What is popular culture.docx

What is popular culture? In order to define popular culture we first need to define the term 'culture'. Raymond Williams (1983) calls culture 'one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language'. Williams suggests three broad definitions. First, culture can be used to refer to...

What is popular culture? In order to define popular culture we first need to define the term 'culture'. Raymond Williams (1983) calls culture 'one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language'. Williams suggests three broad definitions. First, culture can be used to refer to 'a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development'. We could, for example, speak about the cultural development of Western Europe and be referring only to intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic factors -- great philosophers, great artists and great poets. This would be a perfectly understandable formulation. A second use of the word 'culture' might be to suggest 'a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group'. Using this definition, if we speak of the cultural development of Western Europe, we would have in mind not just intellectual and aesthetic factors, but the development of, for example, literacy, holidays, sport, religious festivals. Finally, Williams suggests that culture can be used to refer to 'the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity' (ibid.). In other words, culture here means the texts and practices whose principal function is to signify, to produce or to be the occasion for the production of meaning. Using this definition, we would probably think of examples such as poetry, the novel, ballet, opera, and fine art. To speak of popular culture usually means to mobilize the second and third meanings of the word 'culture'. The second meaning -- culture as a particular way of life -- would allow us to speak of such practices as the seaside holiday, the celebration of Christmas, and youth subcultures, as examples of culture. These are usually referred to as lived cultures or practices. The third meaning -- culture as signifying practices -- would allow us to speak of soap opera, pop music, and comics, as examples of culture. These are usually referred to as texts. Few people would imagine Williams's first definition when thinking about popular culture. Popular culture There are various ways to define popular culture. But first a few words about the term 'popular'. Williams (1983) suggests four current meanings: '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 for themselves'.. **[Clearly, then, any definition of popular culture will bring into play a complex combination of the different meanings of the term 'culture' with the different meanings of the term 'popular'.]** An obvious starting point in any attempt to define popular culture is to say that popular culture is simply culture that is widely favoured or well liked by many people. And, undoubtedly, such a quantitative index would meet the approval of many people. We could examine sales of books, sales of CDs and DVDs. We could also examine attendance records at concerts, sporting events, and festivals. We could also scrutinize market research figures on audience preferences for different television programmes. Such counting would undoubtedly tell us a great deal. The difficulty might prove to be that, paradoxically, it tells us too much. Unless we can agree on a figure over which something becomes popular culture, and below which it is just culture, we might find that widely favoured or well liked by many people included so much as to be virtually useless as a conceptual definition of popular culture. Despite this problem, what is clear is that any definition of popular culture must include a quantitative dimension. The popular of popular culture would seem to demand it. 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 counting would almost certainly include 'the officially sanctioned "high culture" which in terms of book and record sales and audience ratings for television dramatisations of the classics, can justifiably claim to be "popular" in this sense'. A second way of defining popular culture is to suggest that it is the culture that is left over after we have decided what is high culture. Popular culture, in this definition, is a residual category, there to accommodate texts and practices that fail to meet the required standards to qualify as high culture. In other words, it is a definition of popular culture as inferior culture. What the culture/popular culture test might include is a range of value judgements on a particular text or practice. For example, we might want to insist on formal complexity. In other words, to be real culture, it has to be difficult. Being difficult thus ensures its exclusive status as high culture. Its very difficulty literally excludes, an exclusion that guarantees the exclusivity of its audience. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues that cultural distinctions of this kind are often used to support class distinctions. Taste is a deeply ideological category: it functions as a marker of 'class' (using the term in a double sense to mean both a social economic category and the suggestion of a particular level of quality). **This definition of popular culture is often supported by claims that popular culture is mass-produced commercial culture, whereas high culture is the result of an individual act of creation. The latter, therefore, deserves only a moral and aesthetic response; the former requires only a fleeting sociological inspection to unlock what little it has to offer. Whatever the method deployed, those who wish to make the case for the division between high and popular culture generally insist that the division between the two is absolutely clear**. Moreover, not only is this division clear, it is transhistorical -- fixed for all time. This latter point is usually insisted on, especially if the division is dependent on supposed essential textual qualities. There are many problems with this certainty. For example, William Shakespeare is now seen as the epitome of high culture, yet as late as the nineteenth century his work was very much a part of popular theatre. The same point can also be made about Charles Dickens's work. Similarly, film noir can be seen to have crossed the border supposedly separating popular and high culture: in other words, what started as popular cinema is now the preserve of academics and film clubs. One recent example of cultural traffic moving in the other direction is Luciano Pavarotti's recording of Puccini's 'Nessun Dorma'. Even the most rigorous defenders of high culture would not want to exclude Pavarotti or Puccini from its select enclave. But in 1990, Pavarotti managed to take 'Nessun Dorma' tonumber one in the British charts. Such commercial success on any quantitative analysis would make the composer, the performer and the aria, popular culture. On 30 July 1991, Pavarotti gave a free concert in London's Hyde Park. About 250,000 people were expected, but because of heavy rain, the number who actually attended was around 100,000. Two things about the event are of interest to a student of popular culture. The first is the enormous popularity of the event. We could connect this with the fact that Pavarotti's previous two albums (Essential Pavarotti 1 and Essential Pavarotti 2) had both topped the British album charts. His obvious popularity would appear to call into question any clear division between high and popular culture. Second, the extent of his popularity would appear to threaten the class exclusivity of a high/popular divide. It is therefore interesting to note the way in which the event was reported in the media. All the British tabloids carried news of the event on their front pages. The Daily Mirror, for instance, had five pages devoted to the concert. What the tabloid coverage reveals is a clear attempt to define the event for popular culture. The Sun quoted a woman who said, 'I can't afford to go to posh opera houses with toffs and fork out £100 a seat.' The Daily Mirror ran an editorial in which it claimed that Pavarotti's performance 'wasn't for the rich' but 'for the thousands... who could never normally afford a night with an operatic star'. When the event was reported on television news programmes the following lunchtime, the tabloid coverage was included as part of the general meaning of the event. Both the BBC's One O'clock News and ITV's 12.30 News, referred to the way in which the tabloids had covered the concert, and moreover, the extent to which they had covered the concert. The old certainties of the cultural landscape suddenly seemed in doubt. However, there was some attempt made to reintroduce the old certainties: 'some critics said that a park is no place for opera' (One O'clock News); 'some opera enthusiasts might think it all a bit vulgar' (12.30 News). Although such comments invoked the spectre of high-culture exclusivity, they seemed strangely at a loss to offer any purchase on the event. The apparently obvious cultural division between high and popular culture no longer seemed so obvious. It suddenly seemed that the cultural had been replaced by the economic, revealing a division between 'the rich' and 'the thousands'. It was the event's very popularity that forced the television news to confront, and ultimately to find wanting, old cultural certainties. This can be partly illustrated by returning to the contradictory meaning of the term 'popular'. On the one hand, something is said to be good because it is popular. An example of this usage would be: it was a popular performance. Yet, on the other hand, something is said to be bad for the very same reason. Consider the binary oppositions in Table 1.1. This demonstrates quite clearly the way in which popular and popular culture carries within its definitional field connotations of inferiority; a second-best culture for those unable to understand, let alone appreciate, real culture -- what Matthew Arnold refers to as 'the best that has been thought and said in the world'. **Table 1.1 Popular culture as 'inferior' culture.** **Popular press Quality press** **Popular cinema Art cinema** **Popular entertainment Art** A third way of defining popular culture is as 'mass culture'. This draws heavily on the previous definition. The first point that those who refer to popular culture as mass culture want to establish is that popular culture is a hopelessly commercial culture. It is mass produced for mass consumption. Its audience is a mass of non-discriminating consumers. The culture itself is formulaic, manipulative (to the political right or left, depending on who is doing the analysis). It is a culture that is consumed with brain numbed and brain-numbing passivity. But as John Fiske (1989a) points out, 'between 80 and 90 per cent of new products fail despite extensive advertising... many films fail to recover even their promotional costs at the box office' (31). Simon Frith (1983: 147) also points out that about 80 per cent of singles and albums lose money. A fourth definition contends that popular culture is the culture that originates from 'the people'. It takes issue with any approach that suggests that it is something imposed on 'the people' from above. According to this definition, the term should only be used to indicate an 'authentic' culture of 'the people'. This is popular culture as folk culture: a culture of the people for the people. As a definition of popular culture, it is 'often equated with a highly romanticised concept of working-class culture construed as the major source of symbolic protest within contemporary capitalism' (Bennett, 1980: 27). One problem with this approach is the question of who qualifies for inclusion in the category 'the people'. Another problem with it is that it evades the 'commercial' nature of much of the resources from which popular culture is made. No matter how much we might insist on this definition, the fact remains that people do not spontaneously produce culture from raw materials of their own making. Whatever popular culture is, what is certain is that its raw materials are those which are commercially provided. **Another definition claims that there** that postmodern culture is a culture that no longer recognizes the distinction between high and popular culture. As we shall see, for some this is a reason to celebrate an end to an elitism constructed on arbitrary distinctions of culture; for others it is a reason to despair at the final victory of commerce over culture. An example of the supposed interpenetration of commerce and culture (the postmodern blurring of the distinction between 'authentic' and 'commercial' culture) can be found in the relationship between television commercials and pop music. For example, there is a growing list of artists who have had hit records as a result of their songs appearing in television commercials. One of the questions this relationship raises is: 'What is being sold: song or product?' I suppose the obvious answer is both. Moreover, it is now possible to buy CDs that consist of the songs that have become successful, or have become successful again, as a result of being used in advertisements. **Finally, what all these definitions have in common is the insistence that whatever else popular culture is, it is definitely a culture that only emerged following industrialization and urbanization. Before industrialization and urbanization, Britain had two cultures: a common culture which was shared, more or less, by all classes, and a separate elite culture produced and consumed by the dominant classes in society (see Burke, 1994; Storey, 2003). As a result of industrialization and urbanization, three things happened, which together had the effect of redrawing the cultural map. First of all, industrialization changed the relations between employees and employers. This involved a shift from a relationship based on mutual obligation to one based solely on the demands. Second, urbanization produced a residential separation of classes. For the first time in British history there were whole sections of towns and cities inhabited only by working men and women. Third, the panic engendered by the French Revolution -- the fear that it might be imported into Britain -- encouraged successive governments to enact a variety of repressive measures aimed at defeating radicalism. Political radicalism and trade unionism were not destroyed, but driven underground to organize beyond the influence of middle-class interference and control. These three factors combined to produce a cultural space outside of the paternalist considerations of the earlier common culture. The result was the production of a cultural space for the generation of a popular culture more or less outside the controlling influence of the dominant classes.**