Contemporary

Culture

1
 Culture
(Latin: cultura,
stemming from
colere = “to cultivate”)

2
 Definitions, classifications,
categorizations of ‘Culture'

1.
a. patterns of human activity and
the symbolic structures that give such
activities significance and importance.

3
b. systems of symbols and meanings
that
 even their creators contest,
 lack fixed boundaries,
 are constantly in flux
 interact and compete with one another.

4
c.
 all the ways of life including arts, beliefs
and institutions of a population, passed
down from generation to generation.

 the way of life for an entire society, and, as

such, including codes of manners, dress,
language, religion, rituals, games,
norms of behavior (such as law and
morality), systems of belief, art.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture)

5
d.
 the totality of socially transmitted
behavioural patterns, arts, beliefs,
institutions, and all other products
of human work and thought
- as an expression of a particular period,
class, community, or population (ex. Japanese
culture; the culture of poverty), or
- with respect to a particular category (a field,
a subject, or a mode of expression) (ex. the
religious culture in the Middle Ages; the
musical culture; the oral culture),

6
the predominant attitudes and
behaviour that characterize the
functioning of a group or of an
organization.

7
e.
 intellectual and artistic activity and the
works produced by it.

 development of the intellect through

training or education. Enlightenment
resulting from such training or
education.

(http://www.thefreedictionary.com/culture)

8
Postmodern culture,
as any other culture,
is a series of distinct characteristics
of a society or a social group,
in spiritual, material,
intellectual or emotional terms.

9
It is a legacy transmitted by

 specific communicational codes, such as

gestures or words, writing and arts, mass
media, interactive media (telephone), or

 new communication technologies specific to

the information society (the Internet) and
defined by a series of societal transformations
marking the transition to a new type of
society, dependent on extremely complex
electronic information and communication
networks.

10
 Culture is seen today as
a sum/mix/blend
of cultural models:
 DOMINANT/OFFICIAL CULTURE, divided in
modernity into

high/elitist culture (its meaning also involving a scenario

of power for the élite), and

mass/popular culture (brought into existence by the

capitalist society with its need for culturalisation of
the masses).

The distinction between the two is no longer so

steady-cut, as transgressions from one domain to
the other are especially frequent in literature,
music, painting,
11 etc.
 SUBCULTURE(S) – a set of symbols, norms,
values and ways of life, different from the
dominant culture, not necessarily contradictory to
this one, but additional to it (the subculture of
fishermen and hunters, of metro-sexuality – the
subculture of men of any sexual orientation, with
a strong taste for fashion, of manelars, clubbers
or mall-ers, etc.)

It is the culture of a certain social group, a subgroup of the large group –

society itself.
Subcultures are largely heterogeneous and their delimitation is relative,
the borders between them being in permanent redefinition.

12
 COUNTERCULTURE/ALTERNATIVE
CULTURE - manifests itself in
contradiction to the dominant culture of a
specific society; its representatives reject
some or most but not all of the standards
and behavioral models of the larger
society they belong to.
It claims complete freedom from any servitude of culture
to political goals through manipulation, and its main
objective is to produce novelty, to allow cultural forms
to participate in a free competition, to ensure the
democratization of cultural hierarchies, the access to
culture through acknowledged difference, with a view
to the cultural dialogue.

13
 Contemporary cultural forms
(via the perspective of
the obsessive ‘post-’):
continuation of a major crisis in the past century, that of
the spirit, i.e. of humanism)

all sorts of “re-makes”, reconfigurations and conceptual

redefinings

elements such as the fragmentary, the hypertext, the

influence of the media on the masses, television as
double-edged weapon, leadership, hackers and the
Internet (globalizing but also robotizing us),
Americanism vs. Europeanism. All in all, everything that
has to do with communication in postmodernity,
warning about gradual de-humanization
14
 Culture in the age of
post-humanisms
It is a code of existence in what came into being
after modernity, one defined by television, the
mall, the hypermarket, the pc, the cell phone – all
meaning a radical change of the paradigm (the
cultural one included), in close connection with
technical progress and social movements.

The spiritual world, as we knew it, degraded, moved in the

streets and, the individual, looking for his identity,
became a mere consumer of reality, of trends, models
and pseudo-models to which s/he is connected.
15
 From the postmodern
perspective, as the complexity
and expansion of society grows
and its pace becomes
faster and faster,
the identity becomes less and less
stable, more and more fragile,
closer to a myth and/or
an illusion.
16
 The autonomous, self-constituted subject
(an important acquisition of the modern
individual and of a culture of
individualism)
becomes fragmented, decentered/unballanced,
even disappears,
due to social processes determining
the standardization of
individualities in a rationalised and
bureaucratized consumer society
and in the cultural media.

17
 The relationship between
ideology and subjectivity
(central to postmodernism)

MODERNISM investigated the

foundation of experience in the self
and focused on a self in search for
its integration.

18
In other words, the focus of modernity on
subjectivity was still within the
dominant humanist framework, although
the obsessive quest for the whole already
suggested the beginnings of what was to
become
the radical postmodern investigation,
a challenge born from the splitting of the
postmodern discourse into
19
 an underlining and
an undermining of
the notion of coherent,
autonomous self as source of
significance or action.

20
 ASSIGNMENT:
Bearing in mind the definitions, classifications,
categorizations etc. the present course brings
to the fore, choose any one of your favorite
cinema productions (feature movie or
documentary, “Religulous” included) and:
a. translate whichever 10 minute-sequence,
b. write a 1500-2000 word-essay (3-4 p.) on any
of the hypostheses of postmodernity
identified,
c. ‘deliver’ the cd/dvd by…
(movie/documentary included)
(see details of the assigment at the end of the
course) 21