Culture and the Popular

Culture Definition

Culture is one of the most complicated words to define in the English language. This is partly because of its intricate historical development. However we use this word today to describe a set of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors that the members of a society use to cope with their world and with one another.

Someone who is considered "highly" cultured is someone who knows about, and takes part in activities such as classical music, caliber art, high fashion, exquisite food and foreign film. They are described as high culture to distinguish them from "popular" or pop culture. This meaning activities and goods produced for and consumed by non-elite people or the "masses". Both high and low cultures can be viewed as subcultures.

Introduction

German born Theodor W. Adorno was a philosopher, critic, and theorist who generated a vast body of works on aspects of society and culture. He was born into a wealthy, highly cultural and musical family. His interests ranged from sociology to music, philosophy and psychology. He wrote on topics as far-flung as Beethoven, anti-Semitism, and film.

In the 1930s he joined The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Germany. The intellectuals who studied there developed and practiced a mode of understanding called "Critical theory" (This is a descriptive term for the philosophical and methodological bases underlying the type of sociology practiced by Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School). Other famous members of the Frankfurt School include Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse. The Frankfurt School theorists all shared a profound gratitude to the work of Karl Marx.

Adorno's writing is very difficult to understand and he has occasionally been criticized on this account. However he, like other hard-to-assimilate individuals such as Tschichold, John Coltrane or Bob Dylan has produced significant work, work which you cannot ignore.

Adorno's concept of the "Culture Industry"

The culture industry concept is a thesis proposed by Adorno and Horkheimer of the Frankfurt school. It contends that cultural industries exist to enforce (and reinforce) the capitalist culture.

"In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects." Culture Industry Reconsidered, page 92

Today, Adorno and Horkheimer might sound like just another pair of culture snobs, cranky and pessimistic, or conspiracy theorists. Their project, however, is much deeper (and stranger) than that characterization allows. In a world in which human beings are progressively subjected to the rationalized control of their work and leisure, the Frankfurt School sought to reclaim for reason the capacity to liberate human beings from domination.

The term culture industry was used for the first time in the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) by Adorno and Max Horkheimer. It was described as "an iron system that occupies consumers leisure time with amusements designed to enable them to bear the exhaustion and boredom of their increasingly rationalised and mechanized work." It's like a one way looping system designed to ensure the continued obedience of the masses to market interests.

However at this point knowing that we are part of this culture trap, can we really change anything? Is there really anything we can do to unbalance this cultural industry? Would we want to?

Later I will look at television and its part of the cultural Industry. Then further on I will examine what methods people are taking in order to tackle these industrial and commercial giants.

Popular Culture

Popular culture includes consumer goods such as fashion items and fast food, and forms of popular entertainment and communication such as movies, comics, music, illustrated newspapers, television, magazines and advertising. These products or activities commonly have mass appeal and wide accessibility.

Adorno identified "Popular culture" as the reason for people's passive satisfaction and lack of interest in overthrowing the capitalist system. There are parts of this statement I agree with and parts I do not. I believe that everyone is individual and free to choose what they watch, read and buy. However because certain TV programmes, magazines and fashion accessories are highly available and advertised, people are more likely to choose those products either subconsciously or so they are judged more highly amongst their peers, than less advertised.

For example, EastEnders is one of Britain's top-ranking soap operas. It is currently broadcast three times a week, with an omnibus edition on a Sunday. The programme commonly pulls in sixteen million viewers. So therefore, if millions of people like Eastenders, then that must necessarily have merit. While not to like it, is to cut your self off from the cultural preferences of "ordinary people", which in turn has social consequences.

I do agree however with the statement Adorno made about peoples indifferent feelings towards overthrowing the capitalist system. Many people are just not interested. For instance, when was the last time you saw a character from Eastenders complain about broadcasting standards, or the underweight models in teen magazines? Of course they wouldn't, if that happened then maybe people would show 'interest in overthrowing the capitalist system'. But until then we rely on activists and the work they do.

Television and its role in the Culture Industry

It seems more and more impossible to be able to 'overthrow the capitalist system' when already children as young as two or three are targeted by TV adverts for toys, candy and fast food. Targeting these youths is regarded by many as highly unethical, because youths are seen to be highly impressionable to advertising influence. Furthermore they are at an age where they are forming their identity, attempting to make sense of cultural meanings and wanting to form social groupings. Academics have argued that these social groupings are strongly formed by what the media and advertising portray as the accepted norm. This is where the problem