by habituation him to weak evasions, to the refusal to face reality at all.'
For Leavis, mass culture produces a threat to authority.
Frankfurt School - Critical Theory
Institute of social research, University of Frankfurt, 1923-33
University of columbia new york 1933-47
University of Frankfurt, 1949-
Theodore Adorno
Max Horkheimer
Herbert Marcuse
Leo Lowenthal
Walter Benjamin
Doesn't present a threat, it strengthens and maintains the capitalist system.
Adorno and Horkheimer
Reinterpreted Marx, for the 20th century - era of late capitalism
Defined The culture industry
2 Main products - homogeneity and predictability
All mass culture is identical
'As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished or forgotten'
Everything is formulaic, the same.
Herbert Marcuse
Popular Culture v Affirmative Culture
Produces a way of behaving that supports the current system and allows it to continue,
Why do people not resist the feeling of mass exploitation? (Theorised at a time of Nazi Germany)
Indoctrinates you, promotes a false consciousness which immune against its falsehood.
'It militates against qualitative change. '
'This emerges a pattern of one dimensional though and behaviour.'
Culture acts like a fog, makes it seem like the world is good, despite its problems.
Popular Culture serves to depoliticise.
Stops us revolting against the system.
Products of the contemporary culture industry.
Big Brother
X Factor - Mass exploitation - Emotionally manipulated by the producers and editors of the programmes. Mass system of consumption.
Che Guevara t-shirts - Genuine revolutionary who has become a guy on a t-shirt. Some who wear the t-shirts may not understand Che's politics.
Adorno on 'popular music'
Standardisation
Social Cement
Produces passivity through rhythmic and emotional adjustment.
An endless chain of consumption.
Walter Benjamin
'The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction'
Meaning is prescribed at the point of production. Another possibility where you can create meaning at the point of reception/consumption.
Able to actively engage with mass culture. We can create our own meanings.
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