Popular Culture

Published on January 2017 | Categories: Documents | Downloads: 61 | Comments: 0 | Views: 290
of 7
Download PDF   Embed   Report

Comments

Content

POPULAR CULTURE: DEFINED AND DESCRIBED Popular culture, sometimes referred to as 'pop culture', is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred in an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture. This is especially true, and for my purposes, at my website. In Western culture of the early-to-mid 20th century, and the emerging global mainstream of the late 20th-and-early 21st century millions, indeed, billions, are now heavily influenced by a mass print and electronic media. This collection of ideas at the core of pop-culture, popular culture, or populist culture, permeates the everyday lives of the members of society. The term "popular culture", itself, is of 19th century coinage. In its original use it referred to the education and "culturedness" of the lower classes. The term was first used, as far as I know, in an address at the Birmingham Town Hall in England.[1] The term began to assume the meaning of a culture of the lower classes separate from, and opposed to, "true education" towards the end of that 19th century.[2] This usage became established during the antebellum period, that is, the years before the war, before the Civil War. It referred, then, specifically to the period in US history before the Civil War(1861-1864), and after the War of 1812, that is, the years 18151861. The current meaning of the term, culture for mass consumption, originated especially in the United States. It was fully established by the end of World War II when I was just one year old. The abbreviated form "pop culture" dates to the 1960s when I was bringing my adolescent and childhood enthusiasms for sport to an end, when I had just become a member of the Baha'i Faith, when I was in my four years of university and, finally, in the first years of my marriage and the beginning my career as a teacher.[3] --------------------------------------FOOTNOTES-----------------------------------------------------------------1. See 1.1 Adam Siljeström, The educational institutions of the United States: their character and organization; 1.2 J. Chapman, "Influence of European emigration on the state of civilization in the United States: statistics of popular culture in America," 1853, p.243; and 1.3 John Morley presented an address on popular culture at the town hall of Birmingham in 1876 dealing with the education of the lower classes. 2. The sentence: "Learning is dishonored when she stoops to attract," was cited in a section "Popular Culture and True Education" in University extension, The American society for the extension of university teaching, 1894. For a useful discussion of this topic go to A.J. P. Taylor'sEssays in English History, Penguin Books, 1976(1950), pp.49-54. 3. Gloria Steinem, 'Outs of pop culture', LIFE magazine, 20 August 1965, p. 73. POPULAR CULTURE, ACADEMIA and ICONS Part 1: In her 1999 book Popular Culture: An Introduction, Carla Freccero describes what she believes will happen to academia if popular culture continues to be “a degraded cultural form in the minds of liberal educators and students.” Liberal arts education will become an anachronism, as it is already accused of being, by focusing exclusively on forms of cultural production that are not widely shared in public

culture. In my 30 years of teaching in post-secondary education in Australia(19742004), my half a dozen years among students from 12 to 18(1969-1974), and my 10 years teaching and learning in cyberspace(2005-2014)--a total of nearly half a century-I became more and more aware that the potential of the liberal arts education I was dispensing, and still now dispense, is relevant only to a coterie. During the decades of my various forms of involvement in the education of adults, from 1974 to 2014, I have become increasingly aware of: (i) the fracturing of the marketplace and (ii) the preference of many for entertainment and infotainment, over education and edification. Our society is a pluralist one in more ways than one. If I was to have any success as a teacher and educator, I realized by the late 1960s, I needed to be both intellectually stimulating on the one hand, and entertaining on the other. By 1972 when I taught high school in South Australia, this approach, this philosophy of teaching and learning, came to be at the centre of my modus operandi, my MO, as they say in the who-dun-its. Part 1.1: Any media market, broadcast market, media region, designated market area, television market area, indeed, any region where the population can receive the same, or similar, television and radio station offerings is now highly fractured. This market may also include other types of media including: magazines and newspapers as well as a myriad Internet locations from Facebook and MySpace to some 100 million other active internet sites of the 1 billion existing websites. All or some of these print and electronic media can coincide or overlap with 1 or more metropolitan areas. Rural regions with few significant population centers are often designated as separate markets, but the fracturing of this market still applies to them. This fractured media-space is part-and-parcel of the landscape of virtually all advanced and developed societies. Of course, this subject is very complex and highly nuanced; this part of my website makes no attempt at a sohisticated description and analysis. New media marketing(NMM) is a relatively new concept used by businesses in developing a real-space or online community. NMM allows satisfied customers to congregate and extol the virtues of a particular brand or group, party or policy, website or person. In most cases, the online community includes mechanisms such as: blogs and podcasts, message boards and product reviews, Wikipedia and social networks, inter alia. All of these media-mediums contribute to a quite transparent and versatile forum where people can post: praises or criticisms, questions or suggestions, comments or invitations. I utilize this NMM as part of my literary business plan, part of the promotion of my writing in cyberspace. There are several thrusts to my marketing plan, some of which I refer to in this sub-section of my website, and some of which can be found by readers in the "print and media" subsections of this my website.

Part 1.2: The domain of popular culture, the pervasive entity that it has become for millions, passes as fact into and through the minds and hearts of the individuals in mass society. One can argue that this arena of everyday life, of popular culture, is rarely used for argument, debate, and analysis. One can also argue that just about any aspect of popular culture now has such a wealth of information and discussion available that people make no attempt to get an overview of the total package. They focus on those areas of special interest to them in an immensely fractured print and electronic media space. Very few, except some students and some academics, analyse this popular culture in any serious and sophisticated way. The many journals and websites, books and blogs that produce an informed and analytical base for analysis are the preserve of a coterie; the great mass society, mass of society, is rarely engaged in the relevant social sciences that deal with popular culture: sociology, psychology, and philosophy among several others. Popular culture has become, increasingly as the decades of the last half-century have advanced, and especially since the internet has taken-off in this 21st century, an arena of technocratic competence where the focus is on how to manipulate or manage its content, but not analyze and interpret it, at least not by reading what scholars write about it. In this immensely fractured market, the most popular material seems, for the most part, to be the most trivial. Facebook and Twitter and a host of websites which attract the great numbers of hits lack what one could call "serious discussion." Carla Freccero is just one writer who takes this popular, this populist, culture seriously. She gives students of this aspect of our modern world valuable insights. This seductive and unanalysed popular culture is at the centre of her writing and study. She is Professor and Chair of Literature and History of Consciousness, and Professor of Feminist Studies at UCSC. She has taught at UCSC since 1991. Her books include Father Figures (Cornell,1991); Popular Culture(NYU, 1999); and Queer/Early/Modern (Duke, 2006). She co-edited Premodern Sexualities(Routledge, 1996). Her current book project, on nonhuman animals and figuration, is Animate Figures. In 2010 she won the Critical Animal Studies Faculty Paper of the Year. Her fields include early modern European literature and history; critical theory; feminist and queer theories; popular culture and cultural studies; psychoanalysis and animal studies.

Part 1.3:

The theoretical and practical quandary which I have described briefly above is implicit in the somewhat apocalyptic fear that Freccero voices. It is a very familiar one to academic critics of popular culture, as it was familar to me for at least a quarter of a century when I was a teacher and lecturer. This fear, this concern, is now coming to be louder and stronger as the internet has burgeoned into popularity in the last 15 years or so. The problem Freccero describes and discusses in detail is built into the institutional condition of academic cultural studies in particular, and liberal arts education, generally. In order to analyze what Freccero calls the most central, the most “widely shared” culture, the critic must devote his or her attention to precisely those cultural objects which are part and parcel of popular culture. It is those cultural objects whose “technocratically competent” producers have already demonstrated a prolific and disheartening ability to “manipulate and manage”. In the process, hundreds of millions of people are getting immersed in trivia.

Part 1.3.1: This ability of popular culture producers is only 'disheartening', though, to the dispensers of cultural criticism, and perhaps a small part of the great mass of society which has developed a cynical, a skeptical, a pessimistic, take on our modern world. The producers of that popular culture manipulate and manage aspects of popular culture in such a way so as to make that culture “pass as fact”, "enjoyed as pleasure", and "titillate the senses." It is, for the most part, unanalysed and taken as part of the air people breath. These producers both entertain and inform as they manipulate and manage. Confronted with popular culture's mainstream, the critic’s usual tools are hardly effective in throwing light on this pervasive and seductive phenomenon. This sub-section of my website tries to do just that: throw some light on popular culture. It is an olympian task, but it is a task I have set myself to work on in the last several years and in the years ahead. I shall return to this part of my website many times in the years ahead as this popular culture increases its stranglehold over the minds and hearts of billions. The reason the job of the critic of popular culture has such a difficult job is because, by definition, the mainstream center of popular culture is occupied by objects and images that have been, & now, are wholly consumable by the culture at large in a sortof taken-forgranted-ness. These objects and images entertain and distract, delight and capture, charm and tickle, titillate and grab the emotions and feelings, imaginations and minds of a great mass of humanity. They are, de facto, beyond “argument, debate, and analysis.” The most extreme mainstream culture is, virtually by definition, simultaneously the most representative of “the popular” itself, and the least vulnerable to analysis and attack by academic theory and criticism.

Part 2: Under the circumstances I have described above, what could be said to be identified as the “apocalyptic” tone of Freccero’s statements starts to look less like a prediction and more like a simple, a rhetorical flourish. Her writing, I would argue, is tethered by mere convention to an older language of the philosophical sublime, a language that the great mass is simply not attracted to. In the face of the extreme administration of the popular mainstream, the tone and content of Freccero's work seems to me, at best, an anachronistic residue from the old days of the literary scholar. At its worst, her work is just a symptom of the irrelevance of academic cultural theory itself. How, then, do we read the import of Freccero’s prophesy, the threat to which she gives voice? How ought we to deal with the fact that, for the most part, neither the producer nor the consumer of mainstream culture feels any of the “threat” Freccero describes?

The notion of mainstream culture as something threatening because of its utter triviality and spiritual and psychological emptiness is, in some ways, just a sign of the increasingly vast gulf between the cultural critic’s intentions, and those of the aforementioned producers and consumers. The producers and consumers of popular culture are most consummately non-threatening; they have grabbed the market by the jugular and are aiming to keep that market as close as it can, bringing in the dollars as it travels the interstices of cyberspace. They are part of what you might call, and which I refer to above, as "a vast taken-for-grantedness." What kind of a counterthreat is the cultural critic or theorist really able to impose in such a milieux?

Part 2.1: To chose but one example of a pervasive advertising grab for peoples' hearts and minds, I site part of an article which readers can access below. "American, indeed, western, fantasies of upward and outward mobility, of endless space, of vast and remote landscapes, and of possessive, libertarian-style individualism," the article begins, "are all closely linked to the automobile. Only a few decades ago, no American automobile was more desirable or iconic than a compact sports convertible with a powerful engine. Designed to rival European sports cars like the Porsche James Dean died in, the Ford Thunderbird, first manufactured in 1954, deliberately evoked the American continent—prairies, canyons, Native Americans. The T-bird convertible became the ideal automobile for that quintessentially American genre, the road movie. As late as 1991 it was the vehicle driven by Thelma and Louise in their flight to Mexico." "In the first decade of the new century the West is still where many television ads are filmed," so the author contines, "and the open road is still an American fantasy, but the popularity of the compact sports car has given way to that of the “light truck,” a category that includes the SUV, the minivan, and the pick-up truck. It is therefore not

surprising that the culture industry has abandoned the muscle car for what some websites have dubbed the “extreme machine.” This article is written for an American market, but readers here can easily transpose the points made to their own national and media culture. For an extended analysis of popular culture and its fantasies, the print and electronic media and their productions, go to:http://www.uiowa.edu/~ijcs/mainstream/mainfe1.htm For more on this subject you can also go to: http://www.uiowa.edu/~ijcs/mainstream/mainint.htm

POPULAR CULTURE AND MY WRITING Part 1: There is a great deal in popular culture that I have found useful to draw on for this prose-poetic website. This is also true for my literary corpus in the last 20 years since I began to write extensively, in the last 30 years when my writing was first published in the print media, in the last 40 years since I began to teach in post-secondary colleges and universities in Australia, in the last 50 years since beginning my own university studies in 1963/4 in an arts degree in Ontario Canada, and in the last 60 years(1954-2014) since I first began to become immersed myself in popular culture in my late childhood, ages 9 to 12. Below are an essay and several poems that arose out of what I find to be a rich reservoire of relationships between popular culture and my writing on the one hand, and the Baha'i Cause on the other. The essay below is the introduction I wrote to a collection of some 150 published articles, about 800 words each, which appeared in a newspaper in the town of Katherine in the Northern Territory of Australia between 1983 and 1986. For the most part these were essays on popular culture, high and low culture, serious and the everyday. In these early years of this new millennium these published articles and several others in other media, a total of some 200,000 words, are my major form of published work in the traditional literary forms of: books, journals and newspapers. In the last dozen years, though, the years from 2003 to 2014, I have published extensively in cyberspace, and popular culture is certainly one of the centres of this online publishing. I do not possess a detailed interest in the trivia of the celebrity culture. I do not know that much about the hundreds of celebrities, say, since the beginnings of cinema more than a century ago, and the beginnings of television, perhaps six or seven

decades ago. Much of celebrity culture is fundamentally outside my interest inventory. The endless litany of celebrity and popular-interest magazines like: fishing and fashion, music and movies, sport and services, which adorn newsagents and super-market checkouts have always been outside my reading & viewing interests. But much of it is something I have come to increasingly draw on. As I aim my writing at a popular, populist, culture and, at the same time, go in pursuit of an understanding of my times, my age, my epochs readers will find much of my writing of this ilk.

Part 2: On those occasions when I do draw on popular culture, I am not usually capable of being funny about it as, for example, the Australian writer Clive James. I find that digging down fearlessly through the strata of the hardly negligible and finding, in the process, some underlying ephemerality, not to my liking. It takes a particular kind of feeling for the serious to treat what doesn't matter as if it mattered. I don't possess that talent. Sometimes I find, though, that some aspect of pop-culture is not ephemeral and it is useful to my literary purposes. Last year, on 28/11/'13, I watched a film that was part of popular culture. That film provided insights into the realities of life, as I saw them, that were as valuable as any serious article or essay found in high culture, in serious academic thought. What makes fame and celebrity so alluring to audiences and yet so disillusioning for the object of fame? How have the criteria for what deserves or attracts fame changed in different historical eras? What makes people famous? Is it their exemplary conduct as public figures? Or is it their uncompromising resistance to a social paradigm which is trying to absorb them? The Frenzy of Renown is both a who’s who of western history’s heavyweights and an insightful exploration of the human urge to be recognized. For a review of this book go to:http://suhailrafidi.wordpress.com/2012/04/23/book-review-the-frenzy-of-renownfame-and-its-history-by-leo-braudy/ Being in the limelight, as celebrities clearly are, can eat away at their mind, spirit and soul as decisively as quicklime decomposes the body. Celebrity is the theme of Clive James's book The Blaze of Obscurity published in 2010. More accurately his book is about the changing relationship between celebrity status and real achievement. This is what emerges as this books' principal focus. For some reviews of this work of Clive James go to:http://www.clivejames.com/books/current/blazereviews

Sponsor Documents

Or use your account on DocShare.tips

Hide

Forgot your password?

Or register your new account on DocShare.tips

Hide

Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link to create a new password.

Back to log-in

Close