Module 1: pop culture- what is it and who cares?

Consumption as compulsion (A + H)

"...personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions. The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them."

Two economies of TV still true? (Fiske)

"All the culture industries can do is produce a repertoire of texts or cultural resources for the various formations of the people to sue or reject in the ongoing process of producing their popularculture." "The shift to corporate capitalism was a shift toward invisibility; the system became more abstract, more distanced ... less apprehensible."

Consumption as Labor (A + H)

"Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanization has such power over a man's leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process itself."

5. Incorporation (A + H)

"Anyone who resists can only survive by fitting in. Once his particular brand of deviation from the norm has been noted by the industry, he belongs to it as does the land- reformer to capitalism."

Standardization Cont. (A + H)

"As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished, or forgotten. In light music [popular music], once the trained ear has heard the first notes of the hit song, it can guess what is coming and feel flattered when it does come...The result is a constant reproduction of the same thing."

3. Pseudo-individuality (A + H)

"By pseudo-individualization we mean endowing cultural mass production with the halo of free choice or open market on the basis of standardization itself. Standardization of song hits keeps the customers in line by doing their listening for them, as it were. Pseudo- individualization, for its part, keeps them in line by making them forget that what they listen to is already listened to for them, or pre-digested." Ex: Build a bear// customized engagement ring

Use monopoly (Lethem)

"Copyright is a "right" in no absolute sense; it is a government granted monopoly on the use of creative results"

2. Standardization (A + H)

"Culture now impresses the same stamp on everything. Film, radio, and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part...Under monopoly all mass culture is identical." Ex: Law & Order// Real Housewives

anthropological (Hall)

"Difference is the basis of that symbolic order which we call culture"

Linguistic (Hall)

"Difference matters because it is essential to meaning. Without difference, meaning could not exist" (p. 234). "Meaning depends on the difference between opposites"

what is pop culture? (Ziesler)

"In a purely literal sense, popular culture is any cultural product that has a mass audience ... But historically, pop culture grew out of low culture, the uncouth counterpart to so-called high culture ... As the phrase "pop culture" gradually came to take the place of "low culture," it was defined more by what it wasn't—elegant, refined, erudite—than by what it was. Mass culture that supposedly engaged the prurient interests and visceral (rather than cerebral) urges of people assumed to be ill educated and unworthy of "real" art"

Kellner about A + H

"In their view, mass culture and communications stand at the centre of leisure activity, are important agents of socialization, mediators of political reality, and should thus be seen as major institutions..."

Gift Exchange vs. Commodity Exchange (Lethem)

"The cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange is that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, whereas the sale of a commodity leaves no necessaryconnection ... if I am right to say that where there is no gift there is no art, then it maybe possible to destroy a work of art by converting it into a pure commodity. "

Is there anything outside the culture industry? (A + H)

"The color film demolishes the genial oldtavern to a greater extent than bombs evercould..." (Adorno, 1963)

6. Audiences (A + H)

"The consumers are the workers and employees, the farmers and lower middle class. Capitalist production so confines them, body and soul, that they fall helpless victims to what is offered them. As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities."

1. The culture industry (A+H)

"The dependence of the most powerful broadcasting company on the electrical industry, or of the motion picture industry on the banks, is characteristic of the whole sphere, whose individual branches are themselves economically interwoven. All are in such close contact that the extreme concentration of mental forces allows demarcation lines between different firms and technical branches to be ignored."

cult of personality (Benjamin)

"The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the "personality" outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the "spell of the personality," the phony spell of a commodity"

psychoanalytic (Hall)

"The other is fundamental to the constitution of the self, to us as subjects, and to sexual identity"

readers as plays (Schudson)

"The quality of reading rather than the quality of the object then takes center stage and the critic is more producer than evaluator or consumer ... The task is to diminish the distance between writer and reader, writing and reading, and encourage students to be players,"

How do we study pop culture (Schudson)

"The study of popular culture can be broken down as the study of (a) the production of cultural objects, (b) the content of the objects themselves, and (c) the reception of the objects and the meanings attributed to them,"

Regime of Representation (Hall)

"The whole repertoire of imagery and visual effects through which 'difference' is represented at any one historical moment"

Most Ambitious art (Lethem)

"Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a YouTube rebroadcast of the Berlin Wall's fall i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar - it's not a surprise that some of today's most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange. In so doing, in reimagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago, and appearance, artists are paradoxically trying to restore what's taken for "real" to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights."

dialogic (Hall)

"We need difference because we can only construct meaning through a dialogue with the 'Other' ... Meaning ... does belong to any one speaker. It arises in the give-and-take between different speakers"

2. Standardization Cont. part 3

"What is new about the phase of mass culture...is the exclusion of the new. The machine rotates on the same spot. While determining consumption it excludes theuntried as a risk....Any additions to the well-proven culture inventory are too much of a speculation."

Cryptomnesia (Lethem)

"a hidden, unacknowledged memory"

Public commons (Lethem)

"anything like the streets over which we drive, the skies through which we pilot airplanes, or the public parks or beaches on which we dally. A commons belongs to everyone and no one, and its use is controlled only by common consent"

male gaze (Ziesler)

"by positioning women as nothing more than objects to be looked at, sexualized, and made vulnerable, the male unconscious reassures itself that, really, it has nothing to fear from women"

Ideological Control (Storey)

"distorted images of reality" that "work in the interests of the powerful against the interests of the powerless" ex: capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy

Ideological Forms (Storey)

"ideological forms" that "present a particular image of the world" ex: plays, movies, tv

Material Ideology (Storey)

"material practice" that "works to reproduce the social conditions and social relations necessary for the economic conditions and economic relation of capitalism to continue" ex: churches, classrooms, libraries

augmentation (Benjamin)

"process reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction."

Collective Ideology (Storey)

"systematic body of ideas articulated by a particular group of people" ex: lawyers, democrats, college students

distribution (Benjamin)

"technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for theoriginal itself."

Cultural Studies (Ziesler)

"the all-purpose umbrella term for the interdisciplinary examination of a phenomenon or phenomena—a groundbreaking novel, a record-breaking film, an icon such as Michael Jordan—in the context of its social value, influence, and ideology. It's usually informed by sociology, anthropology, literary theory, politicalscience, and race and gender studies"

authenticity (Benjamin)

"the whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical ... reproducibility. Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority, not so vis a vis technical reproduction"

Guide to Meta-theory

Modernism:- mid 1800s to mid 1900s- self-consciousness, irony, abstraction - Belief in social improvement

Semiotic Ideology (Storey)

Operates "at the level of connotations" as "the terrain on which takes place a hegemonic struggle to restrict connotations" ex: ads, signs, magazines, blogs

what else is culture? pt. 2 (Storey)

signifying practices: "texts and practices whose principal function is to signify, reduce or to be the occasion for the production of meaning".

camp is having a moment (Sontag)

the MET (metropolitan museum of art)

Art (Benjamin)

there is a great debate about what classifies as art (is a meme art?)

Pop culture as a struggle (Fiske)

• "All popular culture is a process of struggle." • "Popular culture is to be found in its practices, not in its texts or their readers, though such practices are often most active in the moments of text-reader interaction.." • "Everyday life is constituted by the practices of popular culture, and is characterized by the creativity of the weak in using the resources provided by a disempowering system while refusing finally to submit to that power."

audiences and agency (Benjamin)

• "Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art." • "At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer." • "Literary license is now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common property."

Critical work of pop culture (Fiske)

• "Popular culture is not consumption, it is culture - the active process of generating and circulating meanings and pleasures within a social system." "Culture is a living, active process." "A text that is to be made into popular culture must, then, contain both the forces of domination and the opportunities to speak against them, the opportunities to oppose or evade them from subordinated, but not totally disempowered, positions."

essentialism and stereotypes (Hall)

• Essentialism as being "reduced to their essence" • "Stereotyped means 'reduced to a few essentials, fixed in Nature by a few, simplified characteristics"

Questions (Fiske and CFC)

• Fiske argues that pop culture is always a site of struggle. How does this claim speak to do the goals of the Crunk Feminist Collective? • CFC argues that hip hop is an important form of popular culture, and can speak powerfully to concerns of black feminism. What forms of analysis can you imagine for a critical engagement of hip hop as pop culture? • Fiske argues that pop culture only matters because of the power of consumers. But do all consumers have the same power to interpret and make meaning from texts? * see if you can answer these!*

Hip hop generation feminism

• Ideological context: black feminism• Historical context:"post-soul, post-Civil Rights"

risks of being pro-pop culture (Schudson)

• Less of a canon, but still a hierarchy? • Risks of romanticizing - Semiotic process - Audience reception

limitations (A + H)

• Nostalgic/romantic • Very limited audience research • Assumes no consumer agency and overstates power of "culture industry" over individuals • Deeply pessimistic

what would feminist pop culture look like? (Ziesler)

• Production: More women, POC, queer, trans, differently abled, neuro-atypical people involved in the creation of content - BUT: The fact that people who have been left out are now involved does not guarantee more equitable relationships, onstage or off

Takeaways (Benjamin)

• Role of technology in reshaping art - Process - Distribution• Shifting modes of valuing art - Ritual → Politics- Aura remains crucial throughout, but how we perceive it changes (In person vs. proxy of celebrities) • Agency of audiences

sociotechnical politics of comm (A + H)

• Telephone: liberal • Radio: democratic

Storey and Schudson Relationship

• What is the difference between culture and ideology?• Look back at Storey's typology of popular culture. What kind of popular culture is Schudson working with? • If you had to make a defense of "high culture" in response to Storey and Schudson, where would you start? • Is there a connection between Storey's discussion of authenticity and Schudson's concerns about romanticizing texts and audiences? -- see if you can answer these!

Two economies of TV (Fiske)

→Production studios →Audience commodification "The economic function of a television program is not complete once it has been sold [to a distributor], for in its moment of consumption it changes to become a producer, and what it produces is an audience"

Crunk Feminist Collective

The term "Crunk" was initially coined from a contraction of "crazy" or "chronic" (weed) and "drunk" and was used to describe a state of uber-intoxication, where a person is "crazy drunk," out of their right mind, and under the influence. But where merely getting crunk signaled that you were out of your mind, a crunk feminist mode of resistance will help you get your mind right, as they say in the South.

What is culture? (Storey)

intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic achievements: "great philosophers, great artists and great poets"

What else is culture? (Storey)

lived cultures or cultural practices: "not just intellectual and aesthetic factors, but the development of literacy, holidays, sport, religious festivals".

Crunk Feminist Collective Authors

Britney Cooper and Susana Morris

John Storey

- Definitions of culture, ideology, popular culture Focus on pop culture, critical theory and visual culture

John Fiske

- Pop culture as resistance commodities and culture

The Frankfurt School (A + H)

- School of neo-Marxist critical theory, social research & philosophy set up 1923 - Key theorists: Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Jurgen Habermass - Key concepts: critical theory, dialectic, praxis, culture industry, antipositivism

Michael Schudson

- Why should we [academics] study pop culture? - What happens [to the academy] when we study pop culture? focus on history and sociology of the American news media, advertising, popular culture,Watergate and cultural memory.

The Culture Industry: enlightenment as mass deception (A + H)

- Wide range of references from 1940s popular culture and European intellectual history - They believed, as a matter of philosophy, in keeping things complex

What is Pop Culture (Storey)

1. "culture which is widely favoured or well liked by many people" 2. "culture which is left over after we have decided what is high culture" 3. Popular culture = mass culture = "hopelessly commercial culture"

Passive Audiences (A + H)

1. Nazis' use of mass media a major reason for concerns about passive audiences 2. Pessimism about agency following totalitarianism, failed(?) Marxist revolution

Key Concepts (A + H)

1. The culture industry 2. Standardization 3. Pseudo-Individuality 4. Consumer differentiation 5. Incorporation 6. Audiences

Four Modes of Difference (Hall)

1. linguistic 2. dialogic 3. anthropological 4. psychoanalytic

Andi Zeisler

Co-founder of Bitch Magazine

What is Pop Culture Cont. (Storey)

4. "culture which originates from 'the people'" and "authentic culture of the people" and "popular culture as folk culture" 5. "popular culture as a site of struggle between the 'resistance' of subordinate groups in society and the forces of 'incorporation' operating in the interests of dominant groups in society" 6. "postmodern culture is a culture which no longer recognizes the distinction between high and popular culture"

Benjamin (Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction)

AURAS, CULTS AND REPRODUCABILITY

susan sontag

- Cultural critic, journalist, activist, novelist - Rabid consumer of culture

Theodore Adorno

- Defining the culture industry - Power dynamics in the culture industry First befriended Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin while at the University of Frankfurt

Max Horkheimer

- Defining the culture industry - Power dynamics in the culture industry Frankfurt University

more notes on camp (Sontag)

- "Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a "lamp"; not a woman, but a "woman." To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a- Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater." - "In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve."

pop culture and feminism (Ziesler)

- "Pop culture informs our understanding of political issues that on first glance seem to have nothing to do with pop culture; it also makes us see how something meant as pure entertainment can have everything to do with politics" - "Without pop culture's limited images of women, many actual women in the real world might not have been inspired to fight for more and better representations of themselves"

Situating feminism in hip hop

- "So we call ourselves hip hop generation feminists because while many of us appreciate the culture and the music, we do not have a blind allegiance to it, nor is our feminism solely, or in many cases even primarily, defined by hip hop. Yet our connection to hip hop links us to a set of generational concerns and a community of women, locally, nationally, and globally." - "While our declaration of feminism pays homage to our feminist foremothers and big sisters, hip hop generation feminism is not just a remix but also a remake that builds on the beats and rhythms from the tracks already laid down, but with a decidedly new sound, for a new era."

Understanding camp (Sontag)

- "The essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric -- something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques. " - "Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization." - "Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the "off," of things-being-what- they-are-not."

the aura (Benjamin)

- "The here and now of the artwork—its unique existence in a particular place." - "That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art"

more notes on camp cont. (Sontag)

- "The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious." - "Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture."

questions (Lethem and Sontag)

- Both Lethem and Sontag play around with format in these pieces. How does the formatting of these two pieces reflect their key arguments? - Writing about pop culture basically guarantees writing something that will be dated. What felt dated to you in these pieces? Is there a way of writing about pop culture that can help manage the problem of being dated?

Implications of mechanical reproduction (Benjamin)

Augmentation and distribution

Stuart Hall

Birmingham School

Walter Benjamin

Frankfurt School; belonged to renowned artistic, intellectual circles

Post-Modernism

Postmodernism- 1950s to present (sort of)- Emphasis on plurality, deconstruction - Rejection of essentialism, universalities

Intertextuality (Hall)

The "accumulation of meanings across different texts, where one image refers to another, or has its meaning altered by being "read" in the context of other images"

Jonathan Lethem

The Ecstasy of Influence

Traditional Marxism vs. Neo-Marxism (A + H)

base --> superstructure base--> superstructure (but can go up and down the pyramid)

art and politics (Benjamin)

check notes

art and ritual (Benjamin)

check notes

commercialized feminism (Ziesler)

concept of Zeisler (Frida Kahlo)

Undiscovered public knowledge (Lethem)

content that is publicly accessible but not fully utilized

Imperial plagiarism (Lethem)

cultural appropriation from colonial/Western powers

Commodity Fetishism (A + H)

ex: **water vs. a diamond necklace

What parts of their critique is most relevant today? (A + H)

ex: American idol, makeup ad, Aldo shoes etc...

4. Consumer Differentiation (A + H)

ex: different TV networks

False Needs (A + H)

ex: eagles parade and newest Iphone