Chapter 3: Culturalism
- various breaks from previous Marxist & Leavisite ideas
Breaking from Classical Marxism
- E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
- the working class created itself as a reaction to its context
- an example of culturalism: shift towards agency rather than determinism
Breaking from Leavisism (i.e., creating left-Leavisism)
- Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy
- working-class culture is realistic/active; mass culture is fanciful/passive
- looks at history from working-class point of view, inverts class perspective\
- Raymond Williams, “The Analysis of Culture”
- pop culture works out problems in culture
- i.e., “magical” solutions to real problems
- structures of feeling: what it would be like to be in a time/place
- doesn’t define people by just documents or just consumption patterns
- selective tradition: representing a time/place via our preferred examples
- pop culture works out problems in culture
- Stuart Hall & Paddy Whannel, The Popular Arts
- popular art: product of culture industry, but can still be enlightening
- mass culture: industrial/degrading; high culture: individual/enlightening
- youth culture & music:
- must the study whole of cultural activity (not just the “text”)
- audience appears to get something out of it (not just top-down)
Chapter 4: Marxisms
Classical Marxism
- base: material surroundings and ability to work with them
- creates the terrain for the superstructure to happen
- superstructure: politics, economy, society that results from activity at the base
- not determined by the base, contains lots of internal activity
- class: a group’s social position relative to activity at the base
- popular culture is a product of base and of interactions w/in superstructure
William Morris
- expands Marxist idea of alienation:
- i.e., if you only ever sell your labour for money,
- you’ll never develop a relationship with that labour
- creative labour: when labour and art are same thing (i.e., making something)
- class distinctions would collapse into each other
The Frankfurt School
- culture industry: for-profit entertainment (capitalist); i.e., popular culture
- conforms to industry needs and also promotes conformity
- mass culture: standardized content, pseudo-individualizes audience
- claims we’re in the ideal world, thus negates need for rebellion
- art: by definition, resists or critiques the culture industry (i.e., capitalism)
- problem: the culture industry not this effective or monolithic
- Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
- aura: the specific, contextualized meaning of a signifying object
- mechanical reproduction obliterates the aura: new contexts, new meanings
- so meaning is made in the act of consumption, not determined by production
- Althusser
- ideology: practiced; reality is what you do, ideology is how you represent it
- these representations perpetuate class domination
- dominant classes are also convinced; they see their domination as natural
- ISA (ideological state apparatus): institutions that perpetuate ideology
- RSA (repressive state apparatus): institutions that enforce ideology
- problematic: when ideology tries to represent something outside of itself
- symptomatic: looking for the traces that (futile) effort leaves behind
- interpellation: when you subject yourself to ideology via discourse
- problem: it’s presumed to always be successful & never conflict
- ideology: practiced; reality is what you do, ideology is how you represent it
- Antonio Gramsci
- hegemony: dominant group tries to naturalize its own ideology
- compromise equilibrium: subordinated groups agree with hegemonic values (against their interests)
- RSAs held in reserve in case of actual rebellion
- organic intellectuals: represent hegemonic values; can be ISAs
- bricolage: youths use hegemonic culture for resistance,
- but resistance gets incorporated into the power structure
Post-Marxism and Cultural Studies
- articulation: making meaning in the contextual connection of text & reader1
- culture: is when groups of people tend to articulate in the same ways
- culture defines what is “common sense” or “natural”
- i.e., what the physical world is made to mean by ideology
- mass culture: not always convincing, the people are not always duped
NB: these notes are compiled from John Storey’s Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, 7th Edition. They are for studying purposes only.