What is culture and cultural studies?

Initially, culture was conceived as history and literature from UK and US. This is biased and
incomplete.

Cultural studies→ Anthropological approach.

VIEWS ON CULTURE

Stephen Fry: patronising attitude – faux populism – everything has a right to exist but we all know
what is valuable and what isn’t.

Carl Bernstein: Things I don’t like are “weird, stupid and coarse”.

Jeffrey Eugenides: Culture has to be old, status is granted by age therefore white Europeans are
the best (medieval heritage).

Wade Davis: Culture is humanity distinguished by time, place, social and geographical context.
Culture is everything a-political, scientific perspective, references and objectivity.

POST WAR

F. R. Leavis (1950 British): Culture is under attack from mass production and standardisation. He
fears culture is at risk of being “Americanised”. The war has signaled the fall of Europe, world
default by US – USSR. Britain feels invaded and doesn’t like it. Economy leads to cultural changes.
Mass production = mass culture (universal access).

For Leavis, culture is a minority business. High culture is white and European (Agrees with Arnold).

Art – Modernism: the economic transformations are inherently bad because it makes culture
accessible to everyone, which means it’s no good.

Movies

≠ Vivid illusions of real life. They corrupt culture, the crowds are stupid.

Books

Culture is the preserve of an elite. Anything that is popular is not culture, masses cannot be
cultural.

Dwight MacDonald: He denigrates mass culture; compares it to chewing gum (something that
doesn’t last long and you can’t get rid of).

Mass culture ≠ Folk art

Fake, watered independent of high culture,
down version of organic development,
high culture. more authentic.
Man culture is imposed by the upper-class, by the “Lords of the Kitsch”, the capitalists who
manufacture culture in order to dominate the masses.

By creating this “Man culture”, upper classes are, in a way, destroying their own culture. He agrees
with Leavis, but adds that the whole thing is a capitalist plot to destroy culture and makes the
recipients passive in order to control and dominate.

Masses have no agency. Nothing they generate can ever have value. “If the masses don’t do it, it
must be value.” (Arnold and Leavis agree).

The elitist version of culture is very much alive.

Masses→ Working people, industrial context and socialist class identity. Proletariat and capitalist
classes. Marx and Lenin driving force of the Russian Revolution (the only people that matter are
industrial workers, modernist perspective).

Masses vs People → Masses are sleeplike, they are manipulated, lied. Industrial workers work in a
standarized environment, regimented, specialization of labor. There is no authority of
independence. Workers become an extension of the machine, no detaching the workers from the
industrial setting. Humanity is pushed out. Culture with any authenticity no longer exists.

From the left, culture is a product but it has a purpose (to control and dominate the working
classes).

Kitsch→ Fake simulation, cheap copy, loses its authentic value, provokes meaningless emotional
responses, and reduces the masses docile.

Noam Chomsky: Sports- media- mass culture.

Football is a media artefact for social controls. Manufactures fake community, people with no
personal stakes. There is no such thing as just entertainment, its mass culture to make you stupid
so that you don’t ask questions about what matters.

- In a democracy there are many real things that should matter to citizens (justice,
education, etc.). Most people are too stupid to ask these questions. Mass culture is
created to make people more stupid.

The Frankfurt School (1930 Germany): Adorno and Horkheimer.

Mass culture and fascism→ Why do so many people support the Nazis? Why did the working
classes support the extreme right? Brain washing, fear and hatred.

Matthew Arnold (1869): Culture is what the great minds produce and the rest of us follow
staunchly. Reading is an essential part of obtaining ‘culture’. Not available to everyone.

“Elite” not everyone can access culture. Culture is determined by the rich and powerful.
Canon→ agreed to be goo by the rich and powerful (orthodox intellectual elite). A body of work
accumulated over time that has been agreed upon as representing greatness.

Writers, critics, artists who are widely accepted are representing knowledge and able to certify
value.

1869→ Extension of the franchise: people who didn’t have as much propriety could vote now, so
the elite were worried about what these people could vote. They thought they had to be educated
by imposing ‘culture’ (the right values).

Once something becomes popular is no longer elitist.

When industrialization is involved, culture is out of the picture.

Wade Davis: Anthropologist. Associates culture to humanity and we do?

New stage in cultural analysis: Culture is used to control in the most brutal ways (totalitarian
dictatorships).

- Propaganda: comes from the state, it involves lies, exaggeration and omission, in order to
manipulate political opinions.

Raymond Williams (1950’s): He was working class and Welsh; he didn’t fit in with the canon of
academic excellence.

Commodification→ media tries to sell an idea as a product and takes away the real meaning.

Authenticity begins in communities, grassroots, and movements.

“Culture is ordinary” → Very subjective, based on his personal experience.

Contesting values→ Who decades?

Culture is complex and is governed by symbolic actions.

Perhaps mass culture doesn’t exists→ attacking left and right. At human feelings we give
subjective meaning to everything.
Culture is ordinary (Raymond Williams)

A Theory of Mass Culture (Dwight MacDonald)