Popular Culture

[Gopa B. Caesar]

Popular culture usually refers to the culture of the ‘people’ or the working class, folk culture, youth or subculture (which is yet to be a part of the mainstream culture but somehow is organized enough to be called a culture), and popular genres in fiction and film. In Keywords Raymond Williams suggested that four current meanings of ‘popular works/ culture’ can be drawn for consideration: “well liked by many people” i.e. “culture actually made by the people for themselves” or, “inferior kind of work” or, “work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people”. Thus these two words have showered each other with numerous meanings and connotations out of which John Storey has offered six variants of ‘popular culture’.

[Tamanna Islam]

such a tiny post

[Tamanna Islam]

what's next?

[Gopa B. Caesar]

just wait a bit, ma'm ...i'm trying to compose some

[Gopa B. Caesar]

Firstly, it refers to works which are “widely favoured or well liked by many people”,
secondly, it refers to a culture that is “left over after we have decided what is high culture” i.e.  “inferior culture” which means popular culture is viewed as “mass produced commercial culture” while on the other hand, high culture is the “result of an individual act of creation”. The most interesting thing to note about it is the division between the ‘high culture’ and ‘popular culture” changes with the passage of time; for example: the changing status of William Shakespeare through centuries. Then, as Storey went on for the third variant we come to know that means popular culture is a mass-culture which means that pop-culture is a “hopelessly commercial culture.” It is also “mass produced for mass consumption” and itself is “formulaic” and “manipulative”. Moreover, these are those content which are “consumed with brain numbed” and with “brain numbing passivity”.

[Gopa B. Caesar]

For some other cultural critics, this particular ‘version’ is not just an “imposed and impoverished culture” rather the viewed it as an “imported American culture”.Next, popular culture is viewed as a ‘version’ of culture which “originates from the people (folks)”, therefore, this ‘pop-culture’ is folk culture, an ‘authentic’ culture of ‘the people’.Popular culture is also seen as a site of struggle and resistance. It is “a site of struggle between the ‘resistance’ of subordinate groups in society and the forces of ‘incorporation’ operating in the interests of dominant groups in society”.

[Gopa B. Caesar]

Thus, it can be said that, popular culture is neither ‘imposed’ nor ‘mass’ rather “a terrain of exchange and negotiation between the two.” These seem to have a link to Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. According to him, contents of popular culture move between a “compromise equilibrium”. Then, storey describes the popular culture as ‘postmodern’ in nature and operation. So far we have seen that popular culture’s commercialism, consumerism and ‘well-likedness’; on the other hand postmodern culture does not recognizes the distinction between high culture and popular culture. Thus, popular culture has become a reason of celebration of an “end to an elitism constructed on arbitrary distinction of culture” and on the other hand it is also seen as a “reason to despair at the final victory of commerce over culture.” It is then a site for ideological struggle, where hegemony must win or lose. To explain this struggle Stuart Hall developed the ‘theory of articulation’. The cultural field is thus defined by a “struggle to articulate, disarticulate and rearticulate cultural texts and practices for particular politics”. Thus works in this field has consequently employed a number of explanatory concepts starting from ‘ideology’ (especially of hegemony), ‘gender’, ‘reception’ etc.

[Gopa B. Caesar]

 Here the conflict between ‘the theory of mass society’ and ‘the aristocrat theory of mass society’ surfaces.  “Mass society” was formed during the 19th-century industrialization process through the division of labour, 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 anti-capitalists, aristocratic ideologists and used against the values and practices, in a nut-shell the culture of industrialized society.

[Gopa B. Caesar]

On the other hand, as Alan Swingewood  points out in The Myth of Mass Culture, 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 T. S. Eliot and others would be dominated by the “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.

[Gopa B. Caesar]

Diametrically opposed to the aristocratic view would be the theory of “culture industry” developed by Frankfurt school of critical theorists 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,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.

[Gopa B. Caesar]

The principle of hegemony as a goal to achieve for an oppressed social class loses its meaning. 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 in The Myth of Mass Culture, there is no question of domination here anymore. In this view, popular culture does not threaten the high culture, but is an authentic expression of the
needs of the people. On the other hand, according to K. Turner, the popular culture and the mass media have a “symbiotic relationship: each depends on the other in an intimate collaboration" which suggests that popular culture can also have a link to the ‘institutional propagation’.

[Gopa B. Caesar]

Thus we can sum up saying that, popular culture which has a “strong qualitative dimension” that only has emerged following industrialization and urbanization. And, according to cultural populists like Fiske and Hebdige, popular culture is whether in relation to the mass media or youth cultures, “ the positive expression of cultural meanings, a subversive or carnivalesque rebuff of the homogenizing intent of dominant ideology.”

[Gopa B. Caesar]

@tamanna apu, i hope it does not seem 'tiny' any more

[ns.tonmoy]

 

[Binoy]

As you are talking of culture, I can refer to a book entitled "French Popular Culture: An Introduction" edited by Hugh Dauncey (Arnold, 2003), which might be of interest to you. It covers the whole gamut of popular cultural elements in France. A praiseworthy treatment of the subject, indeed.