POPULAR CULTURE&THE STATE

SOC 210SOCIOLOGY OF POPULAR

CUTURE

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

Marxist theoritician PoliticianMain interests: hegemony,Ideology and culture‘Cultural Hegemony’ theory:How states use cultural institutionsto maintain power in capitalist societies.

• ‘Every state is ethical in as much as one of its most important functions is to raise the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level; a level which corresponds to the needs of the productive forces for development, and hence to the interests of the ruling classes. The school as a positive educative function, and the courts as a repressive and negative educative function, are the most important state activities in this sense; but in reality, a multitude of other so-called private initiatives and activities tend to the same end- initiatives and activities which form the apparatuses of the political and cultural hegemony of the ruling classes.

• Antonio Gramsci

Popular Culture&The State• Gramsci defines the state as ‘the entire

complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies its dominance but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules.’

• For the first time in society science, Gramsci placed questions of culture, and especially popular culture at the very center of the state’s sphere of activity.

Popular Culture&The State• Gramsci argued that, the modern

democratic state forms and organizes society not only in economic life but on a broad front.

• State’s aim is always adapting the civilization and morality of the popular masses to the necessities of continuous development of the economic apparatus of production.

• State works like a mediator between cultural formations and class relations.

Popular Culture&The State• At the historical periodisation of the state

development and popular cultural changes in the society, it is possible to see breaks and discontinuties, the points where a whole set of patterns and relations are drastically reshaped of transformed.

• The shifts in cultural relations punctuates the development of popular culture.

• These turning points occur, not when the contents of popular culture changes, but when cultural relations between the popular and dominant cultures shift.

Popular Culture&The State• Historical accounts of changes in

popular culture – Traditional Village Football versus Modern Soccer game.Pre-industrial football was highly irregular, unformalised, without standard rules. The ball could be carried, thrown, snatched as well as kicked and the only prohibition being that it could be given in a polite manner. It sometimes involved 100s of participants on unmarked fields or through the town streets.Each game was being governed by local traditions.

The modern football game is highly regulated an systematized.

It is administered centrally and organized according to universally observed and refereed rules

Its high points are national and international rather than parochial and though ties of locality remain strong.

Popular Culture&The State• These contrasts bring out qualitative

differences: between a rural society, regulated by custom, local tradition and the particularism of small, face-to-face communities, and an urban-centralized society governed by universally applied rules and a legal and rational mode of regulation.

Popular Culture&The State• Historical developmental shifts of states,

create shifts at the whole complex of social relations.

Cock-fighting – FootballGentry – Buorgeoisie

Rural Laborers – Industrial workersVillage – City

Parish – SuburbCustom – Law

Common Rights – Property RightsLocal Sanctions – Public Order

Popular Culture&The State• Football – for the sense of blood sports in historical ages. • A very different web of relations and understandings

mediates the classes involved in modern football.• Modern football/soccer is no longer local in this sense.• It is realised as much through the mass spectatorship

of the modern media as it is in direct participation.• In its immediate culture of support, the defining

presence is that of the urban industrial classes.• The dominant classes appear to be largely absent-

though they are often present in the financing, administration and chairmanship of the game.

Popular Culture&The State• Village football and cock-fighting were part of

a culture which bound and seperated the fundamental classes of 18th century agrarian society.

• On the other hand, modern football is constructed through the seperation out of the fundamental classes of advanced industrial capitalism and their recombination as a ‘mass’.

• Then, what matters for the history of popular culture are breaks, discontinuities, transformations: the sharply differing articulations of cultural space, in two periods.

Popular Culture&The State‘The State’

18th century stateNo regular policeNo standing armyMale dominanceNo vote right of public

19th century stateNo industriesNo universal system of educationNo national economic policyStruggles of dominant classes

20th century stateThe growth of the all-encompassing state.State arises from society but it also reflects the society by authority.Public matters and private spherese seperated.The family importanceThe economy, education, press privatized under capitalism.

Popular Culture&The State• Historical transitions and development shifts

establish new ‘relations of force’ between the classes and cultures.

• They remodel and refashion the nature of cultural leadership in society.

• They mobilize consent and help to win popular support for, and thus secure, different types of class-cultural authority.

• The restructuring of these relations is central to the processes by which hegemony is, or is not achieved, in particular historical periods.