. In this 7th edition of his award-winning Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, John Storey has extensively revised the text throughout. . As illustrated in Table 6.3, the sign of primary signification becomes the signifier in a process of secondary signification. . Everybody’s an artist if they want to be’ (120). . Johnson, Richard (1996), ‘What is cultural studies anyway?’ in What is Cultural Studies? Add to My Bookmarks Export citation. Butler begins from Simone de Beauvoir’s (1984) observation that ‘one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one’ (12). One of the questions this relationship raises is: ‘What is being sold: song or product?’ I suppose the obvious answer is both. .. CULT_Z01.qxd 10/25/08 16:33 Page 238 238 Notes 16. Leavis and Denys Thompson. This manufactures a situation in which people who make culture in their everyday lives see themselves as uncultured. His significance, therefore, lies not with any body of empirical work, but with the enormous influence of his general perspective – the Arnoldian perspective – on popular culture. An obvious confirmation of his claim is the widespread use of surveillance technologies in contemporary society. Psychoanalytic theory is ‘appropriated . . The history of cultural theory’s engagement with popular culture is, therefore, a history of the different ways in which the two terms have been connected by theoretical labour within particular historical and social contexts. Fandom is what ‘other people’ do. Hoggart, Richard (1990), The Uses of Literacy, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Textbook Help. But it is not difficult to see how in many powerful discourses, white is the positive term, holding priority and privilege over black. That is, we see the two girls, read the caption and decide which girl wants to go to university, which girl wants to leave at 16. Leavis (1984) is insistent ‘that there was in the seventeenth century, a real culture of the people . . . There are other ways to define popular culture, which do not depend on this particular history or these particular circumstances, but they are definitions that fall outside the range of the cultural theorists and the cultural theory discussed in this book. From the vantage point of this new sensibility, the beauty of a machine or of the solution to a mathematical problem, of a painting by Jasper Johns, of a film by Jean-Luc Godard, and of the personalities and music of the Beatles is equally accessible (304). Such substitutions are said to be operating along the paradigmatic axis of language. Feminists unwilling to lie back and think about the economic base exposed the rhetorical vacuousness of this kind of thinking long ago. [L]anguage has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system’ (120). The genteel middling mind wants cultural equality on its own terms. Leavis, Q.D. . Chambers, Iain (1988), Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience, London: Routledge. When he recommends culture ‘as the great help out of our present difficulties’ (6), it is these changes he has in mind. There is, however, a fourth aspect to consider: Arnold insists that culture seeks ‘to minister to the diseased spirit of our time’ (163). We long for a time when we existed in ‘nature’ (inseparable from the mother’s body), where everything was simply itself, before the mediations of language and the Symbolic. Popular culture in this usage is not the imposed culture of the mass culture theorists, nor is it an emerging from below, spontaneously oppositional culture of ‘the people’ – it is a terrain of exchange and negotiation between the two: a terrain, as already stated, marked by resistance and incorporation. CULT_C06.qxd 10/24/08 17:20 Page 121 Roland Barthes: Mythologies Match’s attempt to produce a positive image of French imperialism. . A very interesting collection of essays. One moviegoer was quite clear why the film was such a box-office success: ‘We get to win the Vietnam War’ (quoted in H. Bruce Franklin 1993: 141). This means that human nature is not something innate and unchangeable, it is something at least in part introduced from outside. An interesting example of the processes of articulation is the reggae music of Rastafarian culture. In the inaugural lecture, ‘Schools of English and contemporary society’, establishing the Centre, Hoggart (1970) states: ‘It is hard to listen to a programme of pop songs . . The problem with all this from a feminist perspective is that it is always constructed around a mythical individual woman, situated outside the influence of powerful social and cultural structures and constraints. This is further complicated by the retroactive nature of desire. . Pleasure is discussed, but always in terms of its unreality – its vicariousness, its function as compensation, and its falseness. In 1960 the National Union of Teachers (NUT) Annual Conference passed a resolution that read in part: Conference believes that a determined effort must be made to counteract the debasement of standards which result from the misuse of press, radio, cinema and television. The third narrative paradigm is ‘the Americanization of the war’. Many of the researchers who followed Hoggart into the Centre (including myself) did not find listening to pop music in the least repulsive; on the contrary, we found it profoundly attractive. The totality of this operation consists in a linguistic moment (the request for a brick) and a non-linguistic moment (adding the brick to the wall). all mass culture is identical’ (120–1); and predictability: As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished, or forgotten. Perhaps the most visible change is the addition of illustrations, and the inclusion of a list of websites useful to the student of cultural theory and popular culture. In short, work leads to mass culture; mass culture leads back to work. Culture Ideology Popular culture Popular culture as other Further reading 1 1 2 5 13 14 2 The ‘culture and civilization’ tradition Matthew Arnold Leavisism Mass culture in America: the post-war debate The culture of other people Further reading 17 18 22 28 33 35 3 Culturalism Richard Hoggart: The Uses of Literacy Raymond Williams: ‘The analysis of culture’ E.P. Returning to the bar, he informs the men that the black house is no different from any other old, decaying property. Baudrillard claims that we have reached a stage in social and economic development in which ‘it is no longer possible to separate the economic or productive realm from the realms of ideology or culture, since cultural artefacts, images, representations, even feelings and psychic structures have become part of the world of the economic’ (Connor, 1989: 51). According to Collins (2009), part of what is postmodern about Western societies is the fact that the old is not simply replaced by the new, but is recycled for circulation together with the new. This would be achieved without any reference to a corresponding reality outside of the sentence itself. In addressing the ‘complex organization’ of culture as a particular way of life, the purpose of cultural analysis is always to understand what a culture is expressing; ‘the actual experience through which a culture was lived’; the ‘important common element’; ‘a particular community of experience’ (36). The institutional home of these developments was, especially in the 1970s and early 1980s, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, at the University of Birmingham (see Green, 1996). Its popularity makes it a very dangerous source of pleasure indeed: ‘they [films] involve surrender, under conditions of hypnotic receptivity, to the cheapest emotional appeals, appeals the more insidious because they are associated with a compellingly vivid illusion of actual life’ (Leavis, 2009: 14). But whether “the mass of men” felt better or worse without mass production techniques of which popular culture is an ineluctable part, we shall never know’ (536). There are basically two imperial plot structures. 33 CULT_C02.qxd 10/24/08 17:10 Page 34 34 Chapter 2 The ‘culture and civilization’ tradition Although the ‘culture and civilization’ tradition, especially in its Leavisite form, created an educational space for the study of popular culture, there is also a real sense in which this approach to popular culture ‘actively impeded its development as an area of study’ (Bennett, 1982b: 6). First of all, the connection that is made between the advertisement and so-called mob passions. As Derrida (1976) points out: [A deconstructive] reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of language that he uses. Macdonald, Myra, Representing Women: Myths of Femininity in Popular Media, London: Edward Arnold, 1995. Content has been revised and essays have been replaced and updated. However, Lyotard claims that since the Second World War, the legitimating force of science’s status as a metanarrative has waned considerably. .. CULT_Z02.qxd 10/25/08 16:34 Page 242 242 Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean (1981), For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, St Louis: Telos Press. The context provided by the Daily Telegraph (readership and reader expectation) is very different from that provided by the Socialist Worker. (1999), Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. All this is the meaning of the picture. Its author is not capitalism, but technology. Type Book Author(s) Storey, John Date 2012 Publisher Pearson Pub place Harlow Edition 6th ed ISBN-10 1408285274 ISBN-13 9781408285275. In other words, the reality to which he awakes is less Real than that which he encountered in his dream. Advertising, then, according to this perspective, flatters us into thinking we are the special ‘you’ of its discourse and in so doing we become subjects of and subjected to its material practices: acts of consumption. There is now, however, a general agreement amongst the men that it would be dangerous to go back to the house. Against this, he claims that the literary text is ‘decentred’; it is incomplete in itself. The importance of a particular way of life is that it ‘expresses certain meanings and values‘. The best they can do is escape to the wilderness. She identifies two. Leaving aside the fact that the contemporary extract is an imitation (as are all his contemporary examples), Hoggart argues that its inferiority is due to the fact that it lacks the ‘moral tone’ (236) of the other two extracts. ‘Who’s there?’ ‘Little Redcape, bringing you some cake and wine; open the door.’ ‘Just push down the latch,’ said the grandmother, ‘I’m too weak to get out of bed.’ The wolf pushed down the latch, and without a word he went straight to the old woman’s bed and gobbled her up. . It takes two forms. Fiske also locates popular culture in what Pierre Bourdieu (1984) calls ‘the cultural field’ (113–20), in which takes place a cultural struggle between dominant or official culture and popular culture abstracted from economic and technological determinations, but ultimately overdetermined by them. Hall, Stuart (1996d), ‘When was the “post-colonial”? . Drawing on Saussure, he sees meaning as a result of the interplay between a process of similarity and difference. However, having said this, it is nevertheless the case that acceptance of the contention that the flow of causal traffic within society is unequally structured, such that the economy, in a privileged way, influences political and ideological relationships in ways that are not true in reverse, has usually been held to constitute a ‘limit position’ for Marxism. Ideology is used here to indicate how some texts and practices present distorted images of reality. no later individual can wholly recover: that sense of the life within which the novels were written, and which we now approach through our selection’ (38). It offers some useful commentary on popular culture, especially Chapter 2: ‘Popular culture as serious business’. He contends that ‘the two are closely related, although relatively autonomous’ (316). Thompson: Critical Perspectives, Oxford: Polity Press, 1990. They claim that by adopting ‘a critical and evaluative attitude’ (46) and an awareness that it is ‘foolish to make large claims for this popular culture’ (40), it is possible ‘to break with the false distinction . This is clearly a matter of culture. Nixon, Richard (1986), No More Vietnams, London: W H Allen. Part of the aim of The Popular Arts, then, is to replace the ‘misleading generalizations’ of earlier attacks on popular culture by helping to facilitate popular discrimination within and across the range of popular culture itself. Whilst on the other, there have been those who have turned to consumption (understood too exclusively in terms of pleasure and meaning-making). This is a benign version of the mass culture critique because, as Maltby points out, ‘If it is the crime of popular culture that it has taken our dreams and packaged them and sold them back to us, it is also the achievement of popular culture that it has brought us more and more varied dreams than we could otherwise ever have known’ (ibid.). The forces of production refer to the raw materials, the tools, the technology, the workers and their skills, etc. Figure 6.3 The panoptic machine. According to Barthes, ‘Semiology has taught us that myth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal. Second, the extent of his popularity would appear to threaten the class exclusivity of a high/popular divide. .. .. CULT_Z02.qxd 10/25/08 16:34 Page 251 Bibliography Storey, John (2002a), ‘Expecting rain: opera as popular culture’, in High-Pop, edited by Jim Collins, Oxford: Blackwell. Silverman, Kaja, The Subject of Semiotics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Jameson’s argument also borrows from Williams’s (1980) influential claim that a given social formation will always consist of three cultural moments (‘dominant’, ‘emergent’ and ‘residual’). Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class In the Preface to The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. However, the nature of the agenda has provoked a vigorous debate within feminism itself. 2. It reaches deep down into the id and for that reason is farther from consciousness than the ego is’ (390). What is also clear, however, is that on its own, a quantitative index is not enough to provide an adequate definition of popular culture. Such approaches, he argues, are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the processes of consumption. My discussion of Arnold’s contribution to the study of popular culture will focus mainly (but not exclusively) on Culture and Anarchy (1867–9), the work that secured, and continues to sustain, his reputation as a cultural critic. It was very much a discourse of the ‘cultured’ about the culture of those without ‘culture’. Why were the men so outraged by the young newcomer’s behaviour? You talk like an advertisement.’ Thereafter peace and a pipe of Two Quakers. Intellectuals have, he argues, been losing their authority since ‘the violence and critique mounted against the academy during the sixties’ (quoted in Connor, 1989: 41). Critical theory–Dictionaries. Hollywood has ‘invented’ Vietnam as a ‘contrasting image’ and a ‘surrogate and . Eroticization – stories that explore the erotic side of a character’s life. Foucault, Michel (2002a), ‘Truth and power’, in James D. Faubion (ed. You know how bad most ‘popular culture’ is, but you know also that the irruption of the ‘swinish multitude’, which Burke had prophesied would trample down light and learning, is the coming to relative power and relative justice of your own people, whom you could not if you tried desert (1957: 424–5). In other words, racism is more about signification than it is about biology. ‘Articulation’ is a key term in post-Marxist cultural studies. It contains examples of most of the work discussed here. Scottish philosopher David Hulme, for example, was quite clear about the difference between whites and non-whites. Moreover, the various examples that Freud (1976) provides of words standing in for something other than their literal meaning, is also limited to the language(s) the patient understands. A clear and interesting introduction to Derrida. The primary function of dreams is to be ‘the guardians of sleep which get rid of disturbances of sleep’ (Freud, 1973a: 160). In this 4th edition of his successful Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, John Storey has extensively revised the text throughout. rifles, pistols and revolvers’ (188). I particularly like the way she acknowledges that sometimes she just does not understand what yizek is saying. Gramsci (2009) uses the term ‘hegemony’ to refer to the way in which dominant groups in society, through a process of ‘intellectual and moral leadership’ (75), seek to win the consent of subordinate groups in society. First, postmodernism is said to be a culture of pastiche: a culture, that is, marked by the ‘complacent play of historical allusion’ (Jameson, 1988: 105). Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant’ (ibid.). Certeau, Michel de (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California, 1984. The second type wallows in sentimental misery, oblivious to the real conditions of existence. Jackie Stacey’s (1994) Star Gazing: Hollywood and Female Spectatorship presents a clear rejection of the universalism and textual determinism of much psychoanalytic work on female audiences. In working in this way, she is able to avoid the deployment of textual analysis, with its implied notion of an identifiably correct meaning, or limited set of meanings, which a reader may or may not activate. . In other words, image does not illustrate text, it is the text which amplifies the connotative potential of the image. hooks, bell (2009), ‘Postmodern blackness’, in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 4th edn, edited by John Storey, Harlow: Pearson Education. 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