All the context is western because it is a western concept Popular culture 12/5/2015 1 Sneha...

All the context is western because it is a western concept

Popular culture

18/04/231Sneha Subhedar, Co-ordinator, DMM, Ramnarian Ruia College

Introduction

A vague notion of what is meant when the term "popular culture" is used: we think of the top-ten hits on the radio, music videos, blockbuster films, Stephen King and John Grisham novels, polyester and platform shoes, hamburgers and milkshakes.

Popular culture is certainly all of those things, but it also includes a vast amount - everything from holidays to TV evangelists.


The idea of popular culture, as we know it, only came about in the second half of the nineteenth century and for the first fifty years or so was viewed very negatively by those who dared to acknowledge its existence.

"culture" was divisible into different types - high, popular, and folk are the most common distinctions - in the way that society was divisible into classes came primarily from the writings of Matthew Arnold, particularly his book Culture and Anarchy. (in note)


Arnold was the first to assert that the lower classes posed a cultural danger to the elite. Though there had always been the idea of culture - of fine things, of education, of breeding, of taste - Arnold was the first to give it a definition.

'Culture' can be used to refer to how an entire society operates, including economy, political structure, and religion, but it can also be used to refer to the aesthetic elements of society - that which we do when we are not working directly on our survival: art, music, dance, theatre, and storytelling for example.

Arnold was using . For him, in short, culture was "the best that has been thought and said in the world," which existed, "to make reason and the will of God prevail." Arnold believed that culture was the natural possession of the upper class (based on an evolutionary notion of society, that is, the working class was actually a less evolved form of life, which was why vulgarity and unruliness were inherent characteristics of their class). 18/04/234

Sneha Subhedar, Co-ordinator, DMM, Ramnarian Ruia College

Knowledge and participation in culture was what kept the aristocrats more civilised than the lower classes, and it was therefore their duty to impart "culture" to everyone else.

The perception of culture as Arnold had laid it out remained.

His theories prevailed in the study of culture for some decades to come, and were to form the elitist backbone of Modernism.


The significance of his idea of culture is that it associated culture specifically with the upper classes, that is, with education, with wealth, and with good upbringing.

He designated the culture of the upper classes, their music, their art, their literature, their manners, and their values as the best the world had to offer.

If the aristocrats, politicians, intellectuals and other elite members of society were the only people who possessed culture, to be benevolently doled out to the rest of society, then how could the "culture" that the masses produced be described?


The need to address this latter type of culture became dire as the culture, or the un-culture, of the masses became increasingly prevalent in cheap novels, newspapers, comic strips, advertising and especially in the new inventions of film and radio in early the twentieth century.


Contemporary with Arnold's view of upper-class culture was the late nineteenth century fad for "folk culture".

The retrieving and preservation of folk culture in the form of fairytales, folksongs, proverbs, and dialects, led by the Brothers Grimm, became an academic hotspot.

Although folk culture stemmed from the lowest class - mostly farmers, peasants and villagers - it was not considered a threat to society, because it was a culture in decline, doomed to perish in the wake of industrialisation and urbanisation.


These two different kinds of cultures - Arnold's elite culture and the academics' folk culture - only represented a very small percentage of the population, even put together.

A vast number of people were left hanging in the middle, with activities, past-times, and entertainments unworthy, so it seemed, of a label.

It was their culture that came to be called the contentious "mass" or "popular culture".

The first academic interest in popular culture (not until the 1930s) began negatively, with the condemnation of any cultural manifestation outside of the traditional, educated, and elitist class.


The catalysts of the protest against the rising culture of the masses were F.R. Leavis and his wife Q.D. Leavis, who made a life's work of studying the decline of 'culture' (Arnold's definition of it) in the new 20th century.

In its place was growing a monstrous ugly beast designed to appeal to the uneducated tastes of the working class.

'Mass culture' was the term designated for the Hollywood-movie goers, the romance readers, and the radio show listeners, but the term was used mockingly, an ironic joke to mark the lamentation of like-minded Leavisites


As far as they were concerned this mass culture was a hollow imitation of true culture. It taught nothing, it conveyed no worthwhile messages, and it had no value.

Instead, mass culture worked as a type of drug, lulling its audience into a false perception of reality, deadening them to the true difficulties of life. For example, F.R. Leavis said this about Hollywood films:"[T]hey 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.“


The Leavis' critique continues even today, television and video games are often referred to as a 'drug', and as compensations for reality.

While the Leavis' may have had a genuine concern that the public was reading mediocre material instead of Shakespeare, their appeals were also politically motivated.

Their impression of history was that 'culture', that is, the likes of Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Michelangelo, had always been under the control of a minority, namely the aristocracy, who best knew how to mediate the culture to the majority, and more importantly, were in a position to quash culture that did not measure up to elite standards.


According to the Leavies, . Society's standard of living was being demolished by the invasion of hollow culture, whose growth could only be slowed by a counter-growth of true culture in the schools.


Definition The culture of the masses, no matter what was

taught in schools, continued to proliferateBut much to the chagrin, these biases against

popular culture was carried forward in the study of popular culture for the want of other methodologies


As a result of the study's negative beginning, popular culture has gone without a definition. It has been, rather, defined by what it is not.

It is not the high culture of the Leavisites, nor is it folk culture (which the Leavises already claimed was lost).

The culture of the masses oozed somewhere in between high and folk culture, thus the first step in defining what exactly mass or popular culture was, was to define the parameters of high and folk culture.


High Culture

The creations of high or elite culture are unique and difficult. They are unique in that their creators aim to break the boundaries of what is known, to create in a manner yet untried, perhaps with materials not commonly used for their purpose, or to combine elements in a new or innovative way.

They are difficult in that the creation itself, or the means used to create it, challenge accepted beliefs, cause its audience to question their perceived reality, or to forge new paths in thinking. Thomas Inge in the introduction to The Handbook of Popular Culture puts it well:


"The function of high culture is to validate the experience of the individual. Creation is a purely aesthetic act in pursuit of truth and beauty, and, that being so, therefore self-justifying. 'Art for art's sake' is a phrase generally applied to allow for creations that are non-representational and totally without use or even meaning … The art piece is designed aggressively to confront us, to challenge our assumptions and beliefs about art and life, and to identify the unanswered questions about existence."

Creators of high culture create for the timeless recognition of their having introduced to the world a new way of seeing, hearing, feeling, or experiencing life.

The high culture audience is small, hence the creator is usually easily associated with their work. In our day, high culture includes the works of such artists as Picasso, Shakespeare, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge


Popular Culture

Situated in between the definitions of high culture and folk culture, popular culture is whatever they are not.

If it is not high culture then it cannot be unique, or difficult. Creators of popular culture must remain within known boundaries, use common methods, and common materials, staying away from innovation.

The creation, or its method of creation, must not cause its audience to question accepted reality, and must remain on accepted paths of thinking.


The audience for popular culture must be large, and the likelihood of the creator being known to the audience should be minimal.

If it is not folk culture then popular culture must not be communal, or anticipated. Creators of popular culture must not draw from traditional knowledge nor relate to everyday experience. The audience must not "expect that their experiences will reflect the conventions of what has gone before and served them well in the past."

Popular culture is impersonal. The audience for popular culture is usually quite large,

hence the label 'popular', and therefore, due to the number of people it aims to please, it can not draw from the traditions of a small group. It must draw from a greater consciousness


Popular culture can usually be situated somewhere between unique and anticipated. It must be novel enough to hook attention, but not so novel as to question beliefs. At the same time, it makes much use of regular formulas, detective stories for example, which have anticipated elements throughout.

Popular culture has, in this century, been quite innovative in its use of media, particularly media which can communicate to a large number of people at once: the radio, film, television, the Internet.

Finally, despite the association of popular with mass markets, many creators of popular culture are in their business simply because they love to create (though there a sizeable number in it for the money).


All the context is western because it is a western concept Popular culture 12/5/2015 1 Sneha...

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