1. Culture 2

2. the meanings of jeans

4. Culture as (a web of) meanings
Who puts the meanings into them?
Who is weaving the webs?
Is there a difference between the web itself and the meanings?
Richard Dawkins: the web weaving itself (culture is about the survival of ‘memes’: stories, images, myths, structures)
Culture like gossip?
What is the stake of this?
Individual and community: selfhood, identity, subject(ivity)

5. What do we buy when we buy a cinema ticket or a car
What do we buy when we buy a cinema ticket or a car? What else is offered with a product?

8. Ideas and ideology Ideology:
(1) unquestioned, ‘natural’, invisible system of ideas:
(‘false consciousness’)
(2) a coherent, systematic set of (political-social) ideas shared by a group
(green, conservative, liberal, nationalist, religious)
serving as a basis for action
a belief system through which a particular social group creates the meanings that justify its existence to itself

9. How do ideologies work? Louis Althusser
Ideologies address the subject:
offering a view of ourselves and of the world
ideological messages do not simply influence us to think about the world in certain ways but are responsible for calling us into being as thinking individuals and for making us who we are
e.g. TV news vs mobile phone commercials

10. Cultural products
Enter the circulation of meanings and representations
acquire ‘added meanings’

11. Mickey Mouse 1935: Intnl symbol of good will (League of Nations)
Loved by Th. Roosevelt, King George V, and Mussolini
1944: D Day code-name, US army mascot
Anti-semitic and anti-American ideologies

12. “Mickey Mouse is the most atrocious ideal that has ever been offered to mankind … The healthy sentiments of every independent-minded young man worthy of respect must suggest that this ugly and dirty parasite, this greatest bacillus host of the animal kingdom cannot be the ideal animal. We must not allow Jews to degrade humanity! Down with Mickey Mouse! Let everybody wear the swastika!”

13. Art Spiegelman: Maus (1991)

14. Art Spiegelman: ‘Saying goodbye to Maus’

15. Cultural products meanings added in the course of cultural circulation
- meanings ‘already’ in the texts (intentional or unintentional)
art: the most useful ideological tool precisely because it seems to be outside the system

16. Walt Disney and ideology
children’s films
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, (Wizard of Oz, 1939)
the construction of ‘the child’
the idea of the ‘family movie’

17. The Lion King (1994)

18. Shakespeare in The Lion King
Mufasa and Simba: Hamlet paraphrase
Timon and Pumbaa: Henry V

19. The politics of Lion King
1994: end of the Apartheid in South Africa
Western fears
the usurper Scar’s regime
politically bad – morally evil

20. Scar with his hyaena army

21. sickle moon

22. The politics of Lion King
Scar’s revolt and rule: ‘unnatural’ - wasteland
(King Oedipus – the plague)
ecology and politics

23. Circle of Life song
There’s far too much to take in here More to find than can ever be found But the sun rolling high Through the sapphire sky Keeps great and small on the endless round It's the Circle of Life And it moves us all Through despair and hope Through faith and love Till we find our place On the path unwinding In the Circle The Circle of Life

24. Ecology
Mufasa: Everything you see exists together, in a delicate balance. As king, you need to understand that balance, and respect all the creatures – from the crawling ant to the leaping antelope.
Simba: But, Dad, don't we eat antelope? Mufasa: Yes, Simba, but let me explain. When we die, our bodies become the grass. And the antelopes eat the grass. And so we are all connected in the great Circle of Life.

25. The politics of Lion King
rivalling political systems
democracy – feudalism
political change vs. natural cycle
representing a political system as ‘natural’

26. Voice-casting hyaenas: Whoopi Goldberg, Cheech Marin, Jim Cummings
Mufasa: James Earl Jones
Sarabi: Madge Sinclair
Rafiki: Robert Guillaume
Simba: Matthew Broderick
Scar: Jeremy Irons

27. Culture and class cultural identity – class identiy
(are we defined by our wages, class positions or cultural habits?)
‘cultural’ divisions – class divisions
the ‘élite’
difficulty of talking about social class

28. Hippolyt (1999): class, culture and the élite

29. Hippolyt Schneider Mátyás with his sniffer car nouveau riche
Hyppolit and the garden gnomes
the clash of mass culture and ‘high culture’
high culture=snobbery, hypocrisy (Wagner’s Lohengrin)
public humiliation of Hippolyt

30. Popular culture and high culture in Renaissance Man

31. Shakespeare as the symbol of a happy, utopian cultural unity: Hamlet rap
(~ Shakespeare in Love)

32. Culture and power
Culture (in the narrow sense of ‘cultural products’): field of conflict, battlefield of ideas
forces of regulation (control) and resistance
centralisation, standardisation
vs.
oppositional tendencies

33. Culture, power and education
Curriculum, Classics, Canon Classics: taxation categories Canon: religious context: texts with authenticity, authority, and value. secular context: same features related to “cannon” and “cane” (Gr. kanē) regulates what we read and how we read

34. Birth of mass culture (19th cent)
19th century: mass literacy
increased leisure time
technologies of reproduction
popular fiction, music hall, magazines
Regulation
prohibition (bear-baiting, dogfights, bare-fist boxing )
and promotion (public parks, zoos, botanical gardens, museums)
birth of modern sport: codification of rules

35. What is new about ‘modern’ popular/mass culture?
Four factors:
(1) demographic boom, growth of cities
(2) democracy; extension of suffrage; mass literacy
(3) technologies of production and diffusion (printing; transportation, new media)
(4) consumer society
(advertisement, department stores, fashion
affluence, leisure
consumption as the basis of identity

36. Mass culture ‘mass’, ‘masses’: associations
‘Masses are other people’ (Raymond Williams)
sameness, uniformity (the ‘grey mass’) – physical mass
violent, ignorant, impressionable rabble
mass-produced (‘tömegtermelés’)
designed for mass consumption

37. Mass culture as ‘culture industry’
Theodor Adorno, 1947
- the logic of industry introduced into cultural production
- production line, capitalist mass (re)production
- simultaneous consumption of the same product by audiences (movie → TV)
- (un)importance of the ‘artist’ (e.g. James Bond novels)
- new technologies → demand for new products (cable TV)
Theodor W. Adorno, F. R. Leavis, Thomas Mann, José Ortega y Gasset

38. 1. Uniformity, sameness
‘cliché’ in printing „All mass culture is identical” (Adorno) ‘The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition… always new books, new programmes, new films, news items, but always the same meaning. (Roland Barthes)

39. Sameness sameness: not a flaw but a design consideration.
mass art is designed so that it is accessible to a large number of people (differing cultural backgrounds)
widely shared and recognisable patterns
preference for the visual
content: physical fight between starkly defined forces of good and evil OR complex psychological dramas
rock music: four-beat rhythm
clichés, commonplaces

40. Mass culture and globalisation
a global mass culture: a second culture, overlaid on local, traditional cultures
strangling local cultures?

41. uniformity Identical consumers - brainwashing
BUT: Why isn’t every Hollywood blockbuster a hit?
success unpredictable

42. 2. Not coming from the people
“Mass culture is imposed from above. It is fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen; its audience are passive consumers, their participation limited to the choice between buying and not buying” (Dwight Macdonald) 1984: novel-writing machines

43. CONSUMER CULTURE
identity determined not by labour and social status but by consumption habits
consumers: not participants in social/ political discussion
passive receivers; enjoyment and pleasure
But: graffitti, Youtube success stories
Grassroots initiatives - commodification (eg. hiphop)

44. 3. Ephemeral; passing value
Momentary pleasure instead of catharsis?
BUT:
Dickens, Shakespeare
Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Tolkien
different kinds of (art) experience
classics kept alive by the breathing machine of education

45. 4. Escapist („packaged dream”)
Escape from real problems; no effort
BUT
“If it is the crime of popular culture that it has taken our dreams and packaged them and sold them back to us, it is also the achievement of popular culture that it has brought us more and more varied dreams that we could otherwise never have known” (Richard Maltby)
Much popculture confronts real problems: Scandinavian or feminist crime fiction; speculative fiction; political pop music (Asian Dub Foundation etc)

46. 5. Addictive
~like drugs cutting rates in MTV videos: average shots per minute ~ like pornogaphy (inability to have real relationships) BUT: Much popular culture confronts serious issues

47. 6. Cretinization
Identical, passive, unthinking consumers Conformity – totalitarianism “At worst, mass culture threatens not merely to cretinize our taste, but to brutalize our sense while paving the way to totalitarianism” (Bernard Rosenberg)

48. Closing remarks on popular culture
panem et circenses
Popular culture: profit-making industry +
a device for keeping people quiet
BUT:
the cultural field – no sharp divide
CONSUMERS – PRODUCTS: neither category is homogeneous

49. the consumer We all participate in several cultures (hybridity)
personal culture
Bricolage (DIY): consumption: a ‘creative’ act

50. Fans and fandom
Seems to represent the worst aspects of mass culture (uniform, hysterical, addictive, obsessive)
Yet:
fandom does not entirely fit consumer culture
critical communities
interpretations
buying habits (the fan as anti-consumer)

51. fandom

52. fandom

53. Closing remarks 2
the cultural field: subcultures, countercultures; mainstream, élite
popular culture is not homogeneous
need to look at individual products:
jazz
science fiction
film noir, Hitchcock
Tolkien
Tintin comics, Watchmen, Maus
children’s literature
humour: Chaplin, Monty Python (and Shakespeare)

54. popular culture -- kitsch

55. Baroque church interior

56. De Brusses: Kittens Playing with Wool

57. splash-cloth

60. 1947

61. ‘socialist realism’
(1952 poster)

62. Hubert
Lanzinger:
The Standard Bearer

64. kitsch ‘kitsch’ - art or not art? failed/deficient/poor work of art?
mass-produced?
idealising, prettifying
‘dishonest’ - a lie
homeliness, reassuring familiarity

65. The Fabulous Life of Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)