Uvod u američku pop kulturu

18/10/2021

How to define the term „culture“?

- Raymond Williams calls culture one of the tow/three most complicated word sin E.L.

- three broad definitions:

-to refer to „a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development“ (for example
– the cultural development of Western Europe, referring only to intellectual, spiritual and
aesthetic factors – great philosophers, great artists and poets)

- Second use – a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group (ex. Development
of literacy, holidays, sport, religious festivals…)

- Third use – the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity (ex. Poetry, the
novel, ballet, opera, fine art – the texts and practices whose principal function is to signify, to
produce or to be the occasion for the production of meaning)

- To speak of popular culture usually means to mobilize the second and third meanings

- The second meaning – allows us to speak of such practices as the Christmas, youth subcultures
(lived cultures, practices)

- The third – allows us to speak of soap opera, pop music, and comics as examples of culture
(texts)

IDEOLOGY

- Crucial concept in the study of pop culture

- Many competing meanings; in much cultural analysis the concept is used interchangeably with
culture itself

- A few different ways of understanding ideology:

- a systematic body of ideas articulated by a particular group of people (a political party –
collection of political, economic, social ideas)

- Second definition suggests a certain masking, distortion, or concealment

-how some texts and practices present distorted images of reality, “false consciousness”,
distortions that work in the interests of the powerful against the interests of the powerless
- if you give people something to entertain them in their 8 hour leisure time, they won’t self-
actualize – therefore the start of consumerism (so people would just “sit and do nothing”), also
spending money on things you don’t actually need

- Third definition of ideology – “ideological forms”

- the way in which texts (television, songs, novels…) always present a particular image of the
world
- all texts are ultimately political

- Fourth definition of ideology associated with cultural theorist Roland Barthes

-ideology (or “myth” – Barthes) operates mainly at the level of connotations, the secondary,
often unconscious meanings that texts and practices carry, or can be made to carry
 - Fifth def. very influential in the 1970s and early 1980s, developed by the French Marxist
philosopher Louis Althusser
-ideology not simply as a body of ideas, but as a material practice, encountered in the
practices of everyday life
-the way in which certain rituals and customs have the effect of binding us to the social order
-the seaside holiday or the celebration of Xmas as examples of ideological practices

POPULAR CULTURE

- Different definitions

- Culture that is widely favoured or well-liked by many people

- sales of books, music, movies – data overload; no meaningful analysis can be conducted
- however because of the popular in pop culture a quantitative dimension must be
considered

- Culture that is left over after we have decided what is high culture

-a residual category, there to accommodate texts and practices that fail to meet the required
standards to qualify as high culture

- A definition of popular culture as inferior culture

- To be real culture, it has to be difficult

- Its very difficulty literally excludes, an exclusion that guarantees the exclusivity of its
audience

- 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”

- supported by claims that popular culture is mass-produced commercial culture, whereas high
culture is the result of an individual act of creation
-problems- Shakespeare – epitome of high culture

- popular culture is “mass culture” – attempt to establish that pop culture is a hopelessly
commercial culture; mass produced for mass consumption
-its audience is a mass of non-discriminating consumers
the culture itself is formulaic, manipulative (in relation to left or right political discourses)
- consumed with brain numbed and brain-numbing passivity
- in a clear identifiable sense an imported American culture

- A benign version of the mass culture perspective

-as forms of public fantasy; Pop culture understood as a collective dream world; collective
escapism

- Culture that originates from “the people” – popular culture as folk culture: a culture of the
people for the people

- Problems: - who qualifies for inclusion in the category “the people”

- people do not spontaneously produce culture from raw materials (commercially provided)
 - culture premised on the political analysis of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and his concept
of hegemony
-uses the term “hegemony” to refer to the way in which dominant groups in society, through
a process of “intellectual and moral leadership” seek to win the consent of subordinate groups in
society
-pop culture in this usage is not the imposed culture nor is it an emerging from below, - It is a
terrain of exchange and negotiation between the two, marked by resistance and incorporation
- film noir starts as despised pop cinema and within thirty years becomes art cinema; horror
genre; Shakespeare

- postmodern culture is a culture that no longer recognizes the distinction between high and pop
culture
-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

-what all these definitions have in common is that popular culture is a culture that only emerged
following industrialization and urbanization

25/10/2021

Matthew Arnold

- inaugurates the study of pop culture in the modern age

- he inaugurates a tradition, a particular way of seeing pop culture, a particular way of placing
pop culture within the general field of culture

- “culture and civilization” tradition (Culture and Anarchy (1867-9))

- For Arnold culture begins by meaning two things:

- a body of knowledge
- the endeavour to know the best and to make this knowledge prevail for the good of all
humankind

- The term “anarchy” operates in part as a synonym for pop culture

- He divides society into Barbarians (aristocracy), Philistines (middle class) and Populace (working
class); possible diffusion of class?!
-aristocracy and middle class are further along the evolutionary continuum than the working
class

Culture

- must carefully guide the aristocracy and the middle class from such circumstances

- Secondly, it must bring to the working class, the class in which so-called human nature is said to
reside

- Against such “anarchy”, culture recommends the State

- Two factors make the State necessary:

-the decline of the aristocracy as a centre of authority
-the rise of democracy
 - Creation of a “terrain favourable to anarchy”

- The solution is to occupy this terrain with a mixture of culture and coercion

- Arnold’s cultured State:

- to control and curtail the social, economic and cultural aspirations of the working class until
the middle class is sufficiently cultured to take on this function itself

- “Culture and Anarchy”

-“education is the road to culture”
- aristocracy – to accustom it to decline, to banish it
- working class – to civilize it for subordination, deference and exploitation

- Working-class schools little more than outposts of civilization in a dark continent of working
class barbarism

- Working-class children had to be civilized before they could be instructed

- Middle class – education something quite different. Its essential function is to prepare middle-
class children for the power that is to be theirs

- Popular culture – symptomatic of a profound political disorder

- Arnold’s main concern is social order, social authority, won through cultural subordination and
deference

- Working-class culture is significant to the extent that it signals evidence of social and cultural
disorder and decline – a breakdown in social and cultural authority

8/11/2021

The Frankfurt School

- a group of German intellectuals associated with the Institute for Social Research hat the
University of Frankfurt

- established in 1923; 1933 – moved to NY, attaching itself to the University of Columbia

- “Critical Theory” – name given to the Institute’s critical mix of Marxism and psychoanalysis
-The Institute’s work on pop culture is mostly associated with the writing of Theodor Adorno,
Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal and Herbert Marcuse

- “Culture industry” – coined by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer; to designate the products
and processes of mass culture

- the products of the culture industry marked by two features:

- homogeneity (“film, radio, magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in
every part… all mass culture is identical”)
- predictability (“as soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end…The result is a
constant reproduction of the same thing”)

- Arnold – pop culture represented a threat to cultural and social authority

- Frankfurt Schiol – see only “conformity”

- a situation in which “the deceived masses” are caught in a #circle of manipulation and
retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger”
 - Adorno – reading of an American situation comedy; a young schoolteacher who is both
underpaid and continually fined by her school principal

-Leo Lowenthal – the culture industry

- production of culture marked by “standardisation, stereotype, conservatism, mendacity,
manipulated consumer goods”
- worked to depoliticize the working class – limiting its horizon to political and economic goals
that could be realized within the oppressive and exploitative framework of capitalist society

- “Whenever revolutionary tendencies show a timid head, they are mitigated and cut short by a
false fulfilment of wish-dreams, like wealth, adventure, passionate love, power and sensationalism in
general”

- capitalism is able to prevent the formation of more fundamental desires

- culture industry stunts the political imagination

- art or high culture perceived as to be working differently

- to keep alive the human desire for a better world beyond the confines of the present
- key to unlock the prison-house established by the development of mass culture by the
capitalist culture industry

15/11/2021

Hegemony
- Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci
- hegemony – a political concept developed to explain (given the exploitative and oppressive
nature of capitalism) the absence of socialist revolutions in the Western capitalist democracies

- a continuing condition in which a dominant class (in alliance with other classes or class
fractions) rules and leads a society through the exercise of “intellectual and moral leadership”

- specific kind of consensus:

- a social group seeks to present its own particular interests as the general interests of the
society as a whole

- a society in which, despite oppression and exploitation, there is a high degree of consensus,
a large measure of social stability

- subordinate groups and classes appear to actively support and subscribe to values, ideals,
objectives, cultural and political meaning, which bind them to, and “incorporate them into, the
prevailing structures of power

- does not refer to a society in which all conflict has been removed

- conflict is contained and channelled into ideologically safe harbours

- maintained by dominant groups and classes “negotiating” with, and making concessions to,
subordinate groups and classes

- a process marked by both “resistance” and “incorporation”

 - limits

- to challenge the economic fundamentals of class power is not allowed

- when moral and intellectual leadership is not enough to secure continued authority – the
“repressive state apparatus” is used

- changes allowed by the concept of hegemony:

- pop culture no longer an imposed culture of political manipulation (the Frankfurt School)

- no longer a sign of social decline and decay (the “culture and civilization” tradition)

- no longer something that emerges spontaneously from below

- hegemony theory allows us to think of pop culture as a shifting balance of forces between
resistance and incorporation

- this can be analysed in many different contexts: class, gender, generation, ethnicity, race,
region, religion, disability, sexuality, etc

- causes pop culture to become a contradictory mix of competing interests and values, no
extreme “polarities”

Globalization
- a contemporary term, describe a late twentieth-century condition of economic, social and political
interdependence across cultures, societies, nations, and regions

- caused by an unprecedented expansion of capitalism on a global scale

- historical precedents
- empires, conquests, slavery, and diasporas
- Asian, Arab, and European civilizations mingled through trade, travel, and settlement

- today the term “globalization” used to name a specific set of late-twentieth-century

transformations:

- changes in world political structure after WWII (ascendancy of United States, the
decolonization of the formerly colonized world)

- shift from the concept of modern nation-state toward a range of economic, social, and
political links that articulate interdependencies across nations

- acceleration in the scale, mode, and volume of exchange and interdependency in nearly all
spheres of human activity

- celebrated by free market advocates as fulfilling the promises of neoliberalism and free trade

- criticized by scholars, policymakers, and activists as a world economic program aggressively

command by the US, enacted directly through U.S. foreign policies

- indirectly through institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund,
and the World Trade Organization

- creating economic divides with devastating effects for the poor in “developing” countries
Globalization of culture

- a form of cultural imperialism that has eroded nation-states and flattened national cultural
differences through the vast spread of consumerism (Miyoshi 1993)

- global encounter, migration, and contact have produced more hybrid forms of “cultural complexity”
(Hannerz 1992)

- to study “culture” within globalization is to observe it as it “mediates the uneven spaces linked
through geohistorical, political, economic, and social logics” (P. Taylor 1999)

- “culture” expresses dynamic contradictions precisely at those intersections, borders, and zones
where normative regimes contact, enlist, restrict, or coerce

- critical studies of the US within global processes

- normative modes differentiate as they regulate

- discipline as they include and assimilate

- U.S. culture identifies in

- cultural products (literature, music, art, mass and pop cultures)

- in cultural practices (the organization of cities and public spaces, schooling, religion)

- critics suggest that state, military, and economic processes are now entirely coordinated, in
real time across distances, through the vast reach of global information networks (Manuel Castells)

- Internet as a site of production and critique

Problems

- restructuring of the US economy

- national industries to transnational finance capitalism

- traditionally male jobs in manufacturing to more feminized forms of service operations

- unsettling of historical neighbourhoods by the influx of new transnational migrants

- loss of jobs as manufacturing moved to export- processing zones in Asia and Latin America

- simultaneous reduction of social welfare and build-up of the US prison system

- for some globalization signifies the “end” of modern US myths of purity

- “man” as the white race

- redeemed by the authenticity of rural life

- leader of the “free world” and “the American century”

- other interpretations:

- a “crisis”, a “chaos of governance”

- End of Enlightenment, liberal humanism, or civil society

- sign of emerging Asian economic supremacy

- hope about the possibilities for countering poverty and creating sustainable growth

- “denationalization” of corporate power

- “unbundles” the territorial organization of sovereignty, defying earlier maps of “core” and
“periphery”

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

- Joseph Stalin devised the phrase “the heresy of American Exceptionalism” in 1929

- … the US was “unique” Because it lacked the social and historical conditions that had led to
Europe’s economic collapse

- Founders of American studies reappropriated the term in the 1930s effort to portray the US as
destined to perform a special role in the world of nations

- positioned the US into a model that offered European societies an image of a future liberated from
the incursions of both Marxism and socialism

- it regulated how the US went about identifying, selecting, formulating, and resolving scholarly
problems (inside and outside of academia)

- throughout the Cold War era, American studies research, teaching, and publications constructed a
nationalist and imperialist discourse out of the exceptionalist norms that they propagated
throughout Europe and the so-called Third World

- United State’s unique place in world history

- the “redeemer nation”

- “conqueror of the world’s markets”

- “global security state”

- American exceptionalism

- imagined a Soviet empire that threatened to overthrow the world order through the spread
of revolutionary socialism

- represented Europe as especially susceptible to this threat

- an academic discourse

- a political doctrine

- key element for defining, supporting, and developing the U.S. national identity

Foucault and Power

- Discipline and Punish

- Robert Damiens, 42 years old and a former soldier in the French army, rushed up to Louis XV with a
knife and inflicted a light wound

- guilty of regicide

- execution was public, with a large crowd attending, and spectacularly brutal
- 80 years later – the rules for a detention centre for young offenders in Paris:

- We have, then, a public execution and a time-table” (DP 7)

- Introduction of “discipline” – “not to punish less, but to punish better” (DP 82)

- the scaffold

- a key element of numerous pamphlet novels, dime papers, myth and folklore – a cultural reference

- N. Hawthorne describes it as an ideal tool for the promotion of servile emotions, just as useful as
the French guillotine

- Foucault – the scaffold or more specifically the act of execution is not only a judicial ritual but also a
ritual of power

- the crowd is attracted to the site because of the offense against the ruler (or any form of
government)

- the scaffold – a place where an inversion of power occurs, where the oppressed crowds can speak
against their rulers and ruling institutions without fear of being punished

- four major transitions from between modern and premodern approaches to punishment

- punishment is no longer a public display, a spectacular demonstration to all of the

sovereign’s irresistible force majeure, but rather a discrete, almost embarrassed application of
constraints needed to preserve public order

- what is punished is no longer the crime but the criminal, the concern of the law being not so
much what criminals have done as what (environment, heredity, parental actions) has led them to do
it

- those who determine the precise nature and duration of the punishment are no longer the judges
who impose penalties in conformity with the law, but the experts (psychiatrists, social workers,
parole boards) who decide how to implement indeterminate judicial sentences

- the main purpose of punishment is no longer retribution (either to deter others or for the sake of
pure justice) but the reform and rehabilitation of the criminal

- premodern punishment violently assaults the criminal body, but is satisfied with retribution through
pain

- modern punishment demands an inner transformation, a conversion of the heart to a new way of
life

- in the modern age, “the soul is the prison of the body” (DP 30)

- Discipline and Punish

- the disciplinary techniques introduced for criminals become the model for the other
modern sites of control (schools, hospitals, factories…)

- disciplinary training – operates not by direct control of the body as a whole but by detailed control
of specific parts of the body

- to achieve the results through a specific set of procedures – micro-management

- Foucault – sums up the modern approach to discipline by saying that it aims at producing “docile
bodies”: bodies that not only do what we want but do it precisely in the way that we want (DP 138)

- docile bodies produced thprugh three distinctively moderns means

- Hierarchical observation

- we can control what people do merely by observing them

- architecture

- normalizing judgement

- individuals not judged by the intrinsic rightness or wrongness of their acts

- judged by where their actions place them on a ranked scale that compares them to
everyone else

- no escaping it because, for virtually any level of achievement, the scale shows that there is
an even higher level possible

- norms define certain modes of behaviour as “abnormal”, which puts them beyond
the pale of what is socially (or even humanly) acceptable

- the threat of being judged abnormal constrains us at every turn

- examination

- combines hierarchical observation with normative judgement

- the examination reveals the new position of the individual In the modern nexus of
power/knowledge

- the results of examinations are recorded in documents that provide detailed information
about the individuals examined and allow power systems to control them (for example absentee
records for schools, patients’ charts in hospitals)

- on the basis of these records, those in control can formulate categories, averages, and
norms that are in turn a basis for knowledge

- this process also reverses the polarity of visibility

- in 5he premodern period, the exercise of power was itself typically highly visible (military
presence in towns, public executions), while those who were the objects of knowledge remained
obscure

- in the modern age the exercise of power is typically invisible, bit it controls its object by
making them highly visible

- in conclusion

- the prison-model has metastasized throughout modern society

-society itself appears as a multitude of dominated others: not only criminals but also
students, patients

- we are all the subject of modern power

 - there is no single centre of power, no privileged “us” against which a marginalized “them” is
defined

-power is dispersed throughout society, in a multitude of micro-centres

3-5 pitanja, opisivati, primjeri