THEORIES OF POPULAR

CULTURE

Philippine Modernity and Popular

Culture: An Onto-Historical Inquiry
 THEORIES OF POPULAR CULTURE
• Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
• Marxism by Karl Marx
• Postmodernism by Jean Francois Lyotard
• Feminism by Simone de Beauvoir
• Post-Structuralism by Jacques Derrida
• Structuralism by Ferdinand de Saussure
• Semiology by Roland Barthes
• The Frankfurt School
 Psychoanalysis and Popular culture
 The relationship between psychoanalysis and pop culture is complex and multifaceted. Psychoanalytic
concepts and theories have often found their way into popular culture, influencing literature, film, television,
and music. For example, the idea of the "unconscious mind," as proposed by Sigmund Freud, has been a
recurring theme in popular media, and Freud's theories on dreams and the interpretation of symbols have
also had a significant impact on artistic expression. Additionally, psychoanalytic concepts such as the
Oedipus complex, repression, and the id, ego, and superego have been referenced and explored in various
forms of popular culture.
 Conversely, pop culture has also influenced the way psychoanalysis is perceived and represented in society.
Freud himself recognized the influence of literature and mythology on his work, and contemporary
psychoanalysts continue to engage with popular culture as a way of understanding the human psyche.
 Although they are often considered separately, there are two possible relationships between psychoanalysis
and popular culture and the media. On the one hand, psychoanalysis is acritical theory that contributes to
cultural studies by applying a specific grid of interpretation to cultural objects, from paintings to adverts to
films. On the other hand, the cultural authority of psychoanalysis is necessarily built through its
popularization in mass culture – in a positive form with Freudism.
 Marxism and Popular culture
 Marxists believe that economic and social conditions, and especially the class relations
that derive from them affect every aspect of an individual's life, from religious beliefs to
legal systems to cultural frameworks.
 Marxist historical materialism finds that culture is a social product, social tool, and social
process resulting from the construction and use by social groups with diverse social
experiences and identities, including gender, race, social class, and more
 Historically, Marxists have generally distinguished between those aspects of popular
culture which have been produced by working people themselves, e.g., folk art, tales or
music, and those aspects which have been produced for them, e.g., commercial
television, advertising, arcade video games, film and music.
 There has been a tendency among Marxist critics to understand popular culture in terms
of the amusements and life styles of the working class and high brow culture in terms of
those of the wealthier leisure classes, e.g., the bourgeoisie in capitalism.
 Postmodernism and Popular culture
 Postmodernism rejects concepts of rationality, objectivity, and universal truth. Instead, it emphasizes the
diversity of human experience and multiplicity of perspectives.
 This reversal of a modernist ideology necessitates a Nietzschean revaluation of variation, difference, and
flexibility in the cultural sphere.
 Postmodern culture involves the decline of metanarratives

Following Lyotard, postmodern culture also means people have a declining faith in the validity of 'big stories'
such as political ideologies or religions, or anything else which makes a claim to the universal truth.
 What is postmodern popular culture?
 Post modernism is said to describe the emergence of a social order in which the importance and power of the
mass media and popular culture mean they govern and shape other forms of social relationship.

 I’d say best typical example is the proliferation of memes. They are modern cultural references and a hallmark
of postmodernism. First, we create memes to mock out reality.
Feminism and popular culture

 Feminism in Popular Culture explores (not surprisingly) the relationship between feminism
and popular culture, examining feminism's place within (and outside of) 'contemporary
commonsense', and asking whether feminism can learn from popular culture and vice
versa.
How does feminism affect modern culture?
 Feminism has provided Western women with increased educational opportunities, the right
to vote, protections against workplace discrimination, and the right to make personal
decisions about pregnancy. In some communities, feminism has also succeeded
in challenging pervasive cultural norms about women.
 Cultural feminism refers to a philosophy that men and women
have different approaches to the world around them, and that
greater value should be placed on the way women approach the
world. In some cases, cultural feminism argues that a woman's
way of looking at the world is actually superior to men's.
 Post structuralism and popular culture
 Structuralism, as an intellectual movement in France in the 1950s and 1960s, studied underlying structures
in cultural products (such as texts) and used analytical concepts from linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and
other fields to interpret those structures. Structuralism posits the concept of binary opposition, in which frequently-
used pairs of opposite-but-related words (concepts) are often arranged in a hierarchy; for
example: Enlightenment/Romantic, male/female, speech/writing, rational/emotional, signified/signifier,
symbolic/imaginary, and east/west.

 What is post-structuralism theory in popular culture?

 Post-structuralism rejects the structuralist notion that the dominant word in a pair is dependent on its subservient counterpart,
and instead argues that founding knowledge on either pure experience (phenomenology) or on systematic structures
(structuralism) is impossible, because history and culture actually condition the study of underlying structures, and these
are subject to biases and misinterpretations. Gilles Deleuze and others saw this impossibility not as a failure or
loss, but rather as a cause for "celebration and liberation.
 A post-structuralist approach argues that to understand an object (a text, for example), one must study both the
object itself and the systems of knowledge that produced the object.
Semiology and popular culture

 Semiotics of culture is a research field within semiotics that attempts to define culture from
semiotic perspective and as a type of human symbolic activity, creation of signs and a way
of giving meaning to everything around. Therefore, culture is understood as a system of
symbols or meaningful signs.

 What are examples of semiotics in popular culture?

 An example of semiotics is how we associate the thumbs-up gesture with positivity.
However, it's always important to consider the meaning of signs in context. For example,
the thumbs-up is considered rude in some cultures!
 Frankfurt School
 The "Frankfurt School" refers to a group of German-American theorists who developed powerful analyses of the changes in
Western capitalist societies that occurred since the classical theory of Marx. Working at the Institut fur Sozialforschung in
Frankfurt, Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s, theorists such as Max Horkheimer, T.W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse,
Leo Lowenthal, and Erich Fromm produced some of the first accounts within critical social theory of the importance of mass
culture and communication in social reproduction and domination. The Frankfurt School also generated one of the first
models of a critical cultural studies that analyzes the processes of cultural production and political economy, the politics of
cultural texts, and audience reception and use of cultural artifacts (Kellner 1989 and 1995)

 What is Frankfurt School theory on popular culture?

 Frankfurt school theory of the culture industry articulates a major historical shift to an era in which mass consumption and
culture was indispensable to producing a consumer society based on homogeneous needs and desires for mass-produced
products and a mass society based on social organization and homogeneity. It is culturally the era of highly controlled
network radio and television, insipid top forty pop music, glossy Hollywood films, national magazines, and other mass-
produced cultural artifacts.
 The Frankfurt School found mass culture harmful and dangerous because of its ways of distracting the working class from
their exploitation in capitalist society.
 Mass culture is popular culture produced by mass production, industrial techniques and is
marketed for a profit to a mass public of consumers.
 Mass culture was the widespread American 'low' culture that had developed
during industrialisation. It is often said to have replaced agricultural, pre-industrial folk
culture.
 Some sociologists claim that mass culture was replaced by popular culture in postmodern
society. Others argue that today 'mass culture’ is used as an umbrella term for all folk,
popular, avant-garde and postmodern cultures.
 The main determinant of mass culture is the profit that
production and marketing can make from the potential mass
market
 In order to sell, and be cheap to produce and to maximize profits -
the product must be bland and standardized to a formula,
squeezing out authenticity and originality
Popular Culture in the Philippines

According to National Artist for Literature Bienvenido

Lumbera in his book Revaluation: Essays on Philippine
Literature, Theatre, and Modern Culture (1984), popular culture is
very distinct from Filipino folk culture and nationalistic culture. In a
nutshell, folk culture is the way to live in a specific time place and
depicts a few people's habits and how they can cope with nature.
 Nationalist culture is the culture produced by colonial resistance,
with a people's group at a given time and location. These two
are distinct from mainstream culture that can be traced also
during the time of Philippine Hispanization.

 According to Lumbera, the Spaniards developed and used popular culture

in the Philippines to the native Filipinos or Indios through plays and
literature to get the natives 'hearts and win them over. It is possible to trace
the colonial origins of popular culture found in the Philippines by looking
at notable trends in Philippine literature.
The first permanent settlement in Spain started to replace the native
culture with a Christian and European tradition. Under the
tutelage of missionaries, the children of the native elite became
a central community of intelligentsia called 'ladinos' as they were
instrumental in 'taking into the vernacular, literary forms which were
to be instruments for the' peace 'of the natives.'
Forms of popular theater and literature such as "the pasyon, sinakulo,
and corido ensured Christianity's acceptance and spread, and the
comedy and awit did the same for the monarchy.

Global culture as adopted by the Spanish has been "ordinary" to the point
that it was a "watering-down of Spanish-European culture in order to win
over the general public to the colonial regime's 'ideology.' At that time,
colonial authorities created popular culture, with the aid of local
intelligentsia, to promote the interests of the Church and the State.
However, once they saw the influence of mass culture and learned
how to work their way as propaganda, the native intelligentsia soon
used the Spanish tool against them. The native intelligentsia used
the same types of popular culture in the 19th century, through
the Propaganda movement, to "undermine the influence of the
oppressive friars and mobilize the people to bring an end to colonial
rule" One example of that is Marcelo H's work. Del Pilar, as he used
prayers like 'Aba, Ginoong Maria' and 'Ama Namin' in a kind of
satire to hit the violent Spanish Brothers.
The rise of American colonization introduced to the Philippines the
properly so-called, mainstream culture. The liberal approach
towards the printing press quickly expanded the dissemination of
types of popular culture through radio, television and film.

Then not only by these types but also in digital media such as
films. In the Philippine market, Hollywood films had a
near-monopoly, particularly in the absence of European
films due to World War I.
Early on, the local intelligentsia had the same apprehensions
about mass media as they called it advertisement, or art
vulgarisation. According to Lumbera, the local intelligentsia
noted that "Popular literature as a product intended for a mass
market was seen as a challenge to serious artistic practice, since the
writers accommodated his art to the demands of the publishers and
editors who were more interested in sales than in aesthetics."
Moreover, "... common culture is not produced by the masses ... it is
rather a culture generated either by the ruling elite or by
representatives of the intelligentsia in the employment of that elite,
for the consumption of the people;" it is ".... 'packaged'
entertainment or art intended for the benefit of rulers, be they
colonial administrators or native bureaucrats and businessmen."
Philippines commands cultural, political, and social influence. Via
many media theories, it has been shown that the main objective of
the media through the dissemination of pop culture produces a
commercialized environment because it generates money from
advertisements, and whoever controls economic power always
controls the political.
News outlets may also promote pop culture in order to make their
viewers act in the way they can favor them, often because they
monopolize the stream of information. This can also be offset by
media democratization by promoting social networking sites, and by
spreading thoughts on the internet as a netizen.
It can trigger leverage, but the full potential for complete
democratisation may not be completely realized until all people
in society can have full access with the aforementioned
technology. It can also have down-effects for media outlets, as if
"empowering" them, to use Netizens as the primary sources of
knowledge. This can also be overcome with awareness if the public
learns how to use social media to their benefit.
"Pop culture is power, and anyone who uses it to control minds
would inevitably find his literary and technical machinery turned
against him when the minds he has exploited discover his power as a
political tool" (Lumbera, 1984).
The future of the political, cultural, and social facilities of social
media as a resource, or a weapon, against media conglomerates and
advertising machinery, or the government, or any institutional
agenda, can still be achieved if the general public, particularly those
on the margins who have always been exploited by the false media
images, are to discover and harness their full potential.