Pop Culture Handout

‘In the social production of their life men enter into definite, necessary

relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of

production which corresponded to a definite stage of development of their material

productive forces.  The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the

economic structure of society, the real foundation on which rises a legal and

political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social

consciousness.  The mode of production of material life conditions the social,

political and intellectual life process in general.  It is not the consciousness of men

that determines their being, but on the contrary it is their social being that

determines their consciousness.

At a certain stage in their development, the material production forces of

society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, …From forms

of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters.

Then begins an era of social revolution.

            With the change in economic foundation the whole immense

superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.  In considering such

transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material

transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be

determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political,

religious, artistic or philosophic, in short, ideological forms in which men become

conscious of this conflict and fight it out.’

Marx, (1857) ‘Contribution to the critique of Political Economy’

‘[ The ruling class has ] to represent its interest as the common interest of

all the members of society, …to give its ideas the form of universality, and

represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.’

Karl Marx, (1846) The German Ideology,

‘The working class…raw and half developed…long lain half hidden

amidst it’s poverty and squalor… now issuing from it’s hiding place to assert an

Englishmans heaven born privilege to do a she likes, and beginning to perplex us

by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, breaking what it likes.

Matthew Arnold (1960) Culture & Anarchy

‘This form of compensation… is the very reverse of recreation, in that it tends,

not to strengthen and refresh and the addict for living, but to increase his unfitness

by habituating him to weak evasions, to the refusal to face reality and all’

            F.R.Leavis & Denys Thompson, (1977) Culture And Environment

            ‘Movies and radio need no longer to pretend to be art.  The truth, that they

are just business, is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they

deliberately produce. … The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the

culture industry. …The culture industry can pride itself on having energetically

executed the previously clumsy transposition of art into the sphere of

consumption, on making this a principle . … film, radio and magazines make up a

system which is uniform as a whole and in every part … all mass culture is

identical.’

            Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944) Dialectic of Enlightenment,

            ‘The irresistible output of the entertainment and information

Industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers more or less pleasantly to the

producers and, through the latter, to the whole.  The products indoctrinate and

manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood. … it becomes a way of life.  It is a good way of life – much better than

before – and as a good way of life, it militates against qualitative change.  Thus

emerges a pattern of one dimensional thought and behaviour in which ideas,

aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established

universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this

universe.’

            Herbert Marcuse, (1968) One Dimensional Man

            ‘One might generalise by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.  By making many

reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.  And in

permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own

situation, it reactivates the objects produced.  These two processes lead to a

tremendous shattering of tradition… Their most powerful agent is film.  Its social

significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its

destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage’

            Walter Benjamin (1936) The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical

Reproduction

            […] in our society, where the real distinctions between people are created

by their role in the process of production, as workers, it is the products of their

own work that are used, in the false categories invoked by advertising, to

obscure the real structure of society by replacing class with the distinctions

made by the consumptions of goods.

            Thus, instead of being identified by what they produce, people are made

to identify themselves by what they consume.  From this arises the false

assumption that workers ‘with two cars and a colour TV’ are not part of

working class.  We are made to feel that we can rise or fall in society through

what we are able to buy, and this obscures the actual class basis which still

underlies social position.

            The fundamental differences in our society are class differences, but the

use of manufactured goods as means of creating classes or groups forms an

overlay on them.

            Judith Williamson (1978) ‘Decoding Advertisements’

            ‘Youth cultural styles begin by issuing symbolic challenges, but they must

end by establishing new conventions; by creating new commodities, new

industries, or rejuvenating old ones’

            Hebdige, D (1979) ‘Subcluture: The Meaning of Style’