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Popular Culture

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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.

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