1. Contemporary Cultural Theory and Its Applications in the Analysis of Everyday and Popular Culture

Intro

Culture

• culture (from Latin: “cultura” lit. `cultivation') is a term first used in antiquity by Cicero

• the term first appeared in Europe in the 18^th century to connote a process of cultivation or improvement as in agriculture or horticulture

• in the 19^th century, referred to the betterment or or refinement of the individual

Matthew Arnold (1869)

• a founder of anthropology

• begins to change the definition - culture is a complex cluster of social beliefs and behaviours that includes more or less human activity

Two wievs of culture in circulation from the late 19^th century

1) the body of semi-sacred knowledge that improves us

2) the loose-knit anthropological term

- both are freely interchanged in argument today

T. S. Eliot - Notes Towards a Definition of Culture 1948

• no culture can appear or develop except in relation to a religion

Raymond Williams 1958

• we use the word `culture' in these terms: to mean a whole way of life -the common meanings; to mean the arts & learning—the special processes of discovery and creative effort

E. P. Thompson

• culture is that complex whole which includes beliefs, art, morals, law, customs and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society

• it is learned, shared and processual, it is shared and maintained and made by us

Clifford Geertz (1975)

• “The concept of culture I suppose... is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Mrs Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs and the analysis.”

Millwall Case Study

• an interdisciplinary examination of a working class subculture

• Social Theory (Bourdieu)

• Sociolinguistics (Bernstein)

• Social Hisotry (Williams)

Ideology

• Marx and Ideology

• Frankfurt School and the “Culture Industries”

• Gramsci and Hegemony

Structuralism and Poststructuralism

• Structuralism in anthropology (Levi-Strauss) and linguistics (Saussure)

• Poststructuralism (Foucault et al)

Modernism & Modernity

• modernity as a condition

• modernity as a set of cultural responses

• modernity as alternative modernities

The rise of `low' culture (cultural studies)

Posmodernity and Postmodernism

• embodied culture

• Gender

• Bourdieu

The Interpretation of Cultures (Clifford Geertz)

• thick description and deep play

Myths and Popular Culture

2. Researching the Subculture of England's Most Notorious Football Fans

1. The problem and its context

• Millwall as the exemplary hooligans - history of the club

• Milwall: an English professional football club based in South Bermondsey, south-east London

• Founded by workers (majority of Scottish origin) at Morton's preserve factory on the Isle of Dogs in 1885

• they chose blue as their colour and the Lion rampart as their emblem

• Millwall was closely identified with particular proletarian occupational groups - the docks

• the club relocated to the Den south in 1910, getting a great amount support from the south of the river at New Cross - Bermondsey, Rotherhithe, Deptford

• the social origins of the club's support at this time came from working-class men, which was an important factor in the formation of the identity and culture of the club and the development of its supporting traditions

• Millwall fans: extremely noisy, violent, unpleasantly loud and harsh, disturbing the public peace

• in 1920, when the visiting Newport County FC goalkeeper was attacked with missiles (pociski rakietowe) and knocked out with a hook, the Den was closed for the first time

• the reported fight at FA Cup sixth-round game against Ipswich, led to the closure of Den and strengthened the negative image of Millwall fans

• serious disorder at fifth-round Cup tie at Luton in March 1985 caught by TV cameras became a focus of national attention and thus confirmed the status of Millwall as a symbol of worsening situation in the period when football game was gaining increasingly higher reputation

• `Millwall' as a symbol & myth

• in the popular media representations, the Millwall fan signifies a complex set of social anxieties

• in the football context, the Millwall fan is the source of fear, disgust and desire

• the metaphoric power of the word `Millwall' comes from the symbolic status of the `Millwall supporter' as the typical `Football Hooligan'

• the symbolic status of the `Millwall fan' is complex - it is both real and questionable story of violence characterizing particular patterns of masculine culture, and of ways in which popular examples of that culture meet with subcultural self-definition in the understanding of identity; it is also about a cultural struggle for the right to express that identity

• Millwall fans played a very important role in the establishment of `Football Hooliganism' because of their violent activities during the key moments in the development of the media narratives

• the Den (stadium) became a `spiritual home of football hooliganism'

• In 1977, the makers of BBC1's Panorama used Millwall fans as an example to describe and analyse the phenomenon of football hooliganism, defining and explaining the symbolic relation between the football hooliganism and culture - Millwall fans became a symbol of the country's evil in the late 1970s and the most important figures in football subculture (`Millwall archetype')

• the defining negative image presenting Millwall fans as hooligans had been created and remained

• in the public, Millwall fans became a representation of brutality and violence

• the Millwall archetype introduces a Millwall fan as a symbolic being - his reputation always goes before him; the awareness of this symbolic status strengthens the cultural forms established by Millwall fans and is the reason for the development of their anthem “No one likes us”

• How do fans negotiate/manage their symbolic status?

• how Millwall fans see themselves as a community is mostly affected by the public engagement with reputation & myth

• Millwallism includes both elements of passionate local-patriotic English football-supporting and the collective responses to the reformulation of `Millwall' as a highly-charged symbol in culture

• the concept of Millwall as a media symbol is particularly important as football becomes more commercialised and makes its way into middle-class markets - this is the background in which Millwall with all its bad reputation is placed, in contrast to the progressive change of the game

• the ganster tradition of south-east London has produced a variety of masculine culture characterized by dispositions towards fierce local pride, metropolitan supremacism, personal inviolability (nienaruszalność) and unpredictable brutality - all these characteristics had an impact on the development of Millwallism

• In football context, Millwall fans perceive their opponents as a joke

• the violence still used by some of the Millwall hooligan formations is based on a belief that Millwall fans have a specific kind of local toughness not compared with any of their potential opponents

• Extending the sociology of sport - football studies

• The size and variety of London has created a social mixture of intensively localist culture which became the main characteristic of the historical development of London's working-class communities

• the South-east of London tends to be missing from its social history & if mentioned, is only described as the area associated with crime; it is the place which has produced some of Britain's most notorious criminals

• the local-patriotic and masculinist structures of class cultures in London have its roots in the south-east

• this place of origin makes Millwall fans feel unique

• the south London gangster tradition is an important part of a Millwall fan's identity

• leading normal lives and obeying the law, Millwall fans represent the distinct characteristics of the gangster culture - they are strong, self-confident, sharp and experienced, they have a strong sense of their unique identity

• the cult of crime and violation is also an element of their culture

• Millwall fans have a strong sense of pride and regard themselves as superior, personally untouchable; they are also distinguished by their unpredictable violence - this violence is the result of their toughness which can't be compared with any of their potential opponents; they fear no one; some of them are active in violent conflicts

• fanzines (magazines produced by amateurs for fans of sport) served as an important means of communication between/within clubs, providing humorous insight into the experiences of Millwall; in these magazines, Millwall is presented with all its characteristics through specific language and images

• in football-related literature, the focus is on the experiences of the reformed hooligan

• these writings present Millwall fans' activities as a myth in the shadow of dangerous urban surroundings; they also categorize their toughness & disposition to violence as typical of certain cultural groups such as dockers & gangsters

• Millwall fans are famous for their hatred towards Chelsea, whose fans came to south-east London to challenge Millwall

• Millwall-Chelsea games have been characterised by high degress of violence; the two groups are said to compete against one another for the supremacy of London

• the reason of Chelsea fans' hatred towards Millwall is an attraction based on Millwall's established status as hooligans

• Hypothesis

• Specific: Millwall Football Club is an informal cultural instution centered on the expression and maintenance of a specific variety of social identity (in context of globalisation/late modernity)

• General: Many football clubs in England perform this function, especially for their working class followers

• Research Questions

• Are Millwall fans really `the worst'? If so, why? Is such an assertion measurable?

The frequent violent activities of Millwall fans may suggest that they are indeed the worst of a kind. The use of missiles, instigation of fights and bringing damage to public property are characteristics by means of which they can be easily classified as hooligans. The assertion that they are `the worst' is evidenced by their misbehaviour during football matches and the greatest number of closings of the Den stadium.

• How did the Millwall Myth originate? How does it work?

In 1977, the makers of BBC1's Panorama used Millwall fans as an example to describe and analyse football hooliganism, fixing the association between the football hooliganism and culture; thus, Millwall fans became a symbol of the country's greatest evil in the late 1970s and the primary figures in football subculture (`the Millwall archetype'). The established negative image presenting Millwall fans as hooligans had been created and remained. It still functions as a representation of typical Millwall fan, presenting him in a negative way and hindering the possibility of improving this image.

• Who are these people? What does their subculture look like? Their broader regional culture? (i.e. form and expressive content)

Millwall fans are typically the representative members of particular proletariat groups. At the beginning, they were easily identified by their working class skinhead-style clothing and appearance. Recently, hooliganism was transformed by the casual subculture - with firm members beginning to wear designer clothes and posh sportswear.  Millwall fans have their roots in the south-east London, the area which for decades has been associated with crime and poverty. This place of origin plays an important role as part of their identity distinguished by their strength, determination, sense of superiority towards others and disposition to violence.

• What are the deeper meanings of participation?

In the early stages, football misconduct was reported as relating to `over-excitement' due to devotion. Today, it is suggested that the attraction of this abnormal lifestyle is to cultivate danger, take risks for excitement and feel the sense of achievement they bring with them.

• (Why do some of them fight?)

The reason Millwall fans engage themselves in fights at matches may be due to their need to add some charge to the game, just for `fun' or simply out of boredom. It is no wonder these fans go hysterical when someone finally scores a goal. It seems they must feel cheated by the lack of drama so they create their own.

• Theoretical framework/ideas

• Class analysis - consciousness and culture

The historical formations of class cultures have established a strong sense of combative local sensibility in the city's working-class populations; local-patriotic and masculinist structures of feeling cover the interactive everyday life of south-east London and are firmly rooted in the city. Millwall fans identify themselves strongly with their place of origin - which is the representation of their gangsterish culture.

• How themes in the social history of south-east London are reproduced in the present - cultural reproduction

South-east London tends to be missing from its social history, and if mentioned, it is usually presented as the place associated with poverty, crime and proletarian business. It is where the Dickensian pick-pocket Fagin, original 19^th century `Hooligan', first Teddy Boys and Millwall fans had their roots, and it has a significant role in terms of understanding the relation between class and culture. These historical themes are frequently used to support the image of gangsterlike character of modern working-class men and constitute an important background for the south-east London gangland. Specific patterns of practice, sensibility & response have demonstrably characterized the development of the area and its people, and have been reproduced over time to generate particular variations of social identity.

• Linguistic codes (Bernstein)

Basil Bernstein made a significant contribution to the study of communication with his sociolinguistic theory of elaborated and restricted codes in language. The term code refers to a set of organizing principles behind the language used by members of a social group”. Bernstein's theory shows how the language people use in everyday conversation reflects and shapes the assumptions of a certain social group. Relationships established within the social group affect the way that group uses language, and the type of speech that is used. Thus, the way language is used within a societal class affects the way people assign significance and meaning to the things about which they are speaking. The code that a person uses symbolizes their social identity. The two types of language codes are the elaborated code and the restricted code. The restricted code is suitable for insiders who share assumptions and understanding on the topic. The elaborated code does not assume that the listener shares these assumptions or understandings and thus is more explicit, more thorough, and does not require the listener to read between the lines. The restricted code works better than the elaborated code for situations in which there is a great deal of shared and taken-for-granted knowledge in the group of speakers. It is economical and rich, conveying a great amount of meaning with a few words, pointing the hearer to a lot more information which remains unsaid. Within the restricted code, speakers draw on background knowledge and shared understanding. This type of code creates a sense of includedness, a feeling of belonging to a certain group. Restricted codes can be found among friends and families and other intimately tied groups.

• Globalisation - changing patterns of community, residence, employment, demographics

The recent worldwide increases in the price of food and fuel and the global financial crisis have a direct impact on people's lives - people in the UK have seen the cost of living rise and job insecurity increase. These trends have significant consequences for people's experience of work and community. A key aspect of globalisation is the increased mobility of labour. Globalisation is also described as adding another layer of complexity to communities through the range of migration trends to the UK, including long-term migration and settlement, along with the short-term migration seen more recently, particularly from Eastern Europe. While migration can cause tensions as pressures on local services and resources may increase, many examples of good relations and a sense of `ordinary multiculturalism' are also found in places that had experienced migration over long periods of time. The local influence of global affairs may mean conflicts from abroad being played out on UK streets. Conflicts stimulated a range of actions by people in the UK, particularly those linked directly through family. Examples included people becoming involved in Stop the War campaigns and the development of new communities of practice among UK frontline workers.

• Processes of ritualisation

The ritualized nature of linguistic expression at Millwall is characterized by a particular form of individual comment, song and chant. Different forms of collective as well as individual linguistic expressions are used to motivate Millwall players. When Millwall players do not sufficiently press the ball in midfield the shout is `Put `em under' (i.e. pressure). Lack of team integrity is met with `Sort it out Millwall!' Millwall players faced with an aggressive or difficult opponent will be motivated to `Do `im!' The universal `Come on Millwall!' speaks for itself. These utterances indicate the borderline between personal expression and collective ritualization in terms of individual participation in the flow of the game. The Millwall songs connect the collective of Millwall fans on the basis of unified performance and shared understandings of appropriate use. At Millwall, ritualization continues as a collective participation, demonstrating a spontaneous use of expressive forms, which is supported by an understood awareness in individuals of what is proper in any given context.

• South-East London in history and imagination

• The first suburb of London: crime, disreputability and entrepreneurialism

• Competitive individualism vs. corporate/collective class formations (e.g. the North)

• South-East London as the land that time forgot: London's west/east, light/dark, order/chaos binaries

• SE London & its archetypes

• Fugitives (those who escaped/departed) from regulation

The south-east London, particularly Southwark, has been by 12^th century firmly established as a temporary place of residence for criminals and other different unruly (niesforne) elements. The period is characterized by a continual contest between the `City' and the `Borough' for civic (miejski) control of Southwark, and the presence of criminal communities in the south reflect more restricted urban organization of London. Thus Southwark became the first place of escape from the legal restrictions of the centre, and the River Thames has already been established as an actual and symbolic boundary between lawful, orderly north and chaotic fugitive (przelotny) colony of the south.

• Elizabethan theatre

The vividly criminal Southwark seems to have found its fullest expression in Elizabethan London. Elizabethan and Jacobean comedies produced a new specific stock character of `the witty but unscrupulous Londoner', depriving the decent people of their money. This theatrical illustration has been repeated in the strong dislike towards police. Four hundred years after Southwark became famous for its disorder, the problem of lawlessness in the area due to the lack of proper authority remained unsolved. The medieval mischiefs, the Elizabethan banditry, glorification of police killers in modern football chants and hatred of police are reflected in very specific forms of south-east London's structure.

• Highwaymen (thieveswho preyed on travellers, usually travelled and robbed by horse; such robbers operated in Great Britain and Ireland from the Elizabethan era until the early 19th century)

• Dockers (a type of waterfront workman); Boxers

• The O `Houlihans or Hooligans (assualts, robberies, pick-pocketing, gang fights, stabbings, vandalism and `free fights of those against the law in the Victorian period)

• Teddy Boys (Teddy Boys originated in the Elephant and Castle in south-east London; it was a British subculture of young men wearing clothes partly inspired by the styles worn by fashionable men in the Edwardian period. The Elephant and Castle area was, in the period of Teddy Boys, characterized by dangerous groups of criminals. `Teds' and criminal gangs are said to be the primary representations of violence, crime and danger of the area in 1950s.)

• Skinheads (The first skinheads appeared in England in 1969. They are born of the contact between the Jamaican rude boys and the hard mods (another British subculture). Under the influence of hard mods, skinheads created their own style, both marked by their working class membership but also very accurate: jeans, Ben Sherman shirts and Fred Perry polo, braces & shaved heads - for not getting caught by the police, or avoid accidents at work in factories.)

• Gangsters (Gangster is a criminal who is a member of a gang. London was the first city documented as the world's gang capital. A number of street gangs were present in London during the 20th century in the East End, often referred to as Mobs. There is a modern history of London gangs dating from the 1970s although many of them developed from what Britain labelled as a sub-culture, which included punks, Rastas & football hooligans. Two well known subcultures that had violent fights during the Notting Hill riots in the 1950s are Teddy Boys and Rudeboys. Many gangs have a strong sense of belonging to their local areas and often take their names from the housing estates, districts and postal code areas where they are located.)

• Cultural reproduction: how does this past get into the present?

• A set of `dispositions': guile, autonomy, inviolability and metropolitan arrogance as well as toughness

• Implicit know-how/`common sense' (= characteristics implied in a particular structure of feeling; a powerful sense of uniqueness of cultural background. A Millwall fan may be a law-abiding citizen but still consider the traditional gangster a representative of south-east London masculinity and his culture. This gangster is personally inviolable and answers to nobody, he is materially successful and able to provide the best for himself and his family. He has a deeply rooted sense of tradition and moral code. His capacity for violence is matched by his guile (przebiegłość, podstęp), his practical intelligence and his metropolitan social alertness (gotowość) - his `common sense'. He is his own man, potent and resourceful, sharp and experienced.)

• Masculinity and physical capital in the working class neighbourhood

• A sense of the world held in the body (standing, walking…)

• Speech codes (Bernstein: Class, Codes and Control)

• The working class child in the middle class school

• Elaborated (=complex) Code: explicit, abstract, individualised speaker roles, precise

• Restricted (=simple) code: implicit, concrete, communalised speaker roles, metaphorical

• A grammar of embodied communication? Implicit and Elaborated?

• Ethnography/Participant Observation

• Interviews

• Attending Games as participant

• Field notes and audio recordings (no cameras)

• Immersion in bodily culture - standing/stance, walking,

• participation in the `ballet' as physical capital

• Field notes and audio recordings (no cameras)

• The problem of `going native'

• Ethics and the dissemination of the findings

• Findings: The Ritualisation Process

• Anthropologically widespread techniques and processes: the people gather around the campfire and sing

• Songs and chants as restricted code

• Ritual and singing: `you can't argue with a song'

• Bodily immersion: gestures, movement =

• A psycho-affective ritual that heightens the lived experience of collective identity

• Globalisation and Social Change

• The significance of place in the practical consciousness - symbolism and identification

• Economic restructuring (e.g. the docks)

• White flight (a term originated in the USA applied to the large-scale migration of whites of various European ancestries from racially mixed urban regions to more racially homogeneous suburban or exurban regions) & suburbanisation (the growth of areas on the borders of cities)

• New communities in old places: in-migration

• New communities outside town: out-migration

• Lingering (=maintaining) significance of the old place: pilgrimage

• Findings

• The `spine of history', ontological security & identity

• Interpretive community and ritualisation as a starting point

• Hooliganism? (disruptive or unlawful behavior such as rioting, bullying, vandalism)

Football hooliganism refers to unruly, violent, and destructive behaviour by overzealous football fans. A football firm (a hooligan firm) is a gang formed for the specific purpose of opposing and physically attacking supporters of other clubs. The behaviour is often based upon rivalry between different teams and conflict may take place before or after football matches. Participants often select locations away from stadia to avoid arrest by the police, but conflict can also erupt spontaneously inside the stadium or in the surrounding streets.

The first recorded examples of football hooliganism occurred during the 1880s in England, a period when gangs of supporters would intimidate neighbourhoods, in addition to attacking referees, opposing supporters and players. In 1885, after Preston North End beat Aston Villa 5-0 in a friendly match, both teams were attacked with stones, sticks, punched, kicked & spat at. The following year, Preston fans fought Queen's Park fans in a railway station - the first alleged instance of football hooliganism outside of a match. In 1905, a number of Preston fans were tried for hooliganism, following their match against Blackburn Rovers.

Although instances of football crowd violence and disorder have been a feature of association football throughout its history (e.g. Millwall's ground was reportedly closed in 1920, 1934 and 1950 after crowd disturbances), the phenomenon only started to gain the media's attention in the late 1950s. In the 1955-56 English football season, Liverpool and  Everton fans were involved in a number of incidents and, by the 1960s, an average of 25 hooligan incidents were being reported each year in England. The label "football hooliganism" first began to appear in the English media in the mid-1960s, leading to increased media interest in, and reporting of, acts of disorder.

Football hooliganism has a lot in common with juvenile delinquency and "ritualized male violence". "Involvement in football violence can be explained in relation to a number of factors, relating to interaction, identity, legitimacy and power. Football violence is also thought to reflect expressions of strong emotional ties to a football team, which may help to reinforce a supporter's sense of identity." The main causes of hooliganism are "the media, the police, the football authorities and opposing fans." The outbreaks of violence involving fans are much rarer today. Football has moved on thanks to banning orders and better, more sophisticated policing. Offensive chants are still way too commonplace but actual fighting does not happen very often.

In March 1978, a full-scale riot broke out at The Den during an FA Cup quarter-final between Millwall and Ipswich. In March 1985, hooligans who had attached themselves to Millwall were involved in large-scale rioting at Luton when Millwall played  Luton Town in the quarter final of the FA Cup. Millwall hooligans were involved in their third high profile incident in decade on January 1988, when in an FA Cup tie against Arsenal at Highbury, 41 people were arrested for rioting after The Herd and The Millwall Bushwackers fought.

In a FA Cup semi-final match between Millwall and Wigan Athletic on 13 April 2013, the worst episode of violence witnessed at the New Wembley yet occurred when Millwall fans fought amongst themselves. 14 arrests were made.

3. Marxism &Ideology

• Marx: the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change the world

• Marxist approach to culture: texts, practices must be analysed in relation to their historical conditions of production

• Marxist understanding of history - `base/superstructure' explanation of social and historical development

• each significant period in history is constructed around a particular `mode of production' - the way in which a society is organized (i.e. slave, feudal, capitalist) to produce the necessaries of life - food, shelter, etc.

Each mode of production produces:

1) specific ways of obtaining the necessaries of life;

2) specific social relationships between workers and those who control the mode of production

3) specific social institutions (including cultural ones)

• how a society produces its means of existence (its particular `mode of production') decides about the political, social and cultural shape of that society and its possible future development

• the Marxist understanding of culture is based on the relationship between `base' and `superstructure'

• the `base' consists of a combination of the `forces of production' (raw materials, the tools, the technology, the workers and their skills, etc) and the `relations of production' (the class relations of those engaged in production - each mode of production produces particular relations of production - e.g. the slave mode produces master/slave relations; the feudal mode produces lord/peasant relations; the capitalist mode produces bourgeois/proletariat)

• the `superstructure' (which develops together with a particular mode of production) consists of institutions (political, legal, educational, cultural, etc.), and `definite forms of social consciousness' (political, religious, ethical, philosophical, aesthetic, cultural, etc.) generated by these institutions

• the relationship between base and superstructure is twofold:

1) the superstructure both expresses and makes legal the base;

2) the base is said to condition the content and form of the superstructure

This relationship can be understood as a mechanical relationship (`economic determinism') of cause and effect: what happens in the superstructure is a reflection of what is happening in the base - this often results in a vulgar Marxist `reflection theory' of culture, in which the politics of a text or practice are reduced to the economic conditions of its production; the relationship can also be seen as the setting of limits, the providing of a specific structure in which some developments are probable and others unlikely

• Engels (1883): the decisive element in history is the production and reproduction of real life

• the economic base produces the superstructural field but the form of activity that takes place there is determined by the interaction of the institutions and the participants as they take the field

• Marx and Engels (2009): the dominant class, on the basis of its ownership of and control over the means of material production, is virtually guaranteed to have control over the means of intellectual production

• a ruling class is made to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society

• a classical Marxist approach to popular culture would above all claim that to understand and explain a text or practice it must always be situated in its historical moment of production, analysed in terms of its historical conditions

• It is crucial to keep a subtle understanding between `agency' and `structure' (e.g. a full analysis of nineteenth-century stage melodrama would have to include both the economic changes that produced its audience and the theatrical traditions that produced its form)

The Frankfurt School

• The Frankfurt School is the name given to a group of German intellectuals associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, the Institute was established in 1923; following the coming to power of Hitler in 1933, it moved to New York, attaching itself to the University of Columbia; in 1949 it moved back to Germany

• `Critical Theory' is the name given to the Institute's critical mix of Marxism and psychoanalysis

• the Institute's work on popular culture is mostly associated with the writings of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal and Herbert Marcuse

• In 1944, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1979) introduced the term `culture industry' to indicate the products and processes of mass culture; the products of the culture industry are marked by 2 features: homogeneity (film, radio and magazines make up a uniform system; all mass culture is identical); and predictability (as soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished or forgotten)

• they claim that popular culture maintains social authority

• Where Arnold & Leavis saw anarchy, the Frankfurt School see conformity: a situation in which the deceived masses' are caught in a circle of manipulation and subsequent need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger

• while it is always difficult to establish the unmistakable `message' of a work of `authentic' culture, the `hidden message' of a piece of mass culture is not at all difficult to recognize

• Leo Lowenthal (1961) claims that the culture industry, by producing a culture marked by standardisation, stereotype, conservatism, manipulated consumer goods, has deprived the working class of political nature - limiting its horizon to political and economic goals that could be realized within oppressive and exploitative structure of capitalist society

• Lowenthal: whenever revolutionary tendencies appear, they are reduced and stopped by a false fulfilment of wish-dreams like wealth, adventure, passionate love, power and sensationalism - the culture industry discourages the `masses' from thinking beyond the limits of the present

• by providing the means to the satisfaction of certain needs, capitalism is able to prevent the development of more fundamental desires - the culture industry thus restricts the political imagination

• as with Arnold and Leavisism, art or high culture symbolizes ideals denied by capitalism, it offers an implicit critique of capitalist society, an alternative, utopian vision - `authentic' culture has taken over the utopian function of religion: to keep alive the human desire for a better world beyond the limits of the present;

• the processes of the culture industry threaten the radical potential of `authentic' culture, the culture industry reduces what remains of the conflict between culture and social reality through the liquidation of the oppositional, alien and supernatural elements in the higher culture by which it constituted another perspective of reality

• the better future promised by `authentic' culture no longer contradicts the unhappy present (an encouragement to make the better future) - culture now confirms that here and now is the only better future

• `authentic' culture offers fulfilment instead of the promotion of desire

• Adorno (1991): mass culture is a difficult system to challenge: the culture industry, in its search for profits and cultural unity, deprives `authentic' culture of its critical function, its mode of negation; commodification (`commercialization') devalues `authentic' culture, making it too accessible by turning it into another saleable commodity

• Frankfurt School believes that culture industry's assimilation establishes cultural equality while preserving domination

• the democratization of culture blocks the demand for full democracy; it stabilizes the existent social order

• work and leisure under capitalism form an important relationship: the effects of the culture industry are guaranteed by the nature of work; the work process secures the effects of the culture industry; the function of the culture industry is to organize leisure time in the same way as industrialization has organized work time

• work under capitalism slows the senses; the culture industry continues the process: the escape from everyday hard work which the whole culture industry promises is the world of the same hard work - the escape leads back to the starting point - in short, work leads to mass culture; mass culture leads back to work

• example of Frankfurt School's approach to popular culture - Adorno's (2009) essay, `On popular music':

1) music is `standardised': once a musical pattern has become a success it is exploited commercially, ending in the formation of standards; to hide standardization, the music industry engages in `pseudo-individualization' which manipulates the customers by making them forget that what they listen to is already listened to for them

2) music promotes passive listening: work under capitalism is boring and stimulates the search for escape, but since it is also exhausting, it leaves little energy for that escape - solution is found in forms such as popular music, the consumption of which is always passive and endlessly repetitive, confirming the world as it is

3) popular music operates as `social cement': it aims to adapt the consumers of popular music psychically to the needs of the existent structure of power

• 10 per cent of all records released make money; only about another 10 per cent cover their costs which means that about 80 per cent of records actually lose money; at least 60 per cent of singles released are never played by anyone - this does not suggest the functioning of an all-powerful culture industry, easily able to manipulate its consumers; it sounds more like a culture industry trying desperately to sell records to a critical and discriminating public; such figures certainly imply that consumption is rather more active than Adorno's argument suggests

• Walter Benjamin (1973) claims that capitalism will finally create conditions which would make it possible to abolish capitalism itself'; he believes that changes in the technological reproduction of culture are changing the function of culture in society: `technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself'; reproduction thus challenges what Benjamin calls the `aura' of texts and practices, i.e. their sense of `authenticity', `authority', `autonomy' and `distance'

• decline of the aura separates the text/practice from the authority and rituals of tradition, it opens them to a variety of reinterpretation, making them free to be used in other contexts, for other purposes - significance is now open to dispute; meaning becomes a question of consumption

• Technological reproduction changes production: the work of art reproduced becomes designed for reproducibility; consumption is now based on the practice of politics - culture may have become mass culture, but consumption has not become mass consumption

• Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art: progressive reaction is characterised by the direct, intimate mixture of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert

• Benjamin's celebration of the positive power of `mechanical reproduction': his view that it begins the process of a move from an `auratic' culture to a `democratic' culture in which meaning is no longer seen as unique, but open to question, has had an enormous influence on cultural theory and popular culture

• Whereas Adorno locates meaning in the mode of production (how a cultural text is produced decides about its consumption and significance), Benjamin suggests that meaning is produced at the moment of consumption; significance is determined by the process of consumption, regardless of the mode of production

• Adorno: consumption combined with an insistence on the determining power of production

• Benjamin: consumption as a matter of politics

• the Frankfurt School are very critical of conservative cultural critics who lamented on the passing of, or threat to, a `pure' autonomous culture for its own sake

• the Frankfurt School attack mass culture because it threatens cultural standards and deprives the working class of political nature, and thus keeps the iron strength of social authority

Althusserianism

• rejects mechanistic interpretation of the base/superstructure formulation, insisting on the idea of the social formation

• Althusser (1969): a social formation consists of 3 practices - the economic, the political and the ideological

• the superstructure is seen as necessary to the existence of the base: the model gives opportunity for the relative autonomy of the superstructure; determination remains but it is determination in `the last instance' - this operates through the `structure in dominance'; i.e. although the economic is always ultimately `determinant', this does not mean that in particular historical conditions it will necessarily be dominant;

• the practice that is dominant in a particular social formation will depend on the specific form of economic production - the economic contradictions of capitalism never take a pure form; the economic is determinant in the last instance because it determines which practice is dominant

• Althusser produced 3 definitions of ideology:

1) ideology - `a system (with its own logic and rigour) of representations (images, myths, ideas, concepts)' is a `practice' (any process of transformation of a determinate given raw material into a determinate product, effected by a determinate human labour, using determinate means of “production”) through which men and women live their relations to the real conditions of existence

• In ideology men express the way they live the relation between them and their conditions of existence: this requires both a real relation and an `imaginary', `lived' relation

• Ideology is the expression of the relation between men and their `world', i.e. the unity of the real relation and the imaginary relation between them and their real conditions of existence

• the relationship is both real and imaginary in the sense that ideology is the way we live our relationship to the real conditions of existence at the level of representations (myths, concepts, ideas, images, discourses): there are real conditions and there are the ways we represent these conditions to ourselves and to others

• ideology can only concern such problems as it can answer; i.e. to stay within its boundaries - this formulation leads Althusser to the concept of the `problematic' - Marx's problematic, `the objective internal reference system of questions commanding the answers given' determines not only the questions and answers he is able to use, but also the absence of problems and concepts in his work

• a problematic consists of the assumptions, motivations, underlying ideas, etc., from which a text is made - to fully understand the meaning of a text, we have to be aware both of what is and what is not said in a text

• one way in which a text's problematic is given out is the way a text may seem to answer questions which it has not formally asked; the task of an Althusserian critical practice is to deconstruct the text to reveal the problematic - to do this is to make what Althusser calls a `symptomatic reading'.

• to read a text symptomatically is to make a double reading: reading first the revealed text, and then, through the lapses, distortions, silences and absences in the revealed text, to produce and read the hidden text

• Pierre Macherey's (1978) rejects Althusser's view that a text has a single meaning: the text is a construction with multiple meanings

• it is the conflict of several meanings that structures a text; the task of a fully competent critical practice is to produce a new knowledge of the text: one that explains the ideological necessity of its structuring incompleteness

• in order for something to be said, other things must be left unsaid; there is a gap between what a text wants to say and what a text actually says; to explain a text it is necessary to go beyond it

• a text always begins by posing a problem that is to be solved; the text then exists as a process of unfolding: the narrative movement to the final resolution of the problem

• Macherey claims that there is always a split between the problem posed and the resolution offered, and it is by examining this split that we discover the text's relationship with ideology and history

• all narratives contain an ideological project, i.e. they promise to tell the `truth' about something; information is initially restricted on the promise that it will be revealed

• Macherey divides the text into 3 stages: the ideological project (the `truth' promised), the realization (the `truth' revealed), the unconscious of the text (the return of the repressed historical `truth')

2) ideology is seen as a lived, material practice - rituals, customs, patterns of behaviour, ways of thinking taking practical form - reproduced through the practices and productions of the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs): education, organized religion, the family, organized politics, the media, the culture industries, etc.

• `all ideology has the function (which defines it) of constructing concrete individuals as subjects

• ideological subjects are produced by acts of `hailing' (shouting at) or `interpellation' (reacting to being shouted at) (e.g. a police officer hails an individual: `Hey, you there!' When the individual hailed turns in response, he or she has been interpellated, has become a subject of the police officer's discourse)

• Judith Williamson (1978) uses Althusser's 2nd definition of ideology in her study of advertising - she argues that advertising is ideological as it represents an imaginary relationship to our real conditions of existence; advertising suggests that what really matters are distinctions based on the consumption of particular goods, thus social identity becomes a question of what we consume rather than what we produce

• advertising functions by interpellation: the consumer is interpellated to make meaning, purchase and consume, and purchase and consume again

• the problem with Althusser's 2nd model of ideology and its use in cultural theory is that it seems to work too well: men and women are always successfully reproduced with all the necessary ideological habits required by the capitalist mode of production; there is no sense of failure, notion of conflict, struggle nor resistance

Gramsci - Hegemony

• a political concept developed to explain the absence of socialist revolutions in the Western capitalist democracies

• the concept of hegemony is used by Gramsci (2009) as a condition in process in which a dominant class (in alliance with other classes) does not only rule a society but leads it through the exercise of intellectual and moral leadership

• hegemony involves a specific kind of agreement: a social group aims to present its own particular interests as the general interests of the society as a whole: hegemony is used to suggest a society in which, despite oppression and exploitation, there is a high degree of agreement; in which subordinate groups seem to actively support values, ideals, objectives, cultural & political meanings, which attach them to the established structures of power

• until the 2nd part of the 19th century, capitalism's position was still uncertain; in the 21st century capitalism seems to have won, especially with political & economic collapse of the Soviet Union & Eastern Europe, & the introduction of the `Open Door' policy & `market socialism' in China; capitalism is now, more or less, internationally hegemonic

• hegemony should not be understood as a society in which all conflict has been removed; it is to suggest a society in which conflict is controlled and directed into ideologically safe places - hegemony is and must be held by dominant groups and classes `negotiating' and making compromises with subordinate groups and classes, e.g. Britain tried to keep its control over the Caribbean colony's population by imposing a version of British culture on them: part of the process was to institute English as the official language

• hegemony is never simply power imposed from above: it is always the result of `negotiations' between dominant and subordinate groups, a process marked by both `resistance' and `incorporation' - there are of course limits to such negotiations and concessions - they can never be allowed to challenge the economic bases of class power

• in times of crisis, when moral and intellectual leadership is not enough to secure authority, the processes of hegemony are replaced by forced power of the army, the police, the prison system, etc.

• hegemony is organized by `organic intellectuals' who are distinguished by their social function - all men and women have competence for intellectual achievements, but only some of them have the function of intellectuals in society; each class creates `organically' its own intellectuals who give it uniformity and an awareness of its own function in the economic, social and political fields; e.g. the capitalist businessman creates by his side the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy, the organisers of a new culture, etc.

• organic intellectuals function as class organizers, they shape and organize the reform of moral and intellectual life

• an organic intellectual is identified by Gramsci as one of `an elite of men of culture, who have the function of providing leadership of a cultural and general ideological nature'

• organic intellectuals are collectively the `ideological state apparatuses' of the family, television, the press, education, organized religion, the culture industries, etc.

• using hegemony theory, popular culture is what men and women make from their active consumption of the texts and practices of the culture industries, e.g. youth subcultures (through patterns of behaviour, ways of speaking, taste in music, etc) engage in symbolic forms of resistance to dominant and parent cultures; they move from originality and opposition to commercial incorporation and ideological expansion as the culture industries succeed in marketing subcultural resistance for general consumption and profit

• popular culture is no longer a history-stopping, imposed culture of political manipulation (the Frankfurt School); nor the sign of social decline (the `culture and civilization' tradition); nor something developing spontaneously from below (some versions of culturalism)

• hegemony theory shows popular culture as a `negotiated' mix of what is made both from `commercial' and `authentic'

• popular culture is a contradictory mix of competing interests and values: neither middle nor working class, neither racist nor non-racist, neither sexist nor non-sexist, neither homophobic nor homophilic

Post-Marxism and cultural studies

• Marxism is no longer as influential in cultural studies as it has been in the past: Marxism has been undermined as a result of the events in Eastern Europe, with damaging the reputation of much of the socialist project

• the conflict between British cultural studies and Marxism has first to be understood as the engagement with a problem - not a theory, not even a problematic

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2001):

• post-Marxism can mean at least 2 things: Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2001):

1) to be post-Marxist is to leave behind Marxism for something better,

2) to be post-Marxist is to aim to transform Marxism, by adding to it recent theoretical developments from feminism, postmodernism, post-structuralism & Lacanian psychoanalysis

• objects exist independently of their discursive articulation, but it is only within discourse that they can exist as meaningful objects, e.g. earthquakes exist in the real world, but whether they are constructed in terms of `natural phenomena' or `expressions of the wrath of God', depends upon the structuring of a discursive field

• the meanings produced in discourse inform and organize action

• hegemony works by the transformation of antagonism into simple difference

• a class is not hegemonic in that it can articulate (express) different visions of the world in such a way that their potential disagreement is neutralised

• `the practice of articulation' (expression) lies in the partial fixing of meaning

Hall:

• texts and practices are not given with meaning; meaning is always the result of an act of articulation (expression)

• `Meaning is a social production, a practice; the world has to be made to mean

Volosinov

• texts and practices are `multiaccentual': they can be `spoken' with different `accents' by different people in different discourses and different social contexts for different politics

• an interesting example of the processes of articulation is the reggae music of Rastafarian culture: Bob Marley had international success with songs articulating the values of Rastafari; this success can be viewed in 2 ways:

1) it is the expression of the message of his religious beliefs to an enormous audience worldwide - on many of his audience the music had the effect of enlightenment, understanding/conversion to the principles of the faith

2) the music has made and continues to make enormous profits for the music industry (promoters, Island Records)

• this is a paradox in which the anti-capitalist politics of Rastafari are being expressed in the economic interests of capitalism: the music leads to the very system it seeks to destroy - the politics of Rastafari are being expressed in a form which is of financial benefit to the dominant culture (i.e. as a commodity which circulates for profit)

• nevertheless, the music is an expression of an oppositional (religious) politics, and it may spread as such, and it may produce certain political and cultural effects - Rastafarian reggae is a force for change that paradoxically stabilizes (at least economically) the very forces of power it aims to destroy

• another example is the music of the American counterculture: it inspired people to oppose and organize against Amerika's war in Vietnam; yet its music also made profits that could be used to support the war effort in Vietnam; the music of the counterculture was not denied expression, but it was expressed in the economic interests of the war-supporting capitalist music industry

Williams (2009)

• there is the `social' definition of culture: a description of a particular way of life, which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour; the analysis of culture, from such a definition, is the clarification of the meanings and values hidden in a particular way of life

• a particular way of life expresses certain meanings and values

• culture as a signifying system is not reduced to `a particular way of life' - it is fundamental to the shaping and holding together of a particular way of life

• post-Marxist cultural studies defines culture as the production, circulation and consumption of meanings

• Hall: culture is not so much a set of things - novels, paintings, TV programmes, etc. - as a process, a set of practices

• culture is concerned with the production and exchange of meanings - the giving and taking of meaning

• cultures do not so much consist of e.g. books; they are the shifting networks of signification in which e.g. books are made to signify as meaningful objects: e.g., if a business card is passed to someone in China, the polite way to do it is with two hands, if passed with one hand it may cause offence - this is clearly a matter of culture

• culture is not so much in the gesture as in the meaning of the gesture: there is nothing polite about using two hands; using two hands has been made to signify politeness

• to share a culture is to interpret the world - make and experience it as meaningful

• so-called `culture shock' happens when we come across radically different networks of meaning: when our `natural' or our `common sense' is confronted by someone else's `natural' or `common sense'

• cultures are never simply changing networks of shared meanings, they are always shared and contested networks of meanings: post-Marxist cultural studies draws 2 conclusions from this way of thinking about culture:

1) although the world exists in all its authorizing and restricting materiality outside culture, it is only in culture that the world can be made to mean - culture constructs the realities it can only describe

2) because different meanings can be ascribed to the same `text', the making of culture is always a potential site of struggle and/or negotiation

• culture and power is the main object of study in post-Marxist cultural studies: cultures regulate & organize our behaviour & practices - they help to set the rules, norms & conventions by which social life is ordered and governed

• post-Marxist cultural studies: people make popular culture from the set of commodities provided by culture industries

• although post-Marxist cultural studies recognizes that the culture industries are a main site of ideological production, constructing powerful images & descriptions for understanding the world, it rejects the view that `the people' who consume these productions are victims of deception

• Making popular culture can be empowering to subordinate and resistant to dominant understandings of the world

• popular culture is no more than a degraded landscape of commercial and ideological manipulation, imposed from above in order to make profit and secure social control

4. Structuralism and Poststructuralism

• Structuralism is a way of approaching texts and practices coming from the theoretical work of Ferdinand de Saussure

• its main representatives are French: Louis Althusser in Marxist theory, Roland Barthes in literary and cultural studies, Michel Foucault in philosophy and history, Jacques Lacan in psychoanalysis, Claude Lévi-Strauss in anthropology and Pierre Macherey in literary theory

• what connects these authors is the influence of Saussure and the use of a particular vocabulary drawn from his work

Ferdinand de Saussure

• divides language into 2 parts: the `signifier' and the `signified', together they make up the `sign'

• the relationship between signifier and signified is completely arbitrary (freeform), e.g. the word `dog' has no dog-like qualities; there is no reason why the signifier `dog' should produce the signified `dog': four-legged canine creature; the signifier `dog' could just as easily produce the signified `cat': four-legged feline creature

• meaning is the result of difference and relationship

• meaning is produced by establishing difference, e.g. `mother' has meaning in relation to `father', `daughter', etc.

• meaning is also made in a process of combination & selection, horizontally along the syntagmatic axis, and vertically along the paradigmatic axis:

• the sentence `Miriam made chicken broth today' is meaningful through the collection of its different parts: Miriam/made/chicken broth/today - its meaning is only complete once the final word is spoken - Saussure calls this process the syntagmatic axis of language;

• substituting some parts of the sentence for new parts can also change meaning: e.g. `Miriam made salad today while dreaming about her lover' - such substitution operates along the paradigmatic axis of language

• the language we speak shapes what constitutes for us the reality of the material world

• language organizes and constructs our sense of reality, different languages produce different images of the real

• the meanings made possible by language are the result of the interaction of a network of relationships between combination and selection, similarity and difference

• meaning cannot be explained by reference to an extra-linguistic reality

• Saussure also divides language into langue and parole: langue refers to the system of language, the rules & conventions that organize it; this is language as a social institution that one must accept as a whole in order to communicate; parole refers to the individual utterance, the individual use of language

• Saussure distinguishes between 2 theoretical approaches to linguistics: diachronic approach studies the historical development of a given language, synchronic approach studies a given language in one particular moment in time:

• he argues that in order to found a science of linguistics it is necessary to adopt a synchronic approach

• structuralists have taken the synchronic approach to the study of texts or practices: in order to really understand a text or practice it is necessary to focus exclusively on its structural properties - this allows critics opposed to structuralism to criticize it for its ahistorical approach to culture

• structuralism takes 2 basic ideas from Saussure's work:

1) an interest in the underlying relations of texts and practices, the `grammar' that makes meaning possible

2) the view that meaning is always the result of the interaction of relationships of selection and combination made possible by the underlying structure - texts and practices are studied as similar to language

• it is the underlying rules of cultural texts and practices that interest structuralists, it is structure that makes meaning possible - the task of structuralism, thus, is to reveal the rules and conventions (the structure) which govern the production of meaning (acts of parole)

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Will Wright and the American Western

Claude Lévi-Strauss

• (1968) uses Saussure to discover the unplanned basics of the culture of so-called `primitive' societies: he analyses cooking, manners, modes of dress, aesthetic activity and other forms of cultural and social practices as similar to systems of language; each in its different way is a mode of communication, a form of expression

• his aim is the langue of the whole culture; its system and its general laws

• he claims that beneath the great variety of myths, there is a uniform structure - individual myths are examples of parole, articulations of an underlying structure or langue - by understanding this structure we should be able to truly understand the meaning - `operational value' of particular myths

• myths work like language: they consist of individual `mythemes', similar to individual units of language, `morphemes' and `phonemes' - mythemes only take on meaning when combined in particular patterns; the anthropologists' task is to discover the underlying `grammar' - the rules and regulations that make it possible for myths to be meaningful

• he also observes that myths are structured in terms of `binary oppositions', dividing the world into mutually exclusive categories produces meaning: culture/nature, man/woman, black/white, good/bad, us/them

• he sees meaning as a result of the interaction between a process of similarity and difference, e.g. in order to say what is bad we must have some idea of what is good

• all myths have a similar structure, they also have a similar sociocultural function within society

• the purpose of myth is to make the world explainable, to magically resolve its problems and contradictions

• myths are stories we tell ourselves as a culture in order to get rid of contradictions & make the world understandable and therefore livable; they try to put us at peace with ourselves and our existence

Will Wright (1975)

• uses Lévi-Strauss's structuralist methodology to analyse the Hollywood Western

• argues that much of the narrative power of the Western comes from its structure of binary oppositions (a pair of related concepts that are opposite in meaning)

• his focus is on the way the Western presents a conceptualisation of American social beliefs

• claims that the Western has evolved through 3 stages: `classic', `transition theme' and `professional'

• in order to fully understand the social meaning of a myth, it is necessary to analyse not only its binary structure but its narrative structure - `the progression of events and the resolution of conflicts'

• The `classic' Western, according to Wright, is divided into 16 narrative `functions': 1) The hero enters a social group; 2) The hero is unknown to the society; 3) The hero is revealed to have an exceptional ability; 4) The society recognizes a difference between themselves and the hero; the hero is given a special status; 5) The society does not completely accept the hero; 6) There is a conflict of interests between the villains and the society; 7) The villains are stronger than the society; the society is weak; 8) There is a strong friendship or respect between the hero and a villain; 9) The villains threaten the society; 10) The hero avoids involvement in the conflict; 11) The villains endanger a friend of the hero; 12) The hero fights the villains; 13) The hero defeats the villains; 14) The society is safe; 15) The society accepts the hero; 16) The hero loses or gives up his special status

• Shane (1953) is probably the best example of the classic Western: the story of a stranger who rides out of the wilderness, helps a group of farmers defeat a powerful rancher, and then rides away again, back into the wilderness

• In classic Western the hero & society are (temporarily) aligned in opposition to villains who remain outside society

• in the `transition theme' Western, binary oppositions are reversed: the hero outside society fights against a strong, but corrupt and corrupting civilization

• many of the narrative functions are also inverted: the hero begins as a valued member of the society, but the society comes to be the real `villain' in opposition to the hero and those outside society and civilization

• in his support for those outside society and civilization, the hero himself crosses from inside to outside and from civilization to wilderness; but in the end the society is too strong for those outside it, who are powerless against its force; the best they can do is escape to the wilderness

• Dances with Wolves (1990) is a perfect example of the `transition theme': a cavalry officer, decorated for bravery, rejects the East (`civilization') and asks for being send to the West (`wilderness'), he finds society among the Sioux and as white settlers continue to attack the lands of the Native Americans he decides to fight on the side of the Sioux against the `civilization' he has rejected; considered a betrayer by the cavalry, he decides to leave the Sioux, so as not to give cavalry an excuse to kill them; however, the final scene shows his departure (without the knowledge of the Sioux) as the cavalry massacre the tribe - the film raises some interesting questions as myth

• Wright claims that each type of Western refers to a different moment in the recent economic development of the United States: the classic Western plot agrees with the individualistic conception of society underlying a market economy; the vengeance plot is a variation that begins to reflect changes in the market economy; the professional plot reveals a new conception of society corresponding to the values and attitudes integrated in a planned economy

• each type expresses its own mythic version of how to achieve the American Dream: the classical plot shows that to achieve human rewards (friendship, respect, dignity) is to separate yourself from others and use your individual strength to support them; the vengeance variation shows that the way to respect and love is to separate yourself from others, fighting individually against your enemies but trying to remember and return to the softer values of marriage and humility; the transition theme, argues that love and companionship are achieved by becoming an individual who stands firmly against the intolerance and ignorance of society; the professional plot argues that companionship and respect are to be achieved only by becoming a skilled technician, who joins an elite group of professionals, accepts any job that is offered, and has loyalty only to the integrity of the team

Roland Barthes: Mythologies (1973)

• Barthes's early work on popular culture deals with the processes of signification, the mechanisms by which meanings are produced & put into circulation; Mythologies (1973) is a collection of essays on French popular culture

• he discusses wrestling, soap powders & detergents, toys, steak & chips, tourism & popular attitudes towards science

• his guiding principle is to make explicit what too often remains implicit in the texts and practices of popular culture

• his purpose is political; his target is what he calls the `bourgeois norm'

• Mythologies is the most significant attempt to use the methodology of semiology to put pressure on popular culture

• semiology was first defined by Saussure (1974): language is a system of signs that express ideas; a science that studies the life of signs within society

• Mythologies outlines a semiological model for reading popular culture

• Barthes takes Saussure's schema of signifier/signified = sign and adds to it a second level of signification - the signifier `dog' produces the signified `dog': a four-legged canine creature; Barthes argues that this indicates only primary signification; the sign `dog' produced at the primary level of signification is available to become the signifier `dog' at a second level of signification, producing the signified `dog': an unpleasant human being

• the sign of primary signification becomes the signifier in a process of secondary signification

• In Elements of Semiology, Barthes (1967) substitutes `denotation' (primary signification) & `connotation' (secondary signification): 1st system [denotation] becomes the plane of expression or signifier of the 2nd system [connotation]; the signifiers of connotation are made up of signs (signifiers and signifieds united) of the denoted system'

• it is at the level of secondary signification (connotation) that myth is produced for consumption

• by myth he means ideology understood as a body of ideas and practices, which by actively promoting the values and interests of dominant groups in society, defend the prevailing structures of power

• his most famous example of the workings of secondary signification is taken from the cover of the French magazine Paris Match (1955): he establishes that the primary level of signification consists of a signifier: patches of colour and figuration - this produces the signified: `a black soldier saluting the French flag' and together they form the primary sign which becomes the signifier: `black soldier saluting the French flag', producing, at the level of secondary signification, the signified `French imperiality'

• at the first level: black soldier saluting the French flag, at the second level: a positive image of French imperialism

• Barthes predicts 3 possible reading positions from which the image could be read:

1) the black soldier saluting the flag as an `example' of French imperiality, a `symbol' for it

2) the image as an `alibi' for French imperiality

3) the black soldier saluting the flag is seen as naturally evoking the concept of French imperiality

4) there is a 4th reading position, that of Barthes himself - the mythologist; producing a `structural description'; it seeks to determine the means of ideological production of the image, its transformation of history into nature

• images rarely appear without the accompaniment of a linguistic text, e.g. a newspaper photograph will be surrounded by a title, a caption, a story, and the general layout of the page; it will also be situated within the context of a particular newspaper/magazine; the accompanying text controls the production of connotations in the image

• image does not illustrate text, it is the text which strengthens the connotative potential of the image

• the text produces an entirely new signified which is retroactively projected into the image; an example might be a photograph taken in 2007 of a rock star looking reflective, and originally used to promote a love song: `My baby done me wrong'; in late 2008 the photograph is reused to accompany a newspaper account of the death by a drug overdose of one of the rock star's closest friends - the image is recaptioned: `Drugs killed my best - the text would produce connotations of loss, despair, and a certain thoughtfulness about the role of drugs in rock music culture

• the example of different meanings made of the same image reveals the potential of signs for multiple signification

• without the addition of a linguistic text, the meaning of the image is very difficult to define

• the linguistic message works in 2 ways:

1) it helps the reader to identify the meaning of the image: this is a rock star looking reflective;

2) it limits the potential proliferation of the connotations of the image: the rock star is reflective because of the drug overdose by one of his closest friends

• thus, the rock star is contemplating the role of drugs in rock music culture; it also tries to make the reader believe that the connotative meaning (connotation - a commonly understood cultural or emotional association that some word or phrase carries) is actually present at the level of denotation (the word's explicit or literal meaning)

• what makes the move from denotation to connotation possible is the store of social knowledge on which the reader is able to base when he or she reads the image - such knowledge is always both historical and cultural - it might differ from one culture to another, and from one historical moment to another

• the variation in readings depends on the different kinds of knowledge - practical, national, cultural, aesthetic - invested in the image

Post-structuralism

• rejects the idea of an underlying structure upon which meaning is guaranteed; meaning is always in process

• the `meaning' of a text is only a momentary stop in a continuing flow of interpretations following interpretations

• language: signifiers do not produce signifieds, they produce more signifiers; meaning as a result is very unstable

• only a reader can bring a temporary unity to a text

• a text is a work seen as inseparable from the active process of its many readings

Jacques Derrida (1973)

• meaning is always deferred, never fully present, always both absent and present

• the divided nature of the sign is described as différance, meaning both to defer and to differ

• Derrida's model of différance is both structural and temporal; meaning depends on structural difference but also on temporal relations of before and after

• e.g. if we find the meaning of a word in a dictionary we meet with a relentless deferment of meaning

• it is only when located in a discourse and read in a context that there is a temporary stop to the endless play of signifier to signifier; e.g., if we read or hear the words `nothing was delivered', they would mean something quite different depending on whether they were the opening words of a novel, a line from a poem, a line from a song, etc.

• however, even context cannot fully control meaning: the phrase `nothing was delivered' will carry with it the `trace' of meanings from other contexts; if I know the line is from a song, this will resonate across the words as I read them in a shopkeeper's notebook

• for Derrida, the binary opposition is never a simple structural relation; it is always a relation of power, in which one term is in a position of dominance with regard to the other ; the dominance of one over the other is something which is produced in the way the relationship is constructed

• in his analyses of Jean Jacques Rousseau's `confessional' and linguistic writings, Derrida deconstructs the binary opposition between speech and writing: Rousseau considers speech as the natural way to express thought; he regards writing as a `dangerous supplement'

• Derrida: Writing is not the fall of language, it is inscribed in its origins; according to Derrida, Rousseau `declares what he wishes to say', but he also `describes that which he does not wish to say' - it is in the unravelling of this contradiction that the binary oppositions speech/writing, nature/culture are deconstructed - the privileged term in the opposition is shown to be dependent on the other for its meaning

Discourse and power: Michel Foucault

• one of the main interests of Michel Foucault is the relationship between knowledge and power and how this relationship operates within discourses and discursive formations

• Foucault's concept of discourse is similar to Althusser's idea of the `problematic'; both are organized and organizing bodies of knowledge, with rules and regulations which govern particular practices (ways of thinking and acting)

• discourses work in 3 ways: they enable, constrain and constitute

• discourses are `practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak' - language is a discourse: it enables one to speak, it constrains what one can say, it constitutes one as a speaking subject

• discourses produce subject positions we are invited to occupy (e.g. member of a language community) - thus, they are social practices in which we engage; all the things we are, are enabled, constrained and constituted in discourses

• in The History of Sexuality, Foucault (1981) presents the development of the discursive formation of sexuality

• he rejects the idea of sexuality as something `essential' that the Victorians repressed

• he tracks the discourse of sexuality through a series of discursive domains: medicine, demography, psychiatry, pedagogy, social work, criminology, governmental

• he argues that the different discourses on sexuality are not about sexuality, they actually constitute the reality of sexuality - the Victorians did not repress sexuality, they actually invented it

• discourses produce knowledge and knowledge is always a weapon of power

• the Victorian invention of sexuality did not just produce knowledge about sexuality, it aimed to produce power over sexuality; this was knowledge that could be used to categorize and to organize behaviour; divide it into the `normal' and the unacceptable; power, however, should not be thought of as a negative force, something which denies, represses, negates; power is productive

• power produces reality; through discourses it produces the `truths' we live by - Foucault aims to discover `how men [and women] govern (themselves and others) by the production of truth

• discourse is not just about the imposition of power - where there is power there is resistance

The panoptic machine

• the panopticon is a type of prison building designed by Jeremy Bentham in 1787; at the centre of the building is a tower that allows an inspector to observe all the prisoners in the surrounding cells without the prisoners knowing whether or not they are being observed

• According to Bentham, the panopticon is `a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind'

• Bentham also believed that the panopticon design might also be used in `any sort of establishment, in which persons are to be kept under inspection, including poor-houses, lazarettos, houses of industry, manufactories, hospitals, work-houses, mad-houses, and schools

• Foucault: the major effect of the Panopticon is to cause in the prisoner a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power

• prisoners do not know whether or not they are actually being watched - thus they learn to behave as if they are always being watched - this is the power of the panopticon

• Panopticism is the extension of this system of surveillance (close observation) to society as a whole

• according to Foucault, Bentham's panopticon is symptomatic of a historical shift in methods of social control; this is a movement from punishment (enforcing norms of behaviour through spectacular displays of power: public hangings & torture, etc.) to discipline (enforcing norms of behaviour through surveillance)

• surveillance has become the dominant mode of the operation of power

• the discipline of surveillance has also had a great influence on popular culture: the most obvious examples are TV programmes such as Big Brother and I'm a Celebrity, Get me Out of Here, in which surveillance is a fundamental aspect of how these programmes work - part of Big Brother's appeal is that it seems to let us play the role of Bentham's imaginary inspector, as we take pleasure in the ability to observe without being observed

• the increasing number of celebrity surveillance magazines, such as Reveal, Closer, Heat and New, work in a similar way - celebrities are monitored and scrutinized, especially in terms of body size and sexual and social behaviour, for our supposedly anonymous pleasure and entertainment - but the norms and standards that are used to criticize and ridicule celebrities are the same norms and standards that can be used to discipline us

• the fact that we are on the other side of the screen does not mean that we are safe from the demand to conform, or safely outside of the panoptic machine

5. Modernity and modernism

• 3 great artists prepared the way for modernism - Baudelaire, Manet and Wagner - following the work of T.S. Eliot, the greatest modernist writer in English

Wagner

• the operas of Wagner try to distinguish the human being as dignified by the uncorrupted common culture

• Wagner proposed man as his own redeemer and art as the transforming ritual of passage to a higher world

• Wagner was against the sentimentality and boredom of official art

• he saw that the ideal turned from the world to imagination, but he believed that the ideal could be brought back

• he tried to create a new musical public, one that would not only see the point of heroic ideal but also adopt it

• modern producers, embarrassed by dramas that mock their way of life, decide in turn to mock the dramas

• moderm musicians and singers do their best to produce the sounds that Wagner intended but sarcasm and satire run through the stage as nobility has become intolerable

• the producer aims to distract the audience from Wagner's message and to mock every heroic gesture, to reduce Wagner's dramas from the higher sphere to the world of human trivia

• modernism: the final rejection of high culture and the destruction of the sacred in its last imagined form

• modern producers were anticipated by Nietzsche who advises to translate gods into reality, `the bourgeois'

• Wagner's heroes exist in a state of exalted loneliness, the result of some original mistake

• our sympathy for that hero comes from the deep recognition that Wagner's difficult situation is ours, because we live in an unheroic world of the cynic and the salesman, in which gods and heroes have no place - we are driven to regard our own existence as some kind of mistake

• our life can only have a meaning through gesture, primarily, love; but love also degenerates into cost and benefit

• it is only through the moments when love prepares to sacrifice itself for the beloved, when it wants its own death - by redemption, that we can have meaning

• Wagner's art is important in the sense that it can rescue godless people from triviality - the fact that it is possible makes us live as if we could make that final sacrifice, as if we could free ourselves from the original mistake of living in the world without illusions

• modern people are living beyond the death of their gods - this means they live with a strengthened awareness of their own unpredicted position - of the fact of being thrown down in the world without explanation - they are social beings related to each other by guilt, shame and hesitation

• modern man lives in selfish emptiness, where there is no meaning nor joy, but only pleasure

• love can rescue us from the difficult situation we find ourselves in by putting us in a position where we confront guilt and compensate for it

• we should live as if heroic love was possible and as if we could give up our life for the sake of it

• this `as if' means what is distinctive in the human condition - the thing which separates us from the rest of nature - we are able to look on the world as if a certain thought were true even while not fully believing it; if we believe it, it is only fiction and we are unable to react to it with any lively sense of power

• as Wagner saw, a myth is not just a fiction - it sets before us in allegorical form an implicit truth about our condition

• through the myth we understand both the thing which we aim at, and the forces that prevent us from achieving it

• the myth shapes our emotions, encouraging us to live for the higher state to which the god promises to raise us

• to understand the depth of Wagnerian `as if' is to understand the condition of the modern soul - we know that we are animals, parts of the natural order, connected by laws which tie us to the material forces governing everything

• we believe that gods are our invention and that death is exactly what it seems

• our world has been disenchanted - left without illusions

• at the same time we cannot live as if that were the whole truth of our condition - modern people are made to praise and blame, love and hate, reward and punish;

• modern people are aware of the self as the centre of their being; they try to connect to other selves around them - we see others as if they were free beings, animated by a self or soul - and if we stop seeing it like that, human relations are damaged, the world is left without love, duty and desire and only the body remains

• modern science has presented us with the `as ifness' of human freedom but it could never equip us to live without the belief in it; but the freedom that we enjoy depends on our mortality

• it is but the world Wagner's drama shows us, we don't live in that way

• Wagner's dramas as symbolic representations of forces and processes that lie deeper than words, and to which we respond with a sympathy that is a deeper and darker vision of our sympathy for people

• Wagner's idea of erotic love comes from Romanticism

• faithful love is guaranteed by no institution, no moral status within the community, it is a condition outside society

• love is experienced as a yearning, all-consuming force, its higher ethical form is marriage

• the destiny of love lies in the process of reproduction

Baudelaire

• the heroic has no place in his poetry, he neither tries to rescue through myth

• for him, the ideal, the noble, the ethical, all belong to the world that has been called away

• he was probably the first to recognize the separation between the real community which the artist observed and the imagined community invoked by his language

• the intensity of experience in Baudelaire is of a piece with an evaluation

• he recognizes the reality of the sin, where there is a new life & possibility of damnation; it is a great relief in the world of electoral reform, plebiscites, sex & dress reform - damnation is an immediate form of salvation from boredom of life

• boredom of life is the sign of a deeper disorder: the dissipation of community which gave sacraments their meaning

• Baudelaire's imagery is full of Christian symbols, while his poetry forms, especially sonnets, recall a lyrical innocence which is in great contrast to the scenes of dissipation they describe

• Baudelaire's modernism is based on this: he takes the old verse-forms with their hidden reference to a community in contact with its God, and sets them in judgement over the experience of a self-consciously modern person, lost in a vast sea of evil, with no consolation, no triumph and no consciousness

• the task of the modern poet is to show consciousness, alive and judging, in the world that will not be judged

• tradition is of great importance to modern artist as it defines the perspective from which judgement is maintained

• the painter should be true to the experience of the modern city

• you can't paint modern life by producing recognisable images of it or by simply using brush and pgiments

• modern art is difficult; it is important not only to be modern but also modernist

• the modernist is the one who consciously reshapes the medium, so that the old intentions can be reconsidered

• only a modernist has the problem of staying true to an artistic enterprise which must be re-made if it is to exist at all; only a modernist is concerned to situate himself and his art in history - modernism is essentially a view from outside

• in Baudelaire, we find the most important project of modernism: the attempt to revive the spirit by offending it

• the fall into sexuality, alcoholism are expressed in exquisite language so as to become forms of moral suffering

• The Waste Land - a founding document of English literature, where high culture comes clean: the myths and legends sentimentalised and falsified modern life, high culture hurts because it's abandoned; the poem invokes the dying god while showing the world as it is

• The Waste Land accepts the death of God and also suggest that God's death can never be accepted

• in Elliot, the modern experience finds artistic form, without losing it's reference to a redeemed and higher life

• the task of the artistic modernist is to find the words, rhythms and artistic forms that would make contact again with our experience - experience that unites us as living here and now

• Eliot's artistic modernism was the start of a spiritual search, which ended only when he accepted the Christian religion in the strange form defined by the doctrine and liturgy of the Anglican church; for Nietzsche, the crisis of modernity had happened because of the loss of the Christian faith

• Nietzsche, Wagner, Baudelaire: it is not possible for mankind to live without faith - if you take away faith, you take away the power to see more important truths about our condition

• in this case, Nietzsche chose to hold that there are not truths and to build a philosophy of life on the ruins of science and religion in the name of a purely aesthetic ideal - this response is failure as the aesthetic is rooted in the religious

• to Eliot, what mattered were truths of feeling, truths about the weight of human life and the reality of human attachments - science does not make these truths more easily observable, it corrupts the language of feeling, leads from sensibility to sentimentality and hiding of the human world; the truths of science hide the human reality; the solution was to accept the Christian faith

• for Eliot, conversion was a gesture of belonging, by which he united himself with a historical common culture

• for us, in the modern world, religion and culture are both to be gained through a work of sacrifice, but it is the sacrifice on which redemption of the poet depends

• the modernist poet thus becomes the traditional priest

• the question for the modernist is whether he can rediscover the ethical vision in the centre of modern life, without some equivalent of faith

• many modernists have been religious traditionalists

• nothing is more striking than the collapse of the modernist project when the religious motive dies

• modernists who have not taken Elliot's path, have as a rule taken Wagner's, constructing modern life into a mythic version of itself, in which those very things which most disturb us are somehow reshaped as our redemption

• we should always respect the modernist heroes, but the world has changed and their matters cannot be ours

• modernism involves a divorce between high culture and the religious feelings to which it refers

• keeping old religion, modernism maintains its dignity for year after year

• the post-modern problem: do we try to pass on our culture to the young, knowing that we can do so only by requiring efforts which they may see as wasted? Or do we leave them to their own devices & allow our culture to die?

6. Postmodernity and Postmodernism

• little has been said about postmodernism as an empirical or historical phenomenon

• in the United Kingdom postmodernism is now a term commonly used about contemporary architecture

• postmodernism describes the emergence of a society in which the mass media and popular culture are the most important and powerful institutions, and control and shape all other types of social relationships

popular cultural signs and media images increasingly dominate our sense of reality, and the way we define ourselves and the world around us

• postmodern theory tries to understand a society included within the media

• the liberal view argued that the media provided a mirror to and thus reflected a wider social reality, the radical response to this was that this mirror distorted reality

• a more abstract & conceptual media & cultural theory claimed that the media played some part in constructing our sense of social reality & our sense of being a part of this reality; it is said that this mirror is now the only reality we have

• in the postmodern condition it becomes more difficult to distinguish the economy from popular culture; consumption - what we buy and what determines what we buy - is increasingly influenced by popular culture because popular culture increasingly determines consumption

An emphasis on style at the expense of substance

• in a postmodern world, surfaces & style become more important, producing & using a `designer ideology' to exist

• we increasingly consume images & signs just because they are images & signs, regardless of their usefulness & value

• in popular culture, surface & style, playfulness & jokes & what things look like, are said to predominate at the expense of content, substance and meaning; as a result, qualities such as artistic merit, integrity, seriousness, authenticity, realism, intellectual depth & strong narratives tend to be undermined

• virtual reality computer graphics can allow people to experience various forms of reality at second hand

Art and popular culture

• if the surfaces & style become more important it follows that for postmodern culture anything can be turned into a joke, reference or quotation in its mixed play of styles, simulations and surfaces

• if popular cultural signs and media images define our sense of reality for us, and if this means that style are moe important than content, then it becomes more difficult to keep a meaningful distinction between art and popular culture

• a good example of what postmodernist theory is about is provided by Andy Warhol's multi-image print of Leonardo Da Vinci's famous painting, the Mona Lisa; the print shows that the uniqueness, the artistic aura, of the Mona Lisa is destroyed by its infinite reproducibility through the silkscreen printing technique employed by Warhol - instead, it is turned into a joke - the print's title is Thirty are better than One

• art becomes increasingly integrated into the economy because it is used to encourage people to consume through the expanded role it plays in advertising, and because it becomes a commercial good in its own right

• postmodern popular culture refuses to respect the aspirations & distinctiveness of art; thus, failure in the distinction between art and popular culture, as well as in points where the two cross, become more common

Confusions over time and space

• present & future expansions, constrictions & concentrations of time and space have led to confusion in social senses of space & time, in our maps of the places where we live, & our ideas about the times by which we organise our lives

• the growing lack of distance between global space & time resulting from the dominance of the mass media, the speed and range of modern mass communications as well as the ease and rapidity with which people and information can travel means that previously unified and coherent ideas about space and time become distorted and confused

• rapid international flows of money, information & culture disrupt the linear unities of time

• postmodern popular culture is seen to express these confusions and distortions

• postmodern popular culture is a culture outside history

The decline of metanarratives

• loss of a sense of history as a clear order of events indicates that meta-narratives (ideas such as religion, science, art, modernism/Marxism which make absolute, universal claims to knowledge & truth) are declining in the postmodern world; it is becoming difficult for people to organise & interpret their lives in the light of meta-narratives of any kind

• postmodernism has been particularly critical of the metanarrative of Marxism and its claim to absolute truth

• postmodernism rejects the claim of any theory to absolute knowledge or the demand of any social practice to universal validity; e.g. people seem to be moving away from the metanarrative of life-long, monogamous marriage towards a series of discrete if still monogamous relationships

Contemporary popular culture and postmodernism

Architecture

• during the 20th century, groups of architects have identified themselves as `modernist' or `postmodernist'; these terms have also been used to describe contemporary buildings

• modernism in architecture, becoming important in 1920s, radically rejected all earlier forms of architecture, ordering that buildings & architecture have to be created anew according to rational and scientific principles

• functionality & efficiency, high rise, streamlined, glass & concrete structures, disregard for the past & context are its characteristics; it has aimed to reflect, celebrate and establish the dynamism of industrial modernity through the rational, scientific and technical construction of built space

• its features are also: highly ornate, elaborately designed, contextualised, brightly coloured buildings; a stress on fictionality and playfulness; the mixing of styles drawn from different historical periods

postmodernism turns buildings into celebrations of style & surface, using architecture to make jokes about built space

• postmodern architecture is said to follow the context in which the building is to be placed, and to mix together styles, e.g. classical (ancient Roman or Greek) with vernacular (popular cultural signs and icons)

• it includes cultural definitions & the superiority of style; it rejects the privileged metanarrative of modernist architecture, & the contrast between classical & modernist architecture as art as well as vernacular architecture as popular culture

• e.g. Las Vegas has been seen as an example of and inspiration for postmodern architecture

Cinema

• films which show signs of postmodernism emphasise style, spectacle, special effects and images, at the cost of content, character, substance, narrative & social comment; examples include: Dick Tracey (1990), 9½ Weeks (1986)

• films directed & produced by Steven Spielberg & his colleagues: Indiana Jones (1981, 1984, 1989) and Back to the Future series (1985, 1989 and 1990), display elements of postmodernism

• their main points of reference are earlier forms of popular culture such as cartoons, `B' feature science-fiction films, & the Saturday morning movie-house; these films stress spectacle & action through the use of sophisticated techniques, rather than the complexities of clever plotting and character development

• the Back to the Future series and other films such as Brazil (1985) and Blue Velvet (1986) are said to be postmodern because of the way they are based on confusions over time and space

• Who Framed and Roger Rabbit? (1988) can be seen to be postmodern because of their intentional use of different (cultural and technical) genres: the cartoon strip & the detective story

• Body Heat (1981) can be said to be postmodern because it is based on the cinema's past, recycling - in this example - the crime thriller of the 1940s; they thus engage in a kind of `retro-nostalgia', related to this are films which recycle themselves in a number of sequels: Rocky (1976, 1979, 1982, 1985, 1990) or Rambo (1982, 1985, 1988)

• Runner (1982) mixes styles from different periods: buildings which house the main corporation have characteristics of contemporary skyscrapers but the overall look of ancient temples, while the `street talk' consists of words and phrases taken from a range of different languages

Television

• television's regular daily, night-time flows of images and information bring together pieces from other forms & create its sequences of programmes on the basis of compilations & surface simulations

• examples of TV programmes which can be used to assess the emergence of postmodernism include Miami Vice (1985-1990) which heavily relies upon style and surface, Twin Peaks (1990-1991) and Wild Palms (1993)

• Crime Story (1989) was carefully planned by its colour, locations and camera work; it seemed to match more the grander stylistic & adventurous conventions of cinema rather than the cosy, intimate and more `realistic' routines of television; it was different from more seemingly realistic police series of Hill Street Blues (1981-1989); the visual attraction was added to by the designer clothes worn by its detective heroes, the day & night-time images of Miami; locations, interiors, the city; use of pop & rock music sound track; it did not so much reject narrative as such, rather parodied & stylised the established conventions of the genre, while full of self-conscious references to popular culture

Advertising

• advertisements used to tell us how valuable and useful a product was; however, they now say less about the product directly, and are more concerned with sending up or parodying advertising itself by citing other adverts, by using references drawn from popular culture and by self-consciously making clear their status as advertisements

• advertising is always involved in selling things to people, but suggests that these features distinguish those elements of postmodernism which can be found in contemporary television advertising

• the content and tone of advertising have changed, there is a move away from the simple and direct selling of a product on the basis of its value to the consumer

• postmodern adverts are more concerned with the cultural representations of the advert than any qualities the product advertised may have in the outside world

• the stylish look of advertisements, their clever quotations from popular culture and art, their concern with the surfaces of things, their self-conscious revelation of the nature of advertisements as media constructions, and their blatant recycling of the past are all said to be indicative of the emergence of postmodernism in television advertising

Pop music

• marked by a trend towards the open and extensive mixing of styles & genres of music - the remixing of already recorded songs, quoting & `tasting' of distinct musics, sounds & instruments so as to create new sub-cultural identities

• examples: mixing, collage constructions, reggae sound systems, rap, house, hip hop,techno; also `art rock' musical innovations & mixing of styles associated with such artists as Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, the Pet Shop Boys

• these examples are concerned with collage, pastiche and quotation, with the mixing of styles which remain musically & historically distinct, with the random & selective pasting together of different musics & styles, with the rejection of divisions between serious & fun or pop music, & with the attack on the idea of rock as a serious artistic music which values the high cultural recognition of the respectful concert (an attack closely associated with punk)

• the transition between modernism and postmodernism in pop music can be seen as a movement from rock-'n'-roll in the late 1950s, and the Beatles, Tamla Motown, Bob Dylan and folk rock in the 1960s, to music mixing, house, hip hop, `art rock' and `straight' pop in the 1980s

The emergence of postmodernism (its understanding of the social & historical conditions under which it has emerged)

Consumerism and media-saturation

• postmodernism has connections with how the scale & effects of consumerism & media saturation have been important aspects of the modern development of industrial, capitalist societies

• during the 20th century, the economic needs of capitalism have changed from production to consumption which suggests that the main need of capitalist societies was to establish their conditions of production

• the machines & factories for the production of goods had to be built & continually updated; heavy industries concerned with basic materials, such as iron and steel, and energy, had to be developed; the infrastructure of a capitalist economy had to be established; & the workforce had to be taught the `work ethic', the discipline required by industrial labour; all this meant that consumption had to be sacrificed to the needs of production

• once a fully functioning system of capitalist production has been established, the need for consumption begins to grow, and people need to acquire a leisure or consumer ethic in addition to a work ethic

• in an advanced capitalist society such as Britain, the need for people to consume has become as important than the need for people to produce; this resulted in the growth of consumer credit, the expansion of agencies such as advertising, marketing, design and public relations, encouraging people to consume, the emergence of a postmodern popular culture which celebrates consumerism, hedonism and style

• the mass media have become so important for communication & information spreads within & between modern societies that they have created the characteristic features of postmodernism

• the world will consist more & more of media screens & popular cultural images - TVs, videos, computers, computer games, adverts, etc. - which are part of the trends towards postmodern popular culture

• the increasing importance of consumption & the media in modern societies has created new occupations (or changed the character of older ones) involved with the need to encourage people to consume a greater variety of commodities

• some `postmodern' occupations have developed & function to develop & promote postmodern popular culture; they involve the construction of postmodernism - they are said to be both creating & manipulating or playing with cultural symbols & media images so as to encourage and extend consumerism (occupations such as advertising, marketing, design, architecture, journalism & TV production, accountancy & finance, social work, therapists, teachers, lecturers etc. - all these occupations have an important influence over other people's life-styles & values or ideologies

The erosion of identity

• limited & stable set of regular identities have begun to fragment into a diverse & unstable series of competing identities

• traditional sources of identity - social class, family, local communities, religion, nation state - are said to be declining

• economic globalisation, tendency for investment, production, marketing & distribution taking place on an international basis, are seen as an important reason for the gradual erosion of these traditional sources of identity

• international economic processes destroy the importance of local & national industries and, thus, the occupational, communal and familial identities they could once support

• these problems become worse as there are no proper forms which can replace traditional sources of identity; no new institutions are there to give people a secure sense of themselves, the times in which they live & their place in society

• consumerism is seen to support a self-centred individualism which disrupts the possibilities for solid & stable identities; television has similar effects as it is both individualistic and universal

• people relate to television clearly as individual viewers separated from wider & more real social relations, while TV relates back to people as individual & anonymous members of an abstract & universal audience - the wider collectivities to which people might belong, & the legitimate ideas in which they might believe, tend to be ignored

• neither consumerism nor TV form real sources of identity and belief, but since there are no dependable alternatives, popular culture and the mass media come to serve as the only structures of reference available for the construction of collective and personal identities

The limits of postmodernism

• the idea that the mass media take over `reality' clearly exaggerates their importance

• the idea that the media are all important fails to identify the precise character of this importance; it also ignores the point that other factors, such as work and the family, lead to the construction of `reality'

• the idea that popular media culture regulates consumption fails to recognise how useful the commodities which people buy are for them and neglects the fact that the ability to consume is restricted by economic and cultural inequalities

• the idea that `reality' has fallen inside the media such that it can only be defined by the media is questionable - most people would still be able to distinguish between `reality' created by the media, and that which exists anywhere else

• those theorists who think postmodernism is emerging seem to be reflecting many of the anxieties and fears expressed much earlier by mass culture and Frankfurt School critics - e.g. the ideas that collective and personal identities are being destroyed, that modern popular culture is a trash culture, that art is under threat and that the exaggerated role of the mass media allows them to have a powerful ideological influence over their audiences

• little attention is given to the nature of people's daily lives, popular attitudes towards consumption, the continuity of identities and the possibility of alternative identities emerging in the course of time

• another major difficulty with postmodernism is in its claim that metanarratives are in decline; postmodernism is another metanarrative - it presents a definite view of knowledge & its acquisition; it assumes to tell us sth true about the world

• it is evident that developments in technology and communications have had significant effects on the speed with which information, images and people can be transported around the world; they are thus in agreement with postmodernist claims about space & time - as a result, the sense that people now have of time & space must have changed when compared with earlier generations

• if we are to talk about changes, we must engage in some kind of historical evaluation

• another reason to be sceptical of the claims of postmodern theory is that the effects of these dramatic changes in time & space on people's lives are unexamined

• postmodernist claims about the failure in the distinction between art & popular culture are possible as they seem to relate to the practices & ideologies of certain occupational groups, yet the claims seem to be limited to these groups

• if we look at the examples of popular culture, there seem to be changes in the direction of postmodernism, notably in architecture and advertising; however, this conclusion is not true of most areas of popular culture (cinema)

• postmodernism seems subject to strict theoretical and empirical limitations; it is certainly inappropriate as a basis for developing a sociology of popular culture

Some recent theoretical developments

Discourse (verbal expression) and popular culture

• theorists & researchers are turning to some of ideas of post-structuralism for new ways of interpreting popular culture

• the work of Michel Foucault (1926-1984), the French post-structuralist philosopher and historian of ideas, whose ideas are central to the critique of structuralism & Marxism, has been used for the analysis of popular culture

• one study which shows what the application of poststructuralism to this area involves is Ang's attempt to use Foucault's idea of discourse to analyse the audience

• for Foucault, discourses are particular ways of organising knowledge in the context of serving specific types of power relationships; Ang's analysis looks at institutional discourses about television audiences; these audiences are constructed by certain discourses which aim to know them to exercise power over them

• in Foucault's work there is a detailed emphasis on the way in which power & knowledge are connected through situated practices of functional language use and meaning production

• it is only in & through the discourses that express the institutional point of view that the separated realities of audiencehood come to be known through the single concept of `television audience'

• in the way television institutions know the audience, epistemological issues (concerned with obtaining knowledge) are useful to political ones: empirical information about the audience is important as it produces a kind of truth that is more acceptable to meet a basic need of the institutions: the need to control

• Ang considers how the main television institutions engaged in the organisation, production and communication of programmes operate to control their audiences by treating them as objects of discourses: they construct, produce and distribute knowledge about their audiences so as to control them in keeping with their institutional requirements

• the ideas and habits of which television watching is composed are so complex that they have to be defined by the discourses of television institutions if they are to be controlled; according to Ang, these discourses speak on behalf of, but not for, the television audience

• by exposing the discourses of the audience developed by the powerful television institutions, discourses which have also influenced academic studies of the audience, Ang hopes to shift attention back to the ordinary television viewer; to achieve this, it is necessary for research to look at `the social world of actual audiences', and `to develop forms of knowledge about television audiencehood that move away from those informed by the institutional point of view'

• this understanding of how media organisations work contrasts with the way Marxism treats them as instruments for a dominant ideology or expressions of the demands of profitability

• there is a tendency for this idea to see everything as being discursively constructed; the realities of power are divided into discourses; none of us may be able to speak for an authentic audience, but there must be audiences somewhere outside discourses

The `dialogical' approach to popular culture

• based upon the dialogue which occurs between texts and audiences

• Barker has referred to the potential offered by Foucault's notion of discourse for media and cultural studies: the potential is in how Foucault's concept of power shows the way we can be turned into objects to be studied; our talk becomes a symptom; our dreams, thoughts and sensations become the property of `experts' - that is power

• Barker's guides are also Volosinov and Propp as well as Foucault

• Baker suggests an approach to popular culture which owes much to Volosinov's idea of dialogical analysis

• the aim of Barker's book is to develop a theory of ideology which does not include the imperfections of previous theories, and which can provide an adequate basis for the analysis of comics

• Baker combines Volosinov's dialogical approach and Propp's emphasis on the importance of narrative forms: he suggests we can understand comics in terms of a `contract' between the reader and the text, which is based on a dialogue between them - the meaning of the text arises from this social relationship

• the central hypotheses of his book are:

1. the media are only capable of exercising power over audiences to the degree that there is a `contract' between texts and audiences, which relates to some specifiable aspect(s) of the audience's social lives

2. the breadth and direction of the influence is a function of those socially constituted features of the audience's lives, and comes out of the fulfilment of the contract

3. the power of `ideology' thus is not of some single kind, but varies entirely - from rational to emotional, from private to public, from `harmless' to `harmful' - according to the nature of the `contract'

• Barker bases his analysis of popular culture on the use of the concept of `dialogue', formulated initially by Volosinov to develop a theory of language and ideology, in order to study the relationship between texts and readers

• Barker stresses the importance of studying the production histories of cultural forms which outline the interactions of producers, their audiences, through which the form is produced and reproduced

Cultural populism

• defined by McGuigan as the intellectual assumption, made by some students of popular culture, that the symbolic experiences & practices of ordinary people are more important analytically and politically than Culture with a capital C

• for him populism understands popular cultural forms as an expression of interests, experiences & values of ordinary people - this is what is wrong with it; it becomes an uncritical support rather than a critical analysis of popular culture

• populism argues that popular culture cannot be understood unless it is viewed as a more or less real expression of the voice of the people; e.g. the critical response to the mass culture critics' condemnation of the Americanisation of British culture can be seen as an example of populism

• McGuigan's main complaints are populism's neglect of the macroprocesses of political economy, its failure to explain ordinary people's everyday culture & its material construction by powerful forces beyond the immediate understanding and control of ordinary people, and its agreement with economic liberalism's concept of “consumer sovereignty”

• populism is basically an overreaction to elitism

• whereas elitism have often seen audiences as passive, unthinking & naive, open to manipulation & ideological control by the mass media & the culture they spread, populism sees audiences as self-conscious, active subversives, exploiting media culture for their own purposes, resisting and reinterpreting messages circulated by cultural producers

• elitism has presented the audience by calling it stupid, populism has done so by calling it subversive (rebellious)

• populism has assumed to speak on behalf of, not to, audiences

• the elitist and populist ideas of the audience are wrong, for similar reasons; they both operate in terms of unfounded caricatures, without an adequate empirical & historical appreciation of the social & cultural nature of audiences

• populism has prevented a more precise understanding of consumption from being included in theorising about popular culture: the critique of populism has equated it with consumption - this has meant that any attempt to understand the role of consumption in decisive forms of popular culture has been regarded as another example of populism

• writers who see consumption as a type of populist rebellion neglect authors such as Bourdieu (1984) & Miller (1987), whose discussion of consumption is not at all populist

• Miller: global approaches almost always move from an attack on contemporary material culture as unimportant or inauthentic to an indirect criticism of the mass of the population whose culture this is

• Bourdieu: the argument that the main motive of popular culture is the need for the cultural industries to make a profit is not just an argument about production, but also about consumption, or about how & why the goods produced make a profit by finding large enough markets

7. The Body: Social Theory, Body Culture and Ideology

The Political Psychologies of the Sportive and Antisportive Temperaments

Fascism and the Sportive Temperament

• Hitler presided over the glorification of a male character which combined the athlete and the hooligan into the terrifying figure of the SS man and his personal displays of the hardened body appear very often

• he claimed that the Age of Reason and consequent over-evaluation of knowledge led not only to a disregard of the bodily form and strength but also to a lack of respect for bodily work

• Hitler's support for the body is a specifically fascist one

• the real importance of this view is its open anti-intellectualism and the invocation of body's authority in that context

• no other political culture than fascist art has produced a doctrine of physicality for its own sake

• fascism shows a utopian aesthetics - that of physical perfection; the dream of dynamic virility (masculinity), presented in the perfected body as a symbol of force has been a theme of every fascist culture

• what has been less noted is the relationship between fascism and a “sportive” male style, the degree to which sportive values coincide with fascist values & how a sportive style presenting semi-athletic self-dramatization in the form of self-imposed suffering became a special part of the fascist imagination

• sport may be said to be “haunted” by fascism; it is fascism that celebrated the aesthetic of the body while the communists considered knowledge as the most important

• fascist ideal was the heroic fighter for the fight's sake, ideal which makes dramatization a physical style of action

• while fascism professes political athleticism, Marxism condemns the concept of narcissistic body

• the task is to establish the difference between `sportive' and `nonsportive' ideals

• sportive or `virile' (masculine) temperaments occur and are rewarded within every political culture; Communist athletes have a stable mentality of ideological origin coming from an utopian world of political psychology

• the doctrine of the German workers' sport movement of the 1920s claimed that sport released different emotions in “Socialist” and “bourgeois” athletes

• not all cultures promote ideologies which encourage and incorporate as doctrine the characterological features typical of the sportive temperament: competitive aggressiveness, self-conscious physicality, ascetic indifference to pain and indifference to ethical concerns - what W.H. Sheldon once defined as “psychological callousness”

• Sheldon's somatonic (assertive, athletic) character type is as close as empirical psychology has come to defining the sportive temperament which corresponds to a fascist ideal of manhood

• fascist ideology includes elements of the sportive temperament and Marxism cannot include some of them without violating the norms of its official origins

• the sportive syndrome is not based on an interest in sport itself, though it may well find symbolic expression in sport, it is rather a temperament, a category, defined by Sheldon as “the level of personality just above psychological function and below acquired attitudes and beliefs”

• the difference between ideological types is not physical but rather concerns subconscious attitudes toward the body: there was a difference between the speech between Nazi-Fascists, who shouted at their lungs suggesting tall, masculine bodies under perfect control and the speech of Communist-Fascists, who spoke thinly with hesitancy suggesting the body as unimportant and basing all their claims on intellects

• Dame West claims that communism suggests a renunciation (rejection) of the body

• as Harold Laswell writes (1930), the idea of a lean and bitter agitator (troublemaker) is not a static description of accidental set of characteristics but a hypothesis that bodily irritations work dynamically to develop the selection of forms of activity which allow individual to release his animosities (hatred, dislikes)

• it is the mythic status of the “para-athletic” warrior which is the true model of the physically endowed man of action

• Thorstein Veblen, in his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) offers a characterology with 2 main categories: ethnicity and “temperament”; 3 main ethnic types found in industrial civilization are: “the dolichocephalic-blond (blond with long head), “the brachycephalic brunette (brunette with short head) and “the Mediterranean”; 2 main directions of variation within the ethnic type are: “the peaceable and ante-predatory variant” and “the predatory variant”

• Veblen combines the first ethnic type with the second variation to produce blond predator, more interesting is yet his interpretation of “the predatory temperament” as a sportive one” - males who reach maturity go through a temporary phase similar to permanent spiritual level of fighting & sporting men who show marks of arrested spiritual development

• Veblen sees “the sporting character” as “a rehabilitation of the early barbarian temperament”; this archaic mentality has been deprived of the features of the savage character providing freedom; the culture placed in football results in unusual violence & smart qualities which are of no use to the community except in its hostile dealings with other communities - for this reason, the cult of the sportive temperament finds its ideological fulfilment in fascism;

• Hitler called war the most powerful and classic expression of life; this was opposed by the Bolsheviks - Mario Carli in his novel An Italian of the Times of Mussolini, writes that war is valuable as it makes people choose between courage and cowardice and divides other people from the “heroes of blood”

• Veblen: the sportive temperament is one form of the symbolic content of our social heritage

• as Graña writes, the great influence of “Byronic” heroism and its symbolic content is inseparable from the figure of the magically powerful male adventurer

• a second critique of the sportive temperament, similar to that of Veblen, is given by J. A. Hobson in Imperialism: he finds the essence of sport of in an archaic predatory instinct: chauvinism, which is the desire of the spectator, finds its sport equivalent in “the ideal excitement of the spectator”

• Pierre de Coubertin assured (1910) that the sportsman had nothing to do with the violence of Nietzsche's superman

• Roman Rolland introduced a representative of younger generation in France whom he described as superficial enemy of all spoilsports, passionately in love with pleasure and violent games

• the sportive temperament does not always assume an openly political identity; Graña's “magically powerful male adventurer” may be a soldier, an explorer or a sportsman

• one example of sportive temperament is “the new type of popular hero, the professional player or sportsman” described by Lewis Mumford (1933): “he represents virility, courage, gameness, those talents in exercising the body”; the sports hero represents the masculine virtues, the Mars complex - he is superficially a nonpolitical type, as the “Mars complex” is the core of the fascist ideal of manhood

Nietzsche and the authority of the body

• in 1938, the Parti populaire français, a fascist movement founded by ex-Communist Jacques Doriot, issued a program which included an open promotion of the sportive body

• the fascist doctrine of the body has its most important precursor in Nietzsche's call for the “masculinisation of Europe”

• his book On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) refers to the psychological aspect of being human: most men are psychologically deformed and deranged, their envy & anger of “physiological well-being” is a sign of their unnaturally ascetic (self-denying) outlook - this ascetism is contrasted with a “chastity” (virginity) which does not come from any ascetic scruple or hatred of the senses

• Nietzsche's idealized body is a vehicle of “robust (strong) health”; a source of vitalism for which the healthy and dynamic body is an effective metaphor

• Nietzsche's doctrine of the body reappears in Jean-Paul Sartre's essay on anti-Semitism (1946) - “inauthentic” Jews are said to deny the body that betrays them, separating themselves from their own “vital values”

• Sartre identifies 2 different attitudes toward the body: 1) “inauthentic Jew” escapes the body; 2) the “Aryans” manifest the intimate functioning the organism: grace, nobility, vivacity

• Sartre supports indirectly the violent image of the Italian fascist while criticising the Jew for treating his body as a mechanism and for having no feeling for the “vital values”

• both Nietzsche and Sartre suggest the body as an “ideological variation” and both respect its authority

Fascist Style and Sportive Manhood

• as Oswald Mosley notes, sportsmen figured specifically in the world of fascist types; it is now widely recognized that fascism was a political aesthetic and a phenomenon of style; Mussolini was the most enthusiastic stylist

• Mussolini described his own public technique as the continuation of “electric” and “explosive” atmosphere, describing Italy as the land of theatre and its leaders as those who orchestrate (plan, organize) their public contacts

• Mussolini created the image of “a man masculinely aware of the difficulties that exist in action and ready to face them”; every kind of sport was said to be close to his heart, especially those involving danger - his horse-riding and the speed at which he drove his car became legendary; he invited the journalists to see him fence, play tennis or ride, telling them he hoped they would report how fit and expert he was

• this visible athleticism came both from Mussolini's sense of showmanship and from a deep physical narcissism; this glorification of body narcissism was the idea of Duce in 1930s

• Mussolini hated the ageing process and shaved his head to hide it

• Ernst Nolte has caught the style of Mussolini in his dictator's temperamental impatience with Marxist doctrine: Mussolini's separation from Marxism was a gradual process; he claimed that what divides the parties is not a table of laws but their mentalities; Nolte interprets Mussolini as a restless Marxist dissatisfied with the `dryness' of Marx

• Mussolini describes socialism as a society in which life will be ruled by the rhythm of machines; this kind of stylistic courage is an important element of sportive fascist charisma

• in Filippo Marinetti's Portrait of Mussolini, Mussolini is a kind of sportsman who has an enthusiastic, overwhelming, swift temperament; he is free as the wind; a Socialist and internationalist but only in theory

• Nolte: style is the visible essence of a political phenomenon and Mussolini is the perfect illustration of this principle

• Sorel's myth was defined as a `body of images' - the contrasted physical images of the New Man - young, masculine and athletic - and of the old representative of the democratic order - with large stomach, short-sighted, slow-moving

The Marxist Lacks Dynamism and a Taste for Risk

• as the eccentric fascist Marinetti writes, “you cannot escape these two idea-feelings: patriotism and heroism

• the Communist temperament, the opposite of the futurist temperament, is the opposite of the sportive temperament

• the “political athlete” is one version of the risk-taking nationalist who is denied authority by the Marxist tradition - José Antonio found such ideological hostility to nationalism politically stupid almost beyond belief

• Marinetti's idea of heroism is foreign to Marx and Engels; the health-promoting, risk-avoiding attitude deeply rooted in Communist sport is the temperament for which Marinetti felt only contempt, which was shared by Nazi sport theorists

• the sportive temperament, as Marinetti well understood, is impulsive and having the tendency to the stylish gamble

• Marinetti interprets play as freedom, honouring that sportive style which represents the upward force of the race

• it is only his attitude toward the dignity of sportive style that puts Marinetti in respectable intellectual company, on the other hand, he is most fascist in the hidden brutality of his idea of machines as superimages of bodily forces and in the loving image of Mussolini's body which justifies “physiological patriotism”

Nazism, Athleticism and the SS Warrior

• in a 1981 preface to The Crisis of German Ideology, George Mosse notes that if he were to write this book again, he would put more emphasis on the role of the male stereotype in the myths and symbols of Volkish thought

• it was fascism that chose the symbolic male body as its own political theory; but the symbolic male body and the athletic body are not necessarily the same thing - the `idealized Nordic manliness' whose outline Mosse has drawn cannot be reduced to an athletic ideal - this the distinctions which must be strengthened if we are to understand the relationship between Nazism and athleticism

• the most notorious of all the fascist para-athletic types are the merciless warrior and the Waffen-SS

• B. H. Liddel Hart describes the modern foot soldiers as athletes engaged in a contest of skill - they must be stalkers, athletes and marksmen, he yet compares them to the ruthless, savage German “storm-troops”; his enthusiastic image of the military “athlete” restricts the difference between athletic muscularity & psychopathic muscularity, the sportsman & his distorted image, `the Unknown SS Man' - the muscular but heartless and brainless hero, as Joachim Fest put it

• the “standardized SS man” of Himmler's imagination is a combination of body structure and character; he must be well-built, he must be of ideal proportions; he is supposed to show a specific mentality of a fighter for fighting's sake, he must obey unquestioning, he must be hard, unaffected by human emotions, showing contempt for `inferior beings' and arrogant toward all those who did not belong to the Order

• the attraction of the masculine character which showed the SS as a community of “fighters” was beyond class and national lines; the SS troops were yet no different from other troops - characterized toughness and masculinity; inspired by a sense of belonging to an aristocratic minority, a closed community with its own rules and loyalties

• unlike Fascist Italy, the Third Reich could not show political athleticism at the top

• the athletic ideal of the SS was Reinhard Heydrich, who by 1936, at the age of 32, had risen through SS ranks to become head of the Gestapo, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and the Criminal Police, in 1939, he organized the Reich Central Security Office (RSHA), becoming the most powerful figure in the security services

• Heidrich was a tall and athletic man whom his subordinates sometimes called “the Blond Beast”, he had a passion for all forms of sport - he was a fencer, a horseman, a pilot, a skier

• Heydrich's athleticism must be understood as symbolic of a physical superiority which is of racial importance

• the SS warrior as a type had been evolving through several phases in Germany over a century; the cultivation of the body in a nationalistic spirit dates from the beginning of the 19th century, when Friedrich Ludwig (“Father”) Jahn, a professor at the University of Berlin, founded a gymnastics movement which would prepare the bodies of German youth to fight in the war against Napoleon

• Jahn is also an important figure in the history of “Volkish” tradition (Nazi ideology), which is a mystical, integral nationalism founded on the racial doctrine of a spiritual German “essence”

• Jahn writes that “a state without people is nothing but an airy, disembodied abstraction”; he saw himself as a teacher who has “a healing doctrine” required by the body politic

• although highly anti-intellectual, Jahn's doctrine did not include a conscious brutality, but the aggressive, fascist body is yet present in developing form; Jahn claims that the memorable content of history required “the spectacle of masculine power”; in the 19th century, the Volkish peasant stereotype came to include an element of brutality'; in the 20th century, a deep hostility toward modernity would provide the reason for a “spectacle of masculine power”

• as a masculine community, the SS had 2 important precursors:

1) the Youth movement (or Wandervögel) which successfully developed during the 2 decades before World War I and included Volkish concerns about the shallowness of liberal rich traditionalist society and Germanic racial unity

• Robert G. L. Waite writes that there was no single German Youth Movement; there were several, including a range of programs from homosexuality and sexual excess to extreme self-denial, from atheism to religious fanaticism, from pacifism to folkish nationalism

• Mosse: despite its variety, there remained a sign of physical & emotional toughness which filled the ideal of the Youth Movement & helped shape the ideas of physical beauty which were given functional roles in the ideal of German Youth; it was a source of recruitment into the Free Corps legions of 1919-1920 & later SA & the SS

• the Free Corps provided a charismatic model of `masculine power' for the postwar nazified youth groups

• the athletic ideal had a useful function within the SS mentality; it was practical, a perfect force for racial aesthetics; it provided a stylish way to demonstrate the dynamic essence of the killer

• the athletic ideal and the characterological ideal of the SS are not the same: the difference can be described in the internal unclearness of `hardness', the cult of achievement and of the Volkish concept of male beauty

• `hardness' is unclear in that its demands may be imposed on the self or others; in the case of the SS warrior, hardness means fall into a suffering which justifies the cruelties imposed on others

• “achievement” is unclear in that its meaning may be subjective - the warrior is an individualist, an independent personality responsible only for himself - or objective - the warrior is an organization man who is not entitled to formulate the meaning of his own actions

• there is also an unclearness in the idealized body itself: Mosse described the “Aryan” concept of male beauty combining ideas from racial thought, an idealization of ancient Germanic strength and echoes of the Greek ideal of physical beauty - this combination is an unstable one: the 1st element suggests dynamism & aggressiveness which is its ideological consequence; the 2nd suggests stagnation and the peaceful madness of racial aesthetics

• the essence of SS athleticism is a mutual relationship between a mentality which points to an ideal body and this body, which points back in turn to a characterological ideal suggesting the dynamic, psychopathic muscularity

The Paratrooper as Fascist Para-Athlete

• in April 1961, as the Algerian catastrophe moved France to the edge of civil war, the loyal citizens of Paris looked at the sky for signs of paratroopers (soldiers with parachutes)

• Gilles Perrault defines a paratrooper as combining the general temperaments of youth, fascism and the sportive type

• the paratrooper is what may be called a para-athlete: a man of action who, like a fighter pilot ot an explorer, is charged by society with a serious mission, but whose style of action includes both athletic and aggressive elements

• Perrault's idea of the paratrooper mentality is an exemplary division of a sportive temperament into its psychological, sociological and political factors; his point is the wave of adolescent violence which spread worldwide in the late 1950s

• from “rebellion of cause”, Perrault takes a basic character type - the adolescent male, for whom ideas of class consciousness or family loyalty become unimportant when matched against the taste for violence and risk shown within the brotherly order of the “gang”; he is a privileged and intolerable being whose vigorous body is ready for action; he sees himself as a unique being, irreplaceable, deeply original

• Perrault's most interesting idea is that the violent idealism if this sportive aggressiveness is not politically unformed; there is both “the festival of youth” and “the festival of the body” - fascism

• many observers commented on the emergence of a hard, male style in fascist Europe: Robert Paxton has noticed the appearance of this style in France during the period of Nazi occupation;

• the character of the paratrooper is more than an intimate agreement with the state of his maleness - it is as well a scary doctrine which destroys according to the rules of its own “racialism”, its basic aesthetic

• there is another division which distinguishes the parachutists from nonparachutists which is the ideological divide separating those who jump out of boredom from those for whom parachuting is a cult of masculine spirit

• in their simple search for an activity with both recreative and military value, the Soviets turn parachuting into a profane, as opposed to a cultic, practice

• Perrault: civilian jumper may choose to disengage himself from the challenge at any time, while military paratrooper faces certain disgrace if he loses his nerve at the last moment

Yukio Mishima: The Fascist as Body-Builder

• literary representation of the fascist cult of the body is Yukio Mishima's Sun and Steel (1970)

• Mishima's body consciousness is pathetic because it represents a desperate attempt to hide the mental pains which accompany his literary gift

• his career as an extraordinary sportsman began as a decision to leave behind the complications of mind and language so that he might find a monotonic consciousness of beauty; he claims that the ideal existence must be absolutely free from any interference by words

• held by a heroic imagination, Mishima searched for a style with somatotonia (a personality type characterized by assertiveness and energy, said to be connected with a muscular body type) - the fascist's unquestioning acceptance of the authority of the body

• Perrault offers a unity of the body, fascism & adolescence, Mishima connects the body with the hero & the group

• Mishima's idea of the hero repeats his rejection of mind; the words of the hero must be the most impressive and noble, at the same time, constituting an elegant language of the flesh; the hero `speaks' through the flesh

• only through a group Mishima's body could reach the height of existence that the individual alone could never achieve

• the goal of his life was to acquire all the various characteristics of the warrior

• only the fascist can hear the “language of the flesh”; only they can find happiness through the suppression of mind

• Mishima is a sportive temperament; his uniqueness lies in the refinement of the choice of a physical style; he's also unique in the sadness which accompanied his cultic devotion to the development of the body

• a literary talent substituted for mind the musculature which represents dumbness, lack of imagination

Sport and the Left Intellectuals

• the Marxist (Communist) tradition's hostility toward sport seems to be rather considered as a bias

• the American sport historian Allen Guttman has pointed to the instinctive dislike of physical activity which has traditionally characterized a number of intellectuals

• hostility to the body has not been adopted by the intellectual Left; rather it has been consistent in their bias

• Communist parties have been accused by their own members of neglecting sport on 2 occasions: at the conclusion of the 1924 Paris Olympiad by the French communist party; & 40 years later in the German Democratic Republic

• in 1964 an East German sport historian criticised in his essay his fellow Marxist-Lenninists for lack of interest in sport

• as John McMurtry has remarked, sexuality, play, the body are themes about which Marx says very little

• the most important factor in the antisportive attitude of the Left is intellectualism which characterizes the Marxist tradition and which differentiates it from fascism

• R. Palme Dutt, a founder of the British Communist party, asked about his leisure interests replied `anything but sports', the same attitude is observed in the European workers' sport movements of the 1920s and 1930s

• intellectuals sometimes tend to dislike athletics automatically

• the dislike of sport would eventually make a career for itself in the Soviet Union after 1934 in the form of Zhdanovism, the official aesthetic doctrine of the Stalinist period usually referred to as Socialist Realism; the body here completely disappears from Soviet Marxist aesthetics; Zhdanovism represses the body in the name of an antisexual puritanism, Stakhanovism industrializes it in the name of heroic labour

• the hostility toward the fascist cult of the body is common among the Frankfurt Marxists; Lowenthal criticizes sharply the body beautiful ideal of the racial hero; Herbert Marcuse describes physical exercises as the words including so repression that it makes you shudder; Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno offer a complex critical idea of the body which results from an impossible relationship of civilization to the body: men cannot escape from their body; those who praise the body above all else are close to killing - they see body as a moving mechanism; they use body and its parts as though they were already separated from it; they measure others with the view of a coffin maker

• Freud thought that aesthetics of muscular movement must always describe the movement from life toward death

Virility and the Left

• as Adrian Lyttelton puts it, “fascist ritual can be sees at one level as a complex of virility (masculinity) symbols”

• Sartre openly leaves to the fascists “the aristocracy of the body” manifesting itself as an aggressively physical style; he calls for an alternative to fascist violence; fascist virility is a sadistic virility

• Raymond Aron claims “there are times when one wonders whether the myth of the Revolution is not distinguishable from the Fascist cult of violence

• in his novella The Childhood of a Leader (1939) and in What is a Collaborator (1945), Sartre gives the fascist personality a homosexual sense

• Alberto Moravia offers the following portrait of the Left intellectuals: “Quadri's anti-fascism, his unwarlike, unhealthy, unattractive appearance, his learning, his books went to make up in Marcello's mind the conventional picture”

• Drieu la Rochelle criticised the Left intellectual's opposition toward any sort of pride in the body

• Oswald Mosley insults the physiques of politicians who are more middle-aged and successful than himself

• fascist contempt for the leftist intellectuals signifies a nostalgia (longing, missing) for racial purity combined with a nostalgia for the asceticism of Sparta and its merciless idea of war

What Marx Did Not Know

• Jean Divugnaud writes that a certain manichaeism of Josef Pieper (ancient religious system) of conservative origin places amusement on the right and thought (and therefore boredom) on the left; it sees the Left as terminally dull

• but it is important that the same opinion has often been directed at the Left by Marxists who recognized both the limitations of Marxist thought and the tactical propaganda failures such limitations produced

• Trotsky's analyses of the various aspects of everyday life suggest the inevitability of his break with Stalinism

• Trotsky's claim that democracy and the Soviet dictatorship “drove the unconscious out of politics”; he writes that human psychology is very conservative by nature

• the rise of nazism made the whole area of irrational claims and their political exploitation an urgent matter

• the Marxist had always been hostile to the idea of a timeless human nature, the problem for Marxist thinking was human irrationality; it was a symptom of the decadence and desperation of a declining ruling class

• in 1934, Wilhelm Reich writes that the juvenile tendency toward slavery to leaders and ideas is politically nonspecific, it can be exploited either way; love of sport, the attraction of men in military uniforms, marching songs are generally under the conditions obtaining antirevolutionary factors because the political reaction has far greater possibilities of satisfying the demands they create

• Reich's proposal neglects one historical fact: the Communists and the Social Democrats had great opportunities during the 1920s to satisfy the demands for activities favoured by German youth; but the popular culture served up by the Social Democrats, including an antibourgeois sport movement, had not been able to hold its own against the claims of bourgeois entertainments

• the German Socialists' attitudes have been examined more empirically by George Mosse in his study of “national liturgy” which developed in Germany during the 19th century; festivals, male choir societies gymnastic associations were “a familiar and friendly tradition” upon which the Nazi ceremonial style would eventually build but the Socialist leaders were unwilling to adopt

• rationalistic in outlook and hostile to the cultic nationalism, the Socialists tended to oppose the use of myths and symbols as a political strategy

• a systematic list of Marxist culture's failed claims to the nonrational elements of human experience is the larger context in which the Marxist rejection of the body finds its place

• As Reich writes, the character structure of active man remained unexamined because Marx was a sociologist and not a psychologist and because at that time scientific psychology did not exist

• Melvin Rader points out that a long series of critics have said that Marx was not enough aware of the irrational elements in human motivation: folk traditions, nationalistic sentiments, racial prejudices, etc.

• the Soviet campaign against religion shares the extreme intellectualism of Marxist doctrine and seems to be unwilling to adopt `bourgeois' ideas of beauty

• Havelock Ellis refers to the “sexual enjoyment aroused by the spectacles of graceful, skillful or athletic movement” as ergophily (love of motion)

• Marxism objections to nonrational claims are not always naive: Roland Barthes's analysis of a popular French magazine's report of a voyage into darkest Africa by a young couple and their months-old baby, Bichon - “Match goes into ecstasy over the courage of all three”; Barthes's main target here is the celebration of artificial masculinity and false sport - nothing is more irritating than heroism without a purpose; if the dangers brought on baby Bichon were real, it was literally stupid to impose them on the pretext of doing some painting in Africa; courage functions here in a formal and empty action; the more unmotivated it is, the more respect it gets, it is a civilization where the code of feelings and values is completely separated from concrete problems of solidarity or progress; what we have is the old myth of character, of training

• Barthes's expression is Marxist in its ideals (solidarity, progress) and in its critical vocabulary (myth), his objection to this kind of adventure is Marxist in its utilitarian argument, in its opposition to action as display and the meaningless risks which turn out to be the real point of the whole journey - in this case, Marxist naivety becomes a more precise kind of principled disapproval of a fraudulent public act

• Lenin's critical analysis of religion is likely to be inferior to Barthes's critical analysis of the publicity act

• Barthes's target is small while Marxist naivety is foolish in that it ignores or challenges weakly the nonrational phenomena it criticises

8. `The Interpretation of Cultures'

from Wikipedia:

• Bali is a province of Indonesia covering a few small neighbouring islands as well as the isle of Bali; the main island is located in the westernmost end of the Lesser Sunda Islands, lying between Java to the west and Lombok to the east

• "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" is an essay included in the book The Interpretation of Cultures by anthropologist Clifford Geertz; the essay addresses the meaning of cockfighting in Balinese culture

• cockfights were generally illegal in Indonesia when Geertz was doing his study there in the 1950s; the first cockfight that he and his wife viewed was broken up by the police

• the experience of hiding from the police in the courtyard of a local couple allowed Geertz to break the tension between himself and the villagers & perform all of the interviews and observation which make up The Interpretation of Cultures

• the essay describes how cocks are taken to stand in for powerful men in the villages, and notes that even the double meaning of the word "cock" exists in the Balinese language as much as in English

• the last half of the essay describes the rituals of betting and concludes that the cockfight is the Balinese comment on themselves, as it embodies the network of social relationships in kin and village that govern traditional Balinese life

• the title of the essay is explained as a concept of Jeremy Bentham, who defines "deep play" as a game with stakes so high that no rational person would engage in it

• the amounts of money and status involved in the very brief cockfights make Balinese cockfighting "deep play."

• the problem of explaining why the activity still exists is what Geertz sets out to solve in the essay

The Raid

• when Geertz and his wife arrived in Bali, no one greeted them but also no one was hostile to them, people seemed to be concentrated on some distant view behind them, on some tree or stone; still, the villagers had quite a great deal of information on who Geertz and his wife were but they treated them as if they did not exist

• in Balinese villages nothing happens at all; people go on pounding, talking, making offerings, carrying baskets, etc.

making others feel disembodied; it is only after some time that a Balinese decides for not understandable reasons that you are real and then becomes a warm, cheerful, sensitive, sympathetic, though still controlled, person; though you are not exactly taken as Balinese, you are at least regarded as human being

• 10 days or so after Geertz's arrival, a large cockfight was held in the public square to raise money for a new school

• cockfights are illegal in Bali under the Republic mainly as a result of the pretensions to puritanism that radical nationalism tends to bring with it

• the elite, itself not so very puritan, devoting time to building up the country, sees cockfighting as `primitive', `backward', `unprogressive'; it aims to stop it

• despite being illegal, cockfights are part of the Balinese way of life, they go on happening very often; sometimes the police shows up to confiscate the cocks and spurs, people; the cockfights are usually held in a secluded part of a village; one time it took place in the central square - the police arrived, scattering the crowd in panic; Geertz & his wife escaped too and found shelter in the home of a Balinese who also attended the cockfight

• the next day, Geertz & his wife were treated in a completely different way - they were the object of a great warmth, interest and amusement; everyone in the village knew they have escaped like everyone else and people asked about it again and again - Geertz and his wife had thus demonstrated solidarity with the villagers

• in Bali, to be teased is to be accepted; the whole village opened up to Geertz and his wife

• getting involved in the raid led to a sudden and unusually complete acceptance of Geertz into a society extremely difficult for outsiders to understand

• this acceptance put Geertz on to a combination of emotional explosion, status war and philosophical drama of central significance to the society whose inner nature he desired to understand

Of Cocks and Men

• mythology, art, ritual, social organization, patterns of child upbringing, forms of law, even styles of trance of Bali have been precisely examined for signs of what Jane Belo called “The Balinese Temper”

• cockfight has almost been unnoticed, although as a popular obsession of consuming power it is at least as important as a discovery of what being a Balinese is really like

• there is a deep psychological identification of Balinese men with their cocks - the double meaning here is on purpose

• Bateson and Mead have suggested that, in agreement with the Balinese conception of the body as a set of separately animated parts, cocks are viewed as separable, self-operating penises, moving genitals with a life of their own; they are masculine symbols of the Balinese men

• Subung, the word for cock is used metaphorically to mean “hero,” “warrior,” “champion,” “bachelor,” “tough guy”

• a pompous man whose behaviour presides over his status is compared to a tailless (without tail) cock who walks proudly as though he had a large, spectacular cock; a desperate man who makes a last irrational effort to get himself out of an impossible situation is compared to a dying cock who makes one final attack at his tormentor to destroy him; an ungenerous man who promises much and gives little and refuses that is compared to a cock which, held by the tail, jumps at another without engaging him; a marriageable young man still shy with the opposite sex or someone in a new job worried about making a good impression is called “a fighting cock caged for the first time”

• court trials, wars, political contests, inheritance disputes and street arguments are all compared to cockfights

• the intimacy of men with their cocks is more than metaphorical - Balinese men spend a great deal of time with their cocks, grooming them, feeding them, discussing them, trying them out against one another or just looking at them with a mixture of admiration and dreamy self-absorption

• fighting cocks are kept in wicker cages, moving often to keep the optimum balance of sun and shade, they are fed a special diet (mostly maize), they are cherished; a man with passion for cocks can spend most of his life with them

• Balinese men are cock crazy; cocks are symbolic expressions of their owner's self, the narcissistic male ego; they are also the direct inversion of human status: animality

• aside from cocks and a few domestic animals, the Balinese hate animals and treat them with a phobic cruelty

• in identifying with his cock, the Balinese man is identifying not just with his ideal self, or even his penis, but also with what he most fears, hates and is fascinated by - “The Power of Darkness”; the connection of cocks and cockfighting with such Powers, with the animalistic demons, is quite clear

• a cockfight is in the first place a blood sacrifice offered to the demons in order to pacify their cannibal hunger

• in the cockfight, man and beast, good and evil, ego and id, the creative power of aroused masculinity and the destructive power of freed animality mix in a bloody drama of hatred, cruelty, violence and death - the owner of the winning cock takes the dead cock home to eat, he does so with a mixture of social embarrassment, moral satisfaction, aesthetic disgust and cannibal joy

The Fight

• cockfights are held in a ring about 50 feet square, usually they start in the late afternoon and last 3/4 hours until sunset

• about 9 or 10 separate matches make up a program, each match is like others in general pattern

• after a fight has ended, 7 or 8 men slip into the ring with a cock and look for an opponent for it

• the selected cocks have their spurs (tadji) - razor-sharp, pointed steel swords, 4/5 inches long

• the man who attaches the spurs also provides them, and if the rooster he assists wins, its owner awards him the spur-leg of the victim; the spurs are tied on a long string around the foot of the spur and the leg of the cock

• the cocks are placed by their handlers facing one another in the centre of the ring

• a coconut pierced with a small hole is placed in a bucket of water in which it takes 21 seconds to sink, during which the handlers are not allowed to touch their roosters - if the animals have not fought during this time, they are picked up, kicked, pulled, punched, then put back in the centre of the ring and the process begins again

• with the birds again in the hands of their handlers, the coconut is now sunk 3 times after which the cock that has made the blow must be set down to show that he is firm which he demonstrates by wandering slowly around the ring for a coconut sink; the coconut is then sunk twice and the fight must begin anew

• during this interval, over 2 minutes, the handler of the wounded cock has been working hysterically over it to get it in shape for a last, desperate try for victory; then he is forced to put it back down

• in the climatic battle, the cock which made the first blow usually continues to finish off his weakened opponent

• what counts is which cock expires first; the wounded cock can still be a winner if he manages to stab in the other

• surrounding the fight is a great set of complex and precisely detailed rules of behaviour of the crowd - moving in sympathy with the movement of the animals, on with wordless hand motions, shiftings of the shoulders, turnings of the head, falling back all at once as the cock with the murderous spurs moves toward one side of the ring, etc. - these rules are written down in palm-leaf manuscripts passed on from one generation to another as part of tradition - the man who manages the coconut is in charge of the application of these rules and his authority is absolute

• this doubleness of an event which, taken as a fact of nature, is rage unlimited and, taken as a fact of culture, is form perfected, defines the cockfight as a sociological entity

• a cockfight is what, searching for a name for something not structured enough to be called a group and not structureless enough to be called a crowd, Erving Goffman has called a "focused gathering" - a set of persons engrossed in a common flow of activity and relating to one another in terms of that flow

• in classical times (before to the Dutch invasion of 1908), when there were no bureaucrats around to improve popular

morality, the staging of a cockfight was an explicitly societal matter - bringing a cock to an important fight was, for an adult male, a compulsory duty of citizenship; taxation of fights, was a major source of public revenue

• the connection between the excitements of collective life and those of blood sport impossible remains intimate; to expose it, it is necessary to turn to the aspect of cockfighting around which all the others revolve - gambling

Odds and Even Money

• there are two sorts of bets:

1) the single axial bet in the centre between the principals - typically large, collective; a matter of deliberate, very quiet, almost secret arrangement by the coalition members and the judge gathered like conspirators in the centre of the ring; involving coalitions of bettors gathering around the owner; always even money

2) the cloud of external bets around the ring between members of the audience - typically small, individual; a matter of impulsive shouting, public offers & acceptances by the excited crowd around its edges; never even money

• the center bet is the official one, made between the two cock owners, with the judge as overseer and public witness - this bet is never raised by the owner in whose name it is made, but by him with 4 or 5, 7 or 8, village mates, neighbours

• the side bets are, however, something different: there is a fixed and known odds paradigm which runs in a continuous series from 10 to 9 at the short end to 2 to 1 at the long: 10-9, 9-8, 8-7, 7-6, 6-5, 5-4, 4-3, 3-2, 2-1; the man who wishes to back the underdog cock shouts the short-side number indicating the odds he wants to be given; if he shouts “5”, he wants the underdog at 5 to 4 or 4 to 5; if he shouts “9”, he wants it at 9 to 8 and so on

• a man supporting the favourite, and thus considering giving odds if he can get them short enough, indicates the fact by shouting the colour-type of that cock - "brown," "speckled," or whatever

• there are absolutely no debts, at least to a betting opponent; one may, of course, borrow from a friend before offering or accepting a bet, but to offer or accept it one must have the money already in hand and, if one loses, one must pay it on the spot, before the next match begins

• the higher the center bet, the more likely the match will in actual fact be an even one

• in large-bet fights, which involve better animals, a lot of care is taken to see that the cocks are about as evenly matched as to size, general condition, etc. as possible

• in a large-bet fight the pressure to make the match a 50-50 proposition is enormous; for medium fights the pressure is somewhat less & for small ones less yet, though there is always an effort to make things at least approximately equal

• the higher the center bet the more exactly a fifty-fifty proposition the cockfight is - 2 things more or less immediately follow: (1) the higher the center bet is, the greater the pull on the side betting toward the short-odds end of the betting spectrum, and vice versa; (2) the higher the center bet is, the greater the volume of side betting, and vice versa

• the Balinese try to create an interesting, "deep" match by making the center bet as large as possible so that the cocks matched will be as equal and as fine as possible, and the result, thus, as unpredictable as possible

• the center bet is a means, a device, for creating "interesting," "deep" matches

Playing with Fire

• Bentham's concept of "deep play" is found in his The Theory of Legislation; by it he means play in which the stakes are so high that it is, from his utilitarian view, irrational for men to engage in it at all - if a man whose fortune is 1000 pounds (or ringgits) bets 500 of it on an even bet, the marginal utility of the pound he stands to win is clearly less than the marginal disutility of the 1 he stands to lose

• Bentham's conclusion was that deep play was immoral from first principles and should be prevented legally

• more interesting than the ethical problem is that despite the logical force of Bentham's analysis men do engage in such play, both passionately and often - for Bentham, the explanation is that such men are irrational-addicts, fetishists, children, fools, savages, who need only to be protected against themselves

• for the Balinese, the explanation is that in such play money is less a measure of utility than a symbol of moral import

• in shallow games, ones in which smaller amounts of money are involved, rises and decreases of cash are more synonyms for utility & disutility; in deep ones, where the amounts of money are great, much more is at stake than material gain: esteem, honour, dignity, respect, in Bali - status - is at stake symbolically, for no one's status is changed by the final result of a cockfight; it is only and momentarily, affirmed or insulted

• money does matter and matter very much that the more of it one risks, the more of a lot of other things, such as one's pride, one's poise, one's dispassion, one's masculinity, one also risks, again only momentarily but very publicly as well

• it is in the smaller shallow fights, where one finds the handful of more pure, addict-type gamblers involved - those who are in it mainly for the money - that "real" changes in social position, largely downward, are affected

• plungers, are highly dispraised by "true cockfighters" as fools who do not understand what the sport is all about, vulgarians who simply miss the point of it all; they are, these addicts, regarded as fair game for the real enthusiasts

• what makes Balinese cockfighting deep is not money in itself, but what money causes to happen: the migration of the Balinese status hierarchy into the body of the cockfight

• psychologically an Aesopian representation of the ideal/demonic, rather narcissistic, male self, sociologically is an equally Aesopian representation of the complex fields of tension set up by the controlled, ceremonial, but for all that deeply felt, interaction of those selves in the context of everyday life

• the cocks may be representations of their owners' personalities, animal mirrors of psychic form, but the cockfight is made on purpose to be a simulation of the social origin, the involved system of united groups-villages

• this evident amusement and seeming sport of cockfight is, as Erving Goffman writes, "a status bloodbath" - the easiest way to make this clear is to describe the village whose cockfighting activities were closely observed by Geertz; Tihingan is organized in a complex way, a labyrinth of alliances and oppositions; but, unlike many, 2 types of united groups, which are also status groups, particularly stand out:

1) the village is dominated by 4 large groups which are constantly competing with one another and form the major; there are also subfactions within them, subfactions within the subfactions, and so on

2) there is the village itself, which is opposed to all the other villages round about in its cockfight circuit but which also forms alliances with certain of these neighbours against certain others in various political and social context; the general pattern of a hierarchy of status rivalries between highly united but various based groupings is entirely general

• the cockfight, and especially the deep cockfight, is fundamentally a dramatization of status concerns, a number of facts playing an important role:

1) a man almost never bets against a cock owned by a member of his own kingroup; he will feel he must support it

2) if your kingroup is not involved you will support an allied kingroup against an unallied one in the same way, and so on through the very involved networks of alliances which make up this, as any other, Balinese village

3) for the village as a whole: if an outsider cock is fighting any cock from your village, you will support the local one

4) cocks which come from any distance are almost always favourites, for the theory is the man would not have dared to bring it if it was not a good cock, the more so the further he has come; his followers are obliged to support him, and when the more grand-scale legal cockfights are held, the people of the village take the best cocks in the village and go to support them, although they will have to give odds on them and to make large bets to show that they are not cheap

5) almost all matches are sociologically relevant; one seldom gets 2 outsider cocks fighting, or 2 cocks with no particular group support, or with group support which is mutually unrelated in any clear way

6) one rarely gets 2 cocks from the same group, even more rarely from the same subfaction, and almost never from the same sub-subfaction fighting

7) on the individual level, people involved in an institutionalized hostility relationship, in which they do not speak or otherwise have anything to do with each other will bet very heavily, sometimes almost maniacally, against one another in what is a frank and direct attack on the very masculinity, the ultimate ground of his status, of the opponent

8) the center bet coalition is, in all but the shallowest games, always made up by structural allies - no "outside money" is involved; no outside money is mixed in with the main bet; the center bet, especially in deeper games, is thus the most direct and open expression of social opposition

9) the rule about borrowing money - that you may borrow for a bet but not in one - comes (and the Balinese are quite aware of this) from similar considerations: you are never at the economic mercy of your enemy that way; gambling debts, which can get quite large on a rather short-term basis, are always to friends, never to enemies

10) when 2 cocks are structurally unimportant or neutral so far as you are concerned (though they almost never are to each other) you do not even ask a relative or a friend whom he is betting on, because if you know how he is betting and he knows you know, and you go the other way, it will lead to conflict

11) there is a special word for betting against the nature, which is also the word for "pardon me" (mpura) - it is considered a bad thing to do, though if the center bet is small it is sometimes all right as long as you do not do it too often; but the larger the bet & the more often you do it, the more the "pardon me" will lead to social disruption

12) the institutionalized hostility relation is often formally initiated (though its causes always lie elsewhere) by such a "pardon me" bet in a deep fight, putting the symbolic fat in the fire; the end of such a relationship and continuation of normal social intercourse is often signalized by one or the other of the enemies supporting the other's bird

13) in sticky, cross-loyalty situations, where a man is caught between 2 more or less equally balanced loyalties, he tends to walk off for a cup of coffee or something to avoid having to bet

14) the people involved in the center bet are, especially in deep fights, almost always leading members of their group-kinship, village or whatever; those who bet on the side are the more established members of the village - solid citizens

15) so far as money is concerned, the openly expressed attitude toward it is that it is a secondary matter

16) you must bet on cocks of your own group aside from simple loyalty considerations, similarly, home team people must bet against outside cocks or the outsiders will accuse them of just collecting entry fees and not really being interested in cockfighting, as well as again being arrogant and insulting

17) the Balinese peasants themselves are quite aware of all this and can and do state most of it in approximately the same terms as stated above; fighting cocks is like playing with fire only not getting burned - one activates village and kingroup rivalries and hostilities, but in "play" form, coming dangerously close to the expression of open and direct interpersonal and intergroup aggression, but not quite, because, after all, it is "only a cockfight”

• THE MORE A MATCH IS 1. Between near status equals (and/or personal enemies) 2. Between high status individuals THE DEEPER THE MATCH.

• THE DEEPER THE MATCH:

1) the closer the identification of cock and man

2) the finer the cocks involved and the more exactly they will be matched

3) the greater the emotion that will be involved and the more the general absorption in the match

4. the higher the individual bets center and outside, the shorter the outside bet odds will tend to be

5) the less an "economic" & the more a "status" view of gaming'll be involved & the "solider" the citizens who'll be gaming

• inverse arguments hold for the shallower the fight, culminating in the coin-spinning and dice-throwing amusements

• for deep fights there are no absolute upper limits & there are many legendlike tales of great Duel-in-the-Sun combats between lords and princes in classical times (for cockfighting has always been as much an elite concern as a popular one), far deeper than anything anyone, even aristocrats, could produce today anywhere in Bali

• one of the great culture heroes of Bali is a prince, called after his passion for the sport, "The Cockfighter," who happened to be away at a very deep cockfight with a neighbouring prince when his family were murdered by commoner usurpers; thus spared, he returned to regain the throne, reconstitute the Balinese high tradition, and build its most powerful, glorious, and prosperous state

• along with everything else that the Balinese see in fighting cocks - their social order, abstract hatred, masculinity, demonic power - they also see the archetype of status virtue, the arrogant, resolute, player with real fire, the prince

Fathers, Blood, Crowds, and Money

• "poetry makes nothing happen," Auden says in his elegy of Yeats, "it survives in the valley of its saying ... a way of happening, a mouth." - the cockfight too makes nothing happen; men go on symbolically humiliating one another and being symbolically humiliated by one another, day after day, glorying quietly in the experience if they have triumphed, crushed only a little more openly by it if they have not; but no one's status really changes

• the cockfight provides ordinary, everyday experience understandable by presenting it in terms of acts and objects which have had their practical consequences removed & been reduced (or raised) to the level of simple appearances, where their meaning can be more powerfully articulated and more exactly observed

• the cockfight is "really real" only to the cocks - it does not kill anyone; it catches up these themes - death, masculinity, rage, pride, loss, beneficence, chance; an image, fiction, a model, a metaphor, the cockfight is a means of expression; its function is in a medium of feathers, blood, crowds, and money, to display them

• the question of how it is that we see qualities in things - paintings, books, melodies, plays - that we do not feel we can assert literally to be there has come, in recent years, into the very center of aesthetic theory

• we attribute grandeur, wit, despair, exuberance to strings of sounds; lightness, energy, violence, fluidity to blocks of stone; in this world of eccentric a claim, to say that the cockfight, in its perfected cases at least, is "disquietful" does not seem at all unnatural, only somewhat puzzling; this disquietfulness comes, "somehow," out of a connection of 3 attributes of the fight: its immediate dramatic shape; its metaphoric content; and its social context.

• the reason the fight disquietful is that, joining pride to selfhood, selfhood to cocks, and cocks to destruction, it brings to imaginative realization a range of Balinese experience normally well unclear from view

• the cockfight life is an example of Balinese social life, carefully prepared

• on the one hand, cockfight is a part of general social life, yet its aggressiveness makes it seem a contradiction of it

• in the normal course of things, the Balinese are shy to the point of obsessiveness of open conflict; they rarely face what they can avoid, but during cockfights, they portray themselves as wild & murderous, with explosions of cruelty

• the slaughter in the cock ring is not a depiction of how things literally are among men, but, what is almost worse, of how, from a particular angle, they imaginatively are

• what, as we have already seen, the cockfight talks most forcibly about is status relationships, and what it says about them is that they are matters of life and death

• the hierarchy of pride is the moral basis of the society; but only in the cockfight are the sentiments upon which that hierarchy rests revealed in their natural colours; in other contexts, they are expressed in only the thinnest disguise of an animal mask, a mask which in fact demonstrates them far more effectively than it hides them

• jealousy is as much a part of Bali as poise, envy as grace, brutality as charm; but without the cockfight the Balinese would have a much less certain understanding of them, which is, probably, why they value it so highly

• the Balinese are still a great deal more interested in understanding men than they are in understanding cocks

• what separates the cockfight from the ordinary course of life, lifts it from the world of everyday practical matters, and surrounds it with an atmosphere of enlarged importance is that it provides a metasocial commentary upon the whole matter of assorting human beings into fixed hierarchical ranks & then organizing the major part of collective existence around that organization - its function, if you want to call it that, is interpretive: it is a Balinese reading of Balinese experience, a story they tell themselves about themselves

Saying Something of Something

• if one takes the cockfight as a means of "saying something of something", then one is faced with a problem not in social mechanics but social semantics; since the anthropologist, whose concern is with formulating sociological principles, not with promoting or appreciating cockfights, the question is, what one learns about such principles from examining culture as a collection of texts

• such an extension of the concept of a text beyond written material, is metaphorical

• to treat the cockfight as a text is to bring out a feature of it that treating it as a rite or a pastime, the two most obvious alternatives, would tend to make unclear: its use of emotion for cognitive ends

• what the cockfight says, it says in a vocabulary of sentiment - the thrill of risk, the despair of loss, the pleasure of triumph; yet what it says is not only that risk is exciting, loss depressing, or triumph gratifying, but that it is of these emotions that society is built and individuals are put together

• attending cockfights and participating in them is, for the Balinese, a kind of sentimental education

• what one learns there is what his culture's ethos and his private sensibility look like when explained in a collective text; that the two are near enough alike to be articulated in the symbolics of a single such text;

• every people loves its own form of violence - the cockfight is the Balinese reflection on theirs: on its look, its uses, its force, its fascination; the Balinese experience brings together themes such as animal savagery, male narcissism, opponent gambling, status rivalry, mass excitement, blood sacrifice, whose main connection is their involvement with rage and the fear of rage

• Balinese go to cockfights to find out what a man, usually composed, aloof, almost obsessively self-absorbed, a kind of moral autocosm, feels like when, attacked, tormented, challenged, insulted, and driven in result to the extremes of fury, he has totally triumphed or been brought totally low

• it is this kind of bringing of assorted experiences of everyday life to focus that the cockfight, separated from that life as "only a game" and reconnected to it as "more than a game," achieves, and so creates what could be called a paradigmatic human event - that is, one that tells us less what happens than the kind of thing that would happen if life were art and could be as freely shaped by styles of feeling as Macbeth and David Copperfield are

• the cockfight enables the Balinese to see a dimension of his own subjectivity; as he watches fight after fight, with the active watching of an owner and a bettor, he grows familiar with it and what it has to say to him

• cockfights are not merely reflections of a pre-existing sensibility analogically represented; they are positive agents in the creation and maintenance of such a sensibility

• in the cockfight, then, the Balinese forms and discovers his temperament and his society's temper at the same time, or, more exactly, he forms and discovers a particular character of them

• the cockfight is not the master key to Balinese life; what it says about that life is not unqualified nor even unchallenged by what other equally eloquent cultural statements say about it

• the culture of a people is a collection of texts, which the anthropologist tries to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong

• functionalism lives, and so does psychologism, but to regard such forms as "saying something of something," and saying it to somebody, is at least to open up the possibility of an analysis which accompany their substance rather than reductive formulas professing to explain them

• one can start anywhere in a culture's range of forms and end up anywhere else, but whatever the level at which one operates, and in however complicated way, the guiding principle is the same: societies, like lives, contain their own interpretations; one has only to learn how to get access to them

9. Myth & Popular Culture

Barthes -The World of Wrestling

The grandiloquent of gestures;

on life's great occasion

Baudelaire

• the virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess; here we find a grandiloquence (pompous expression) which must have been that of ancient theatres; it is an open-air spectacle; what makes the circus or the arena what they are is the infiltrating and vertical quality of the flood of light

• there are people who think that wrestling is a shameful sport; Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle,

• there exists a false wrestling, in which the participants unnecessarily go to great lengths to make a show of a fair fight; true wrestling is performed in second-rate halls, where the public spontaneously adapts itself to the spectacular nature of the contest, like the audience at a suburban cinema

• the public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is false or not; it leaves itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives & all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees

• in wrestling, betting the result of a match would make no sense; in wrestling, each moment is understandable; the spectator is not interested in the rise and fall of fortunes; he expects the temporary image of certain passions

• wrestling requires an immediate interpretation of the compared meanings, so that there is no need to connect them

• the logical conclusion of the contest does not interest the wrestling-fan; wrestling is a sum of spectacles, of which no single one is a function: each moment imposes the total knowledge of a passion which rises straight and alone

• the function of the wrestler is not to win but to go exactly through the motions which are expected of him

• wrestling offers excessive gestures; in wrestling, a man who is down is exaggeratedly so & completely fills the eyes of the spectators with the intolerable spectacle of his powerlessness

• this function of grandiloquence is the same as that of ancient theatre, whose principle, language and props (masks and buskins) are combined in the exaggeratedly visible explanation of a Necessity; the gesture of the defeated wrestler signifying to the world a defeat which he emphasizes and holds like a pause in music, corresponds to the mask of antiquity meant to signify the tragic mode of the spectacle - in wrestling, as on the stage in antiquity, one is not ashamed of one's suffering, one knows how to cry, one has a liking for tears

• as in the theatre, each physical type expresses the part which has been assigned to the contestant

• Thauvin, a fifty-year-old with an obese and sagging body, whose type of asexual ugliness always inspires feminine nicknames, shows in his flesh the characters of baseness, as his part is to represent what the 'bastard', appears as organically distasteful; the disgust provoked by Thauvin shows a very extended use of signs: not only is ugliness used here in order to signify baseness, but is wholly collected into a particularly repulsive weak collapse of dead flesh, so that the passionate condemnation of the crowd no longer comes from its judgment, but from the depth of its humours

• it is in the body of the wrestler that we find the first key to the contest; wrestlers have a physique as authoritative as those of the characters of the Commedia dell'Arte who display in advance, in their costumes and attitudes, the future contents of their parts; Thauvin will never be anything but an ignoble traitor, the moving image of passivity

• the physique of the wrestlers is a basic sign; at every turn during the fight, the body of the wrestler gives to the public the magical entertainment of a temperament which finds its natural expression in a gesture

• wrestling is like a diacritic writing: above the fundamental meaning of his body, the wrestler arranges comments which are rare but always appropriate, and constantly help the interpretation of the fight by means of gestures, attitudes and mimicry which make the intention completely obvious

• what the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself; there is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theatre - what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private.

• wrestling is an immediate pantomime (a performance of gesture and movement)

• what is displayed for the public is the great spectacle of Suffering, Defeat, and Justice

• wrestling presents man's suffering with the application of tragic masks; the wrestler offers an excessive portrayal of Suffering; he exhibits for all to see his face, exaggeratedly distorted by an intolerable pain

• all the actions which produce suffering are particularly spectacular; suffering which appeared without any cause would not be understood; suffering appears as imposed with emphasis and conviction, as everyone must not only see that the man suffers, but also and above all understand why he suffers

• only the image is involved in the game, the spectator only enjoys the perfection of an imagery

• it is not true that wrestling is a sadistic spectacle: it is only an understandable spectacle

• in wrestling, Defeat is a duration, a display, it takes up the ancient myths of public Suffering and Humiliation; it is as if the wrestler is crucified in broad daylight and in the sight of all

• but what wrestling is above all meant to portray is a purely moral concept: that of justice - the idea of 'paying' is necessary to wrestling, and the crowd's 'Give it to him' means above all else 'Make him pay'

• wrestling is above all a numerous series of compensations (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth)

• it is thus easy to understand why out of five wrestling-matches, only about one is fair; the 'fairness' is a role or a genre, as in the theatre: the rules are not at all a real limit; they are the general representation of fairness: the contestants confront each other with enthusiasm, not rage

• foul play exists only in its excessive signs: administering a big kick to one's beaten opponent, taking shelter behind the ropes while invoking a purely formal right, refusing to shake hands with one's opponent before or after the fight, etc.

• since Evil is the natural climate of wrestling, a fair fight has mainly the value of being an exception

• fair wrestling could lead only to boxing or judo, whereas true wrestling takes its originality from all the excesses which make it a spectacle and not a sport

• in America wrestling represents a sort of mythological fight between Good and Evil. of some political nature

• the process of creating heroes in French wrestling is very different, based on ethics and not on politics

• what the public is looking for is the gradual construction of a highly moral image: that of the perfect 'bastard'; one comes to wrestling to attend the continuing adventures of a single major leading character; the 'bastard' is here revealed as a Molière character or a 'portrait' by La Bruyère, as a classical individual

• a 'bastard' for this audience is someone unstable, who accepts the rules only when they are useful to him and violates the formal continuity of attitudes; he is unpredictable, therefore asocial; he takes refuge behind the law when he considers that it is in his favour, and breaks it when he finds it useful to do so

• there is nothing more exciting for a crowd than the grandiloquent kick given to a vanquished 'bastard'

• wrestling should be exactly what the public expects of it; wrestlers, who are very experienced, know perfectly how to direct the spontaneous episodes of the fight so as to make them conform to the image which the public has of the great legendary themes of its mythology

• in the ring, wrestlers remain gods because they are, for a few moments, the key which opens Nature, the pure gesture which separates Good from Evil, and shows the form of a Justice which is at last understood

Elliade - Survivals and Camouflages of Myths

Christianity and mythology

• there is an unclear use of the term “myth”:

1) the earliest Christian theologians took the word myth which had become common some centuries earlier in the Greco-Roman world, meaning “fable, fiction, lie”; they refused to see a “mythical” figure in Jesus;

• from the 2^nd century on, Christian theologians had to defend the historical authenticity of Jesus against the Docetics (who shared a view that Jesus had no human body and only appeared to have died on the cross) and the Gnostics (who valued the knowledge of God and of the origin and end of the human race as a means to achieve redemption for the spiritual element in humans)

2) the literary documents that illustrate the historical authenticity of Jesus are questioned

• Rudolf Bultmann claims that we can know nothing about the life and character of Jesus; thus the Gospels and other primitive documents are full of myths (taking myth to mean “what cannot exist”);

• symbols, figures and rituals of Jewish and Mediterranean origin were early absorbed by Christianity

• symbols and elements that Christianity shares with solar cults and Mystery religions has caused some scholars to deny the historical authenticity of Jesus - they promoted myth that was imperfectly “historicized” by the earliest generations of Christians

• modern scholars such as Arthur Drews (1909), Peter Jansen (1906, 1909) and Paul Couchoud (1924) have tried to reconstruct the “original myth” which they consider to have given birth to the figure of Christ and to Christianity

3) the problem between mythical thought and Christianity is:

• if Christians have refused to see in their religion the myth of Greek period, what is the situation of Christianity in respect to the living myth as known in the archaic and traditional societies?

• Christianity as practised during 2000 years of its history cannot be completely separated from mythical thinking

History and “enigmas” in the Gospels

• the theologians refused to accept the Gospels and oral information as authentic documents

• the philosophical crisis was speeded by Marcion in 137, who claimed Luke's Gospel was the only authentic one

• Marcion used the method of the Greco-Roman grammarians claiming to be able to separate mythological documents from theological ones; to defend themselves against him & Gnostics, the orthodox were forced to use the same method

• at the beginning of the 2nd century Aelius Theon, in his Progymnasmata showed the difference between myth and narrative: the myth is “a false account portraying truth” and the narrative is “an account describing events which took place or might have taken place”

• the Christian theologians denied that the Gospels were “myths” or “wonder stories”

• Justin claimed that the non-Christian reader could be given material evidence of the historical truth of the Gospels; e.g. the Nativity could be proved by the “tax declarations submitted under the procurator Quirinius”

• a Tatian or a Clement of Alexandria considered the Gospels historical documents

• Origen was too convinced of the stories of the Gospels to admit that they could be taken in a literal sense; but on the other hand, to defend Christianity against Celsius, he insisted on the historical authenticity of the life of Jesus

• Origen criticizes and rejects the historical authenticity of the cleansing of the Temple; instead of “myth” and “fiction”, he uses “enigma” and “parable” as equivalent terms; then he admits that the Gospels include episodes that are not “authentic” historically, though they are “piritually "true"

• Origen believes that certain events in the life of Jesus are proved historically; though he does not doubt the historical authenticity of the life, passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, he is more interested in the spiritual meaning of the Gospels, which is meaning “beyond history”

• Origen correctly understood that the originality of Christianity lies in the fact that the Incarnation took place in a historical Time and not in cosmic Time

• in proclaiming Incarnation, Resurrection and Ascension of the World, the Christians were sure that they were not creating a new myth; actually they were putting into use the categories of mythical thought

• for the Christians the centre of religious life is the drama of Jesus Christ; which first established the possibility of salvation by repeating this drama and imitating the model of the life and teaching of Jesus

• the religious experience of the Christian is based on an imitation of the Christ as exemplary pattern

• Christianity had to keep at least one mythical aspect - liturgical Time, however though liturgical Time is a circular Time, Christianity accepts the linear Time of History: the World was created only once and will have only one end, the Incarnation took place only one and there will be only one Judgement

• Christianity was subject to various influences: Gnosticism, Judaism and “paganism”

• the Fathers fought against those influences but also kept some of them; certain Gnostic myths reappeared in the oral and written literatures of the Middle Ages; Judaism gave the Church an allegorical method of interpreting Scriptures and the model for “historicizing” the festivals; a certain number of cosmic symbols - Water, the Tree, the Vine etc. had already been adopted by Judaism and could easily be adopted by the Christianity

“Cosmic Christianity”

• the real problems appeared when the Christian missionaries were faced by, especially in Central and Western Europe, living popular religions, which ended by “Christianizing” the “pagan” divine Figures and myths

• the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches have been criticized for accepting so many pagan elements

• the religious experience specific to the rural populations in Eastern Europe was influenced by what could be called a “cosmic Christianity” - Christianity understood as a cosmic liturgy, involving the destiny of the Cosmos

• for the peasants of Eastern Europe, this was a “Christianisation” of the religion of their ancestors; Christ comes down to Earth to visit the peasants - this Christ is not “historical” since popular thought is not interested in chronology nor in the accuracy of events and the authenticity of historical figures

• the Nativity, the teachings of Jesus and his miracles are essential themes in this popular Christianity; it is Christian spirit that affects all these folklore creations, which tell of man's salvation by Christ; of faith, hope and charity

• the cosmic Christianity of the rural populations is dominated by nostalgia (missing) for a Nature sanctified by the presence of Jesus; a nostalgia for Paradise, the desire to find again a transfigured and invulnerable Nature, safe from cataclysms brought by wars, devastation and conquests; it is a passive revolt against the tragedy * injustice of History

• it is clear that this Christianity has kept alive some categories of mythical thought to this day

Eschatological (concerning the end of the world) mythologies of the Middle Ages

• the rise of mythical thought is witnessed in the Middle Ages; all social classes depend on their mythological tradition

• these mythologies have various sources: the Arthurian cycle and the Grail theme include a number of Celtic beliefs, especially those having to do with the Other World; the knights try to follow the example of Lancelot or Parsifal

• in some historical movements of the Middle Ages, we find the most typical representations of mythical thought

• millennialist exaltation and eschatological myths appear in the form of the Crusades, the elevation of Frederick II to the rank of Messiah - Frederick has a unique virtue which connects the elements of the universe together; he is a cosmic messiah whom land and sea are adoring

• the myth of Frederick II is only a famous example of a far more widespread phenomenon - the secularization of the concept of eschatological King did not destroy the hope for a universal renewal caused by the exemplary Hero in his new form - the Reformer, the Revolutionary, the Martyr

• the centre of eschatological Crusade consciousness was the duty to free Jerusalem

• the proof that we are here in the presence of a collective spiritual phenomenon, of an irrational drive, is, among other things, the Children's Crusades that began in Northern France and Germany in 1212 whose intention was to cross the sea and recapture Christ's tomb

Survivals of eschatological myth

• the failure of the Crusades did not put an end to eschatological hopes

• it is important to stress the continuity between the medieval eschatological conceptions and different “philosophies of History” produced by the Enlightenment and the 19th century; during the last 30 years it has begun to be realized what exceptional role was played by the “prophecies” of Gioacchino da Fiore in creating all these messianic movements that arose in the 13th century and continued into the 19th century

• Gioacchino's central idea - the coming entrance of the World into the 3rd age of History, which will be the age of freedom since it will be realized under the sign of the Holy Spirit - had important consequences

• according to the present doctrine, perfection having been achieved on Earth by the Church, the only decisive events will be the Second Coming of Christ and the Last Judgement

• Gioacchino da Fiore brings back into Christianity the archaic myth of universal regeneration

• his Education of the Human Race develops the thesis of continual and progressive revelation ending in a 3rd age

• Lessing thought of this 3rd age as the triumph of reason through education but he also believed the fulfillment of Christian revelation; Lessing's ideas influenced Auguste Comte and his doctrine of 3 stages; Fichte, Hegel, Schelling were influenced by the Gioacchinian myth of a future 3rd age that will renew and complete History; through them this eschatological myth influenced some Russian writers, especially Krasinsky with his Third Kingdom of the Spirit and Merejkowsky, author of The Christianity of the Third Testament

The Myths of the modern world

• some forms of “mythical behaviour” still survive in our day

• certain aspects and functions of mythical thought are elements of the human being

• we have seen the importance of the “return to the origins” in archaic societies, now, this prestige of the “origin” has also survived in the societies of Europe

• the Reformation began the return to the Bible and dreamed of recovering the experience of the primitive Church

• the French Revolution saw restoring the ancient virtues by Livy and Plutarch

• “origin” had a magical prestige - to have a well-established origin meant to have the advantage of a noble origin

• the Romanian intellectuals of the 18th & 19th century had their awareness of Latin origin accompanied by a kind of mystical participation in the greatness of Rome

• in Central and Southeastern Europe at the beginning of the 19th century the mirage of “noble origin” aroused passion for national history; such a passion was a result of the awakening of nationalities in this part of Europe

• the passion for “noble origin” also explains the racist myth of “Aryanism” - the fact to be studied is that the “Aryan” represented at once the “primordial” (earliest) Ancestor and the noble “hero”;

• the “Aryan” was the exemplary model that must be imitated in order to recover racial “purity”, physical strength, nobility, the heroic “ethics” of the glorious and creative “beginnings”

• Marxist Communism had taken over one of the great eschatological myths of the Asianico-Mediterranean world: the redeeming role of the Just Man (in our day, the proletariat), whose sufferings are destined to change the ontological (relating to the nature of being) status of the World

• Marx classless society and the disappearance of all historical tensions find their basis in the myth of the Golden Age, Marx has enriched this myth with truly messianic Judaeo-Christian ideology by the prophetic and setoriological (relating to the theological doctrine of salvation as effected by Jesus) function he gives the proletariat and by the final fight between Good and Evil, which may be compared with the apocalyptic conflict between Christ and Antichrist, ending in the decisive victory of Christ

• Marx turns to his own description of the Judaeo-Christian eschatological hope of an absolute end to History in that he separates himself from the other historical philosophers

Myths and mass media

• recent studies have shown mythical structures of the images and behaviour imposed on communities by mass media

• the characters of the comic pieces present the modern version of mythological or folklore Heroes - they embody the ideal of a large part of society to such a degree that any change in their typical behaviour or their death will bring crises, violent reaction and protest among their readers

• a fantastic character, Superman, has become extremely popular especially because of his double identity - although coming from a planet destroyed by a catastrophe, and having superpowers, he lives on Earth in the modest disguise of a journalist, Clark Kent; he is shy, unassertive, dominated by his colleague Lois Lane

• the myth of Superman satisfies the secret desire of modern man who, though he knows that he is a fallen, limited creature, dreams of one day proving himself an “exceptional person,” a “Hero”

• the mythicization of public figures through the mass media, the transformation of a personality into an exemplary image, has also been analyzed - Lloyd Warner tells us of the creation of such a public figure in the first section of his The Living and the Dead

• Biggy Muldoon, a Yankee City Politician who became a national figure because of his colourful opposition to the Hill Street Aristocracy, had a deceptive public image built up by the press and radio; he was presented as a crusading man of the people attacking excessive wealth; then, when the public tired of this image, the mass media turned Biggy into a villain, a corrupt politician seeking personal profit out of the public necessity - but, as Warner points out, the real Biggy was quite different from either image but was forced to modify his style & conform to one image & fight another

• mythical behaviour can be recognized in the obsession with “success” that is so characteristic of modern society and that expresses an unclear wish to go beyond the limits of the human condition - in the nostalgia for “primordial (fundamental) perfection”; in the belongings and emotional intensity that characterize the “cult of the sacred automobile” - as Andrew Greeley writes, one needs only to visit the annual automobile show to realize that it is a highly ritualized religious performance

Myths of the elite

• myths of the elite have succeeded in imposing themselves far beyond the closed corporation of the initiate, mainly because of the inferiority complex that now affects both the public and official art circles

• the aggressive incomprehensibility (lack of understanding) of the public, critics and of the official representatives of art toward a Rimbaud or a Van Gogh, the terrible consequences produced by ignorance toward innovating movements, have been hard lessons for the critics, the public & art dealers, museum directors & collectors; today their only fear is to not to be advanced enough & not to be in time to recognize genius in a work that is at first sight not understandable

• the myth of the damned artist, which obsessed the 19th century, is outmoded today

• the artist is asked to conform to his mythical image - to be strange, irreducible, and to “produce something new”

• “anything goes” is no longer an appropriate expression: now, each new thing is considered an achievement of genius and put on the same level as the innovations of Van Gogh or a Picasso

• the importance of this revolution is that there is no longer any tension between artists, critics, collectors and the public

• one may note the redeeming function of “difficulty”, especially as found in works of modern art - such works represent closed worlds that cannot be entered except by overcoming great difficulties - one has the experience of “initiation” and, on the other hand, one proclaims to the “others” (the “mass”) that one belongs to a select minority - a gnosis (revealed knowledge of various spiritual truths) that opposes official values and traditional churches

• being fascinated by the difficulty of works of art expresses the desire to discover a new, secret, thus unknown meaning for the World and human life; one dreams of being “initiated” and understanding the secret meaning of all these destructions of artistic languages, these “original” experiences that no longer have anything in common with art

• all the real revolutionary experiences of modern art reflect some aspects of the contemporary spiritual crisis or at least of the crisis in artistic knowledge and creation

• what concerns this analysis is the fact that the “elites” find in the extravagance and lack of understanding of modern works the opportunity for an initiatory gnosis; it is a “new World” being built up from ruins and enigmas, an almost private World, which one would like to keep for oneself and a very few initiates

• but the prestige of difficulty & incomprehensibility is such that very soon the “public” too accepts the elite's discoveries

• the destruction of artistic languages was achieved by cubism, dadaism, surrealism, James Joyce, Becket & Ionesco

• the real creators do not want to take their position on ruins; the reduction of “artistic Universes” to the earliest state is only a phase in a more complex process

• as far as literature is concerned, the epic and the novel, like other literary genres, continue mythological narrative, though on a different level and in search for different purposes

• it is a question of telling a significant story, of relating series of dramatic events that took place in the past

• what is considered important is the fact that in modern societies the prose narrative, especially the novel, has taken the place of the recitation of myths in traditional and popular societies

• it is possible to show the literary survival of great mythological themes and characters

• the modern passion for the novel expresses the desire to hear the greatest possible number of “mythological stories”

• people feel the need to read “histories” and narratives that could be called paradigmatic (symbolic) since they continue in agreement with a traditional model - the need to communicate with “others,” with “strangers,” and share in their dramas and hopes, the need to know what can have taken place

• it is the “escape from Time” caused by reading that connects the function of literature with that of mythologies

• in both the time that one “lives” when reading a novel, is not the time that a member of a traditional society recovers when he listens to a myth; but in both cases one “escapes” from historical and personal time;

• the reader is confronted with a strange, imaginary time

• one feels in literature a revolt against historical time, the desire to reach for other temporal rhythms than those in which we are forced to live and work

• one wonders whether the day will come when this desire to go beyond one's own - personal, historical - time and be absorbed in a “strange” time will be completely eradicated

• signs of such mythological behaviour can also be found in the desire to rediscover the intensity with which one experienced or knew something for the first time; and also in the desire to recover the distant past

• there is always the struggle against Time, the hope to be freed from the weight of “dead Time,” of the Time that kills

10. Consumption

Theories of Consumer Culture

1. consumer culture is based on the expansion of capitalist commodity (goods) production which caused a great collection of material culture in the form of consumer goods & places for buying & consumption - this has resulted in the growing importance of free time & consumption activities in contemporary Western societies which are regarded as increasing the capacity for ideological manipulation of the population from some other set of `better' social relations

2. the satisfaction coming from goods relates to their socially structured access in a zero sum game in which satisfaction and status depend on showing and keeping the differences within conditions of inflation

3. there is the question of the emotional pleasures of consumption, the dreams and desires in which people use goods in order to create social bonds or distinctions

exchange value - the quantified worth of one good or service expressed in terms of the worth of another

The Production of Consumption

• if from the perspective of classical economics the object of all production is consumption, with individuals maximizing their satisfactions through buying from a wide range of goods, then from the perspective of some 20th century neo-Marxists this development is regarded as producing greater opportunities for controlled & manipulated consumption

• the expansion of capitalist production required the construction of new markets and the `education' of publics to become consumers through advertising & other media; this idea has been developed in the writings of Horkheimer and Adorno (1972), Marcuse (1964) & Lefebvre (1971)

• Horkheimer & Adorno argue that the same commodity logic & instrumental rationality in the sphere of production are visible in the sphere of consumption; free time seeking, the arts and culture in general become filtered through the culture industry, reception becomes dictated by exchange value as the higher purposes & values of culture surrender to the logic of the production process and the market - traditional forms of association in the family & private life as well as the promise of happiness & fulfillment are presented as giving in to a manipulated mass who participate in mass-produced commodity culture aimed at the lowest common number - it could be argued that the accumulation of goods has resulted in the triumph of exchange-value, that the instrumental rational calculation of all aspects of life becomes possible in which all cultural traditions and qualities become transformed into quantities

• another tendency within the work of Frankfurt School is that of Adorno on how, once the dominance of exchange-value has managed to eliminate the memory of original use-value of goods, the commodity becomes free to take up a secondary use-value - goods become free to take on a wide range of cultural associations & illusions; advertising is especially able to exploit this & attach images of romance, exotica, desire, beauty, fulfillment, communality, scientific progress & the good life to boring consumer goods such as soap, washing machines, motor cars and alcoholic drinks

• a similar emphasis on the unstopping logic of the commodity is found in the work of Jean Baudrillard, the major addition to Baudrillard's (1970) theory is based on semiology (science dealing with signs) to argue that consumption is connected with the active manipulation of signs, which becomes central to late capitalist society where sign and commodity have come together to produce the `commodity-sign'

• the signs are able to move free from objects and are available for use in many associative relations

• Baudrillard's theory including signs results for some in an idealistic variation of Marx's theory and movement from a materialist emphasis to a cultural emphasis, which becomes evident in Baudrillard's later writings where emphasis moves from production to reproduction, to the endless reduplication of signs, images and simulations through the media which blurs the distinction between the image and reality; the overproduction of signs and reproduction of images and simulations leads to a loss of stable meaning and an aestheticization of reality by postmodern culture

• Jameson's idea of postmodern culture is as the culture of the consumer society, the post-World War II stage of late capitalism, in which it is given a new significance through the assimilation of signs and messages to the degree that `everything in social life can be said to have become cultural'

• the Frankfurt School's tendency to regard the culture industries as producing a uniform mass culture which threatens individuality and creativity has been criticized for its elitism and inability to examine actual processes of consumption

Modes of consumption

• if it is possible to assume the operation of a `capital logic' coming from production, it may also be possible to claim a `consumption logic' which points to the socially structured ways in which goods are used to divide social relationships

• consumption of goods hides the wide range of goods which are consumed/purchased when more aspects of free time are negotiated by the purchase of goods; it also hides the need to differentiate between consumer durables (goods we use at work and free time, e.g. refrigerators, cars, cameras) and consumer non-durables (food, drink, clothing, body-care products) and the change over time in the proportion of income spent on each sector

• we can refer to the doubly symbolic aspect of goods in contemporary Western cultures: food may be consumed by being eaten but also consumed (symbolically) by being looked at, dreamt about, photographed)

• in some cases the object of purchasing may be to gain prestige through high exchange value, (e.g. in societies where aristocracy & old rich have been forced to give up power to the new rich)

• a commodity can also lose its commodity status, thus becoming `priceless'

• art objects or objects produced for ritual (& thus given a particular symbolic value) tend often to be ones excluded from exchange or not have the commodity status for long; their professed sacred status and denial of the profane market may paradoxically raise their value; their lack of availability and `pricelessness' raises their price and desirability

• while there is capacity for goods to break down social barriers, to divide the long-established links between people and things, there is also the opposite tendency to restrict, control and channel (direct) the exchange of goods

• in some societies stable status systems are protected by limiting possibilities for exchange or supply of new goods, in other there is an ever-changing supply of goods which gives the illusion of complete changeability of goods yet legitimate taste, knowledge of the rules of classification, hierarchy and appropriateness is limited (the second in contemporary Western societies it makes the problem of reading the status of the owner of the goods more complex)

• Douglas and Sherwood's (1980) work emphasizes the way in which goods are used to draw the lines of social relationships: our enjoyment of goods is only partly related to their physical consumption, being also linked to their use as markers (we enjoy, e.g. sharing the names of goods with others)

• the consumption of high cultural goods (art, novels, etc.) must be related to the ways in which other more ordinary cultural goods (clothes, food, drink) are handled and consumed

• Douglas and Sherwood define consumption classes in relation to the consumption of 3 sets of goods: in the primary production sector (e.g. food), in the secondary production sector (travel & consumer's capital equipment), in the tertiary production sector (information goods, education, arts. etc.)

• at the lower end of the social structure the poor are limited to the stable set and have more time, while those in the top consumption class require a higher level of earnings and a competence in judging information goods and services to provide the reaction necessary from consumption to employment, which becomes itself a qualification for employment

• the phasing, duration & intensity of time invested in getting & keeping competences for managing information & goods is a useful criterion of social class; our use of time in consumption practices harmonizes with our class environment and carries an accurate idea of our class status - this points us to the need of detailed time-budget research

• for Bourdieu (1984) `taste classifies the classifier'; consumption and lifestyle preferences involve discriminatory judgements which identify and provide our own specific judgement of taste to others

• the constant supply of new, fashionably desirable goods by lower groups results in that those above will have to invest in new goods to reestablish the original social distance; knowledge of new goods and how to use them is important, especially for the new middle- and working-class, the new rich or upper class that the consumer-culture magazines, newspapers are important in self-improvement, self-development, personal change

• there is higher demand for cultural specialists & intermediaries (negotiators) who have the skill to search through various traditions and cultures to produce new symbolic goods and provide the necessary interpretations of their use

• it should be evident that the problems of inflation (a progressive increase in the general level of prices brought about by an expansion in demand or the money) produced by an oversupply and fast circulation of symbolic & consumer goods have the danger of threatening the readability (understanding) of goods used as signs of social status

• in the context of the erosion of the state-society as part of the process of globalization of markets and culture, it may be difficult to stabilize appropriate marker goods; this would threaten the cultural logic of differences in which taste in cultural and consumer goods and lifestyle activities are held to be oppositionally structured

• still it can be argued that the need to collect clues & information about the other's power potential, status & social position by understanding the other person's behaviour will continue

• we need to consider the pressures which may cause cultural declassification and the deformation of environment

• it may be that there are different modes of identity and environment formation and deformation emerging which make the importance of taste and lifestyle choice more blurred

• there may be `rules of disorder' which work to permit more easily controlled flows - between order and disorder, status consciousness and the play of fantasy and desire - which were formerly threatening to keep a consistent identity structure and deny violations

Consuming Dreams, Images and Pleasure

• as Raymond Williams (1976) remarks, one of the earliest uses of the term `consume' meant `to destroy, to use up, to waste, to exhaust'; in this sense, consumption as waste, excess and spending represents a paradoxical presence within the productionist emphasis of capitalist & state socialist societies which must somehow be controlled & directed

• the meaning of economic value as linked to scarcity (deficiency, shortage), the promise that the sacrifices required by the need to collect within the production process will finally lead to the overcoming of scarcity, as consumer needs and pleasures are satisfied, has been a strong cultural image and motivating force within capitalist and socialist societies

• within the middle class and among traditional economic specialists, there is the persistence of the notion of disciplined hard work celebrated in 19^th century `self-help' individualism and later 20^th century Thatcherism - here consumption helps to work & keeps many of the displaced orientations from production; this group represents old bourgeois virtues

• Bataille's idea of general economy, economic production should not be linked to scarcity but to excess - in effect the aim of production becomes destruction and the key problem becomes what to do with share, the excess of energy represented in an excess of product and goods; to control the growth effectively and manage the excess, the only solution is to destroy or waste the excess in the form of games, religion, art, wars, death

• according to Bataille, capitalist societies try to direct the share into full economic growth, to produce growth without end

• but capitalism also produces images and locations of consumption which support the pleasures of excess; these images & locations blur the border between art and everyday life; thus 4 things need to be investigated:

1) the persistence within consumer culture of elements of the pre-industrial carnival tradition

2) the transformation & displacement of the carnival tradition into media images, design, advertising, rock videos, etc.

3) the persistence & transformation of elements of the carnival tradition within certain locations of consumption: holiday resorts, sports stadia, theme parks, department stores and shopping centres

4) displacement and incorporation of the carnival tradition into visible consumption by states and companies, either in the form of `prestige' spectacles for wider publics and privileged upper management

• the popular tradition of carnivals, fairs and festivals provided symbolic contradictions and violations of the official `civilized' culture and favoured excitement, uncontrolled emotions and the direct bodily pleasures of fattening food, alcohol and sex - these were liminal spaces, in which the everyday world was turned upside down and in which the fantastic was possible, in which impossible dreams could be expressed; the liminal, according to Victor Turner (1969) points to the generation of a sense of unsettled community, emotional fusion and aesthetic unity

• fairs (targi, jarmarki) have long played a dual role as local markets and as sites of pleasure - not only places where goods were exchanged, they included the display of exotic and strange products from different parts of the world

• fairs offered spectacular imagery, strange contrasts, confusions of borders, developing bodily and emotional controls as part of civilizing process, especially for middle classes - they came to dominate the urban market-place, the department stores and theme parks; they provided places of carnival tradition in their displays of exotic locations

• for Walter Benjamin (1982) new department stores & arcades that emerged in Paris were effectively `dream worlds'; the great variety of goods on display, constantly renewed, was the source of dream images which recalled associations and illusions, referred to by Benjamin as allegories

• the everyday life of the big cities becomes aestheticized - the new industrial processes provided the opportunity for art to move into industry; which resulted in an expansion of jobs in advertising, marketing, industrial design & commercial display to produce the new aestheticized urban landscape; the emphasis is on immediacies, intensities, sensory overload, disorientation, assimilation of signs and images, the mixing of codes

• there is a strong populist (supporting the rights and power of the people) idea in the writings of Benjamin which is usually contrasted to the supposed elitism of Horkheimer and Adorno; Benjamin emphasized the utopian, or positive moment in the mass produced consumer goods which freed creativity from art and allowed it to move into the variety of mass produced everyday objects; this celebration of the aesthetic potential of mass culture has been taken up by commentators who emphasise the violating and playful potential of postmodernism

• these tendencies toward the aestheticization of everyday life relate to the distinction between high and mass culture

• the 1960s Pop Art and postmodernism focuses on everyday commodities as art

• the expansion of the art market and increase in working artists have resulted in important changes in the artist's role: it is no longer useful to speak of an artistic avant-garde in the sense of a group of artists who reject both popular culture and the middle-class lifestyle; many artists have resigned from their commitment to high culture and avant-garde and have adopted an open attitude towards consumer culture; this has resulted in blurring of tendencies towards the deconstruction of symbolic hierarchies; advertising's effectiveness has began to be doubted; design and advertising become confused with art and celebrated as art

• the image of artist as an expressive rebel and stylistic hero has been a strong theme, especially in popular and rock music in Britain in the post-war era; Frith and Horne (1987) support this introduction of art into popular culture which also helped to deconstruct the distinction between high and popular culture

• jazz, blues, rock and black music were presented as forms of direct emotional expression, regarded as both more pleasurable, involved and authentic by young audiences - yet this project also suggests a degree of integration and unity of purpose which is becoming old-fashioned - there is less interest in constructing a uniform style than in playing with, and expanding, the range of familiar styles

• Simmel (1978) refers to the age of `no style' & Malraux (1967) remarked that our culture is `a museum without walls' - views that become heightened in postmodernism with its emphasis on pastiche, `retro', the fall of symbolic hierarchies

• the tendency within consumer culture is to promote lifestyles available to audiences and consumers

Conclusion

• in his book All Consuming Images, Stuart Ewen (1988) discusses the advertisement for Nieman-Marcus, a fashionable US department store which seems to combine a unity of opposites - two photographs of the same woman: 1) upper-class woman dressed in Parisian clothes - the text beneath the images stresses that attitude is `disposition with regard to people', `wearing the correct thing at the correct hour', etc. 2) a brooding Semitic woman dressed in a Palestinian scarf and desert caftan; the text in graffiti style emphasizes the latitude (casualty, tolerance) is `freedom from narrow restrictions', `changing the structure of clothes with the mood', `whatever feels comfortable', etc.

• within contemporary culture, women and men are asked not to chose but incorporate both options; to regard their dress and consumer goods as communicators, as `symbols of class status' requires proper behaviour on the part of the wearer/user to promote the visible classification of the social world into categories of persons

• thus, within consumer culture, there are still prestige economies, with scarce goods demanding considerable investment in time, money and knowledge to achieve and manage appropriately - such goods can be read and used to classify the status of the bearer

• at the same time, consumer culture uses images, signs & symbolic goods which recall dreams, desires and fantasies which suggest romantic authenticity and emotional fulfillment in pleasing oneself, instead of others

• today's consumer culture represents neither a period of control nor the institution of more strict controls but rather their bases by a flexible generative structure which can both manage formal control and de-control

11. Digital Culture

Introduction

• the idea of young people as confident, “expert” computer users has existed in Western societies for the past 30 years

• from the 1970s' phenomena of the “computer hacker” and “video gamer” on, perceptions of almighty young computer users have been important in shaping public expectations and fears concerning technology and society

• these stories about young people and digital technology reflect earlier representations of children and 20th century analogue media such as film, radio, television, comic books and magazines

• the first years of the 2000s have been subject to a particularly intense type of the child computer user discourse, represented by images of “digital natives” and the “net generation”

• the specific label of “digital native” comes from a series of articles written since 2001 by the US technologist Marc Prensky who described the generation of young people born since 1980 as “digital natives” due to what he saw as an innate confidence in using new technologies such as the internet, videogames, mobile telephony, etc.

• Prensky argued that technology was essential to these young people's existence - showing young people as now being constantly “surrounded” and “immersed” by these new technologies in ways that older generations were not

• Recently, Prensky has argued that this permanent state of technological immersion and dependence is contained in the lifestyles of upcoming generations of “i-kids”, who are “plugged into” portable, personalised devices such as mobile phones, mp3 players and handheld games consoles

• the US author Donald Tapscott has developed a similar thesis to Prensky's, detailing the high-tech activities and expectations of the “net generation” of young people who were born between 1977 & 1996

• in a domestic sense these are young people described as living “digital childhoods”, situated within “media families”

• from an educational viewpoint, these are “New Millennium Learners”

• many popular, political and academic reports of technology & society now assume a distinct step-change in the ways in which modern forms of childhood, adolescence & young adulthood are based around digital technology and media

• some commentators are now presenting young people of the 2000s in specific terms of “generation M” (media), “generation V” (virtual) or “generation C” (referring to characteristics such as connected, creative and click)

• all these descriptions give a common set of characteristics to present generations of children and young people, which carry a sense of digital technology being an accepted condition under which young people now lead their lives

• as Mimi Ito claims, young people's technology use is now perhaps best seen as a media “ecology” where more traditional media, such as books, television, and radio, are merging with digital media

• while the past 10 years have seen significant changes in the technological practices and tendencies of children, young people and young adults, it would seem sensible to reconsider the status of the “digital native” description as a visible description of young people's lives in the early 21st century

• there is a need to develop and promote realistic understandings of young people and digital technology if information professionals (librarians, teachers, etc) are to play meaningful roles in supporting present generations of young people

Implications of the digital native discourse

The empowered digital native

• young people are seen as a “multitasking generation”, depending on a “digital juggling” of their daily activities

• digital natives are seen to benefit from a distinct individualisation of everyday life that comes specifically from digital technology use - in particular, the internet is seen to support a capacity to build and maintain connections with various formal and informal elements of their lives - what is often presented as the “personalisation” of activities & services

• the internet-connected young learner is often celebrated as given an active role of (re)constructing the nature, place, pace & timing of learning events as they wish

• the digital native is often presented as autonomous and highly sociable

• there is a great importance in young people's lives of digital cultures of communal creativity via Web 2.0 tools such as social networking sites, wikis, virtual worlds - young people are described as the “collaboration generation” (Tapscott & Williams), eager to work together towards common goals, share content & rely on “the power of mass collaboration”

• the worldview of the digital native generation is presented as young people to construct alternatives to the main values of the traditional institutions & structures of previous generations; as Tapscott & Williams warn, they satisfy their desire for choice, convenience, customization, & control by designing, producing, and distributing products themselves

• much of Prensky's initial writing on the digital native was related to the technology-induced capacity of young people to think and process information differently from their predecessors

• it is said that internet use increases the capacity for young people to have greater working memory and be more skilled at perceptual learning; young people are able to access great digital networks of information, resources & people, learning in ways that are situated within authentic contexts & webs of knowledge

• what young people learn and how they learn it is seen to be changed by digital technology, often in ways & places far removed from the interests of formal settings such as the school or library

The disempowered digital native

• it is said that the increased autonomy coming from digital technology use may lead to the disadvantaging & disempowerment of young people through a set of “risks” & “dangers” of technology use

• apart from the physical, emotional & sexual risks associated with young people's digital excesses, concerns also have been raised over an intellectual & academic simplification associated with young people's digitally redefined relationships with information & knowledge

• it is claimed that the capacity of young people to learn is now endangered by a general inability to gather information from the internet in a clever way; similar concerns are expressed over the quality of internet-supported learning amongst university students with numerous predictions of the intellectual and scholarly de-powering of a “Google generation” of undergraduates incapable of independent critical thought

• Tara Brabazon describes how online learning resources separate inexperienced students from the support of their teachers & give them freedom to behave rashly & make poor judgements

• young people are mocked as being more interested in using digital technologies such as the internet or mobile telephony for self-expression and self-promotion than for listening to and learning from others

• Keen claims that MySpace and Facebook are creating a youth culture of digital narcissism, open-source knowledge sharing sites like Wikipedia are damaging the authority of teachers in the classroom; the YouTube generation are more interested in self-expression than in learning about the insider world

• there seems to be a digital intensification of “a culture of disrespect” between young people and formal institutions

• concerns have been raised over the reorganization of power within the child/adult relationship that digital technologies seem to develop, as demonstrated in web sites such as ratemyprofessors.com or young people posting frank video fragments of their teachers on content-sharing sites such as YouTube

Implications for adults

• all images of the digital native all suggest a great disempowerment (depriving of power) of older generations

• Prensky (2001) and others describe adults as “digital immigrants” who have been forced to adapt to a world of digital media after many years of leading “pre-digital” lifestyles - such claims suggest that adults lack the technological fluency of the younger digital natives and find the skills possessed by them unfamiliar and often foreign (Long, 2005)

• a distinct conflict is evident in the digital native literature between “the generations who grow up with these ways of thinking” & the “often Web-illiterate” adults in their lives (Keen, 2007); many commentators are thus led to construct „them” and “us” arguments where adults and institutions caused to be obsolete by the rise of the digital native

• the digital native way-of-being is seen to be conflicting with the many formal & informal systems of regulation & control which characterise the organisation of such institutions; formal institutions (e.g. school) are said to be often “poorly placed to deal with the social, cultural and economic changes that come from the use of digital technologies

• this conflict is presented with digital technologies seen to be a ready basis for young people's avoidance of traditional structures & organisations & ability to “find something online that [institutions] are not giving them” (Jenkins, 2004)

• it is suggested that with internet technologies young people can change the future of the education system

• commentators warn against attempts to motivate and engage young people through the introduction of consciously “trendy” forms of technology use into formal institutions

• as Tapscott and Williams (2008) conclude, the digital natives' “appetite for authenticity means that they are resistant to irrational trying by older generations to `speak their language'”

• numbers of commentators argue that the digital excesses of young people should be tempered and checked, with adults & formal institutions working towards a depowering of the digital native wherever possible, through the increased regulation & control, blocking & filtering of young people's technology use (Keen, 2007)

• however, many other commentators argue for the change of existing structures and organisations; such change is usually presented in terms of reforming the temporal, spatial & epistemological organisation of formal institutions, and developing ways of working within institutions that are more adapted to a “sense” of young people's digital practice

• it is believed that young people should be acceded overall control of their interactions with information and knowledge

• Leadbetter (2008) suggests a reorientation of the school to make learning a more peer-to-peer activity, seeing children as part of the school's productive resources, not just as its consumers

• Prensky (2008) argues for a new education of kids teaching themselves with the teacher's guidance

• Tapscott (1999) advises to “give students the tools, and they will be the single most important source of guidance on how to make their schools important and effective places to learn”

Moving beyond the myth of the digital native

• the general tendency of the discursive constructions of young people & technology is rather exaggerated & inconsistent; the digital native discourse cannot be said to give an accurate explanation of young people & technology

• the “evidence base” for much of the digital native literature is rooted in informal observation and anecdote

• many of the points described in the analysis of the digital native literature can be said to gain acceptance from their associations with wider moral and ideological debates over young people and digital technology

• the idea of the “digital native” should be seen more as a discursive (in speech) than descriptive tool, used by those who aim to exercise some form of power and control over the shaping of the digital (near) future

• much of the digital native discourse would certainly seem to support a range of “crisis” explanations about the role of public institutions in supporting present generations of children and young people (Bennett, 2008)

• many of the arguments on the idea of the “digital native” are based on an biological reading of the “child” and “young person” as somehow naturally technically skilled, thus “failing to recognize the diversity of the lived experience” of both childhood and adulthood (Buckingham, 1998)

• much of the digital native commentary can be criticised in its technological determinist view of societal change, where digital technologies are full of inborn qualities affecting young users in consistent ways

• yet it is probably more helpful to see young people's use of technologies as subjected to complex interactions and negotiations with the social, economic, political and cultural contexts in which they appear

• an attempt is made to adjust the presently idealised digital native debate to the rather more “messy” realities of young people's use of these technologies in practice

Considering the realities of young people's digital technology use

• studies suggest that young people's abilities to access digital technologies are rooted in lines of socio-economic status & social class, gender, geography & many other lines important in early 21st century society (Golding, 2000)

• some social groups of young people seem to be as “digitally-excluded” as older generations

• recent studies across Europe & North America show that levels of computer and internet use are lower amongst rural youth, female youth & those from families with low levels of parental education (Vandewater, Looker & Thiessen)

• age continues to be reported as a main influence on the technological needs, interests and practices of young people

• there is growing evidence that many young people's actual uses of digital technologies are rather more limited; surveys of adolescents' technology use show domination of game playing, text messaging & retrieval of online content

• usual technology practices of younger children are more basic, centred on writing and image creation & basic gaming

• young people's internet use often continues to be mixed with more passive forms of media consumption such as the viewing of films and TV programmes - often in real-time broadcast form as well as “on-demand” viewing

• young people's use of the internet can be described most accurately as the passive consumption of knowledge rather than the active creation of content; children & young people are found to often show a limited ability to successfully use the internet and other research tools (Williams and Rowlands, 2007)

• some recent studies suggest that children and young people do not necessarily expect or even want to use technology in institutional settings such as schools or libraries in the same way as they do at home (‼!)

• one needs to see the importance of context & circumstance to understand young people's (non)use of technology

• young people have been found to be more likely than adults of all ages to search online information about sports, humorous content and entertainment, but less likely to look for information related to health, medical care, religion or travel (Dutton and Helpser, 2007; Pew, 2005) - searching for “information on a topic that is hard to talk about” has been found to be the least popular internet activity for teenage internet users (Pew, 2001)

• thus we should not miss the importance of a wide range of non-technological sources that young people may base upon to meet these information needs, such as intimate personal networks with friends, wider networks of family and community contacts and mass media source

• a repeated finding throughout the research literature on young people's information behaviour is the importance of face-to-face conversations to young people's information gathering (Wells and Dudash, 2007)

Reconsidering the role of “digital immigrants” in the lives of children and young people

• a picture of rather less spectacular technology use & engagement comes from the empirical literature

• it is thus worth reconsidering functions & roles that can be played by formal institutions (schools, libraries, museums) and information professionals (librarians, teachers etc.) in realistically supporting young people's engagement with digital technologies and digital information

• adults seem to have a continued role in supporting young people's use of technology and information, not least in ensuring that the social contexts surrounding digital information allow young people to be informed about their choices

• research findings point to the need for additional training of young people with regards to digital information

• as Buckingham (2007) argues, within schools & other civic institutions there is probably a need to “place a central emphasis on developing children's critical & creative abilities related to new media”, thus promoting a form of `digital media literacy' as a basic educational right

• organisations such as public service broadcasters, internet service providers & other youth media providers also have different roles to play in creating young people's decisive engagement with digital media and digital information through their content provision and interactions with users

• the increasing complexity and complication of digital technologies brings difficulties that young people must confront (Crook, 2008); thus, teachers, librarians, parents can play important roles in managing young people's experiences of using digital technologies, and supporting their attempts to understand the structures and meanings of digitally-based information (Ljosa, 1998)

• however, teachers, librarians and others still have a valuable authoritative role in educating, informing, managing and directing the technological activities of children and young people

Conclusions

• while digital technologies are associated with significant changes in the lives of young people and adults, there is little reason to assume that serious disconnections are somehow resulting between young people and society

• there are few ways in which the present “digital native” generation can be said to constitute a complete discontinuity from earlier generations; we should be careful with claims that a digital generation is overthrowing culture & knowledge & that its members are engaging in new media in ways radically different from those of older generations

• the concept of the “digital native” could be welcomed as providing a ready rhetorical space for the expression of adult concerns over present developments in digital technology

• there is a very real danger that if these rhetorical stories continue to be taken as real & connected with the realities of young people's technology use, then they can only provide an ill-informed & realistic basis for the formation of effective policymaking and practice - thus, there is a clear need for all parties concerned with young people and technology to keep a balanced and objective perspective on what can seem a substantial transformation of social relations

• adults should not feel threatened by younger generations' engagements with digital technologies, any more than young people should feel limited by the “pre-digital” structures of older generations

• the benefit probably now falls on academic communities of information scholars and other social scientists to better promote empirically-grounded and socially-aware images of the complexities of young people's uses of technology - thus providing realistic alternatives to the discourse of the digital native, the public & political concerns that surround it

12. `Reality Culture'

Doing Cultural Studies

• there are 4 connected elements of Cultural Studies, having to do with the observation of culture (genre), the manufacture of culture (production), exchange of culture (consumption) and contestation of culture (cultural politics)

1) genre - questions of genre address characteristics of cultural form & content; they enable us to compare & contrast cultural formations & construct maps of cultural difference (e.g. What are the features of House & Techno culture)

2) production has to do with the creation of cultural meaning & the interests behind the presentation of cultural form & content; the topic of production includes the plan & application of cultural meaning; it examines the means & purposes involved in traditions & projects of cultural reproduction (e.g. How do deviant cultures emerge & protect their privacy?)

3) consumption refers to the various processes of how cultural meanings are assimilated by consumers; questions of reception focus on the response of consumers to cultural goods and meanings; they concentrate on the interface between cultural production & exchange; they require us to consider the field of culture, including the traditions & orientations that consumers bring to the exchange process (e.g. How are cultural texts exchanged? How is cultural form & content developed to signify difference and opposition?)

4) cultural politics refers to how meaning is presented, resisted & opposed through the process of cultural exchange; it confronts issues of values, difference, knowledge & power; it investigates how we are differently situated in relation to scarce economics, social, political & cultural resources & the struggles & alliances that arise from this; it raises issues of cultural authority, distributive justice & empowerment (e.g. How is cultural form & content developed to signify difference & opposition?)

• Cultural Studies - the exploration of interrelationships between genre, production, consumption & cultural politics;

• as staged versions of history & the truth are constructed in a complicated way, revealing the forces that empower them is often tricky - one good way of approaching this is comparative & historical analysis, as 2 natural misunderstandings that people often make in life are that their experience is universal & that basic things have always been the same

• by comparing cultural, political & economic conditions in other societies with those of our own (comparative analysis) & examining how people thought & acted in other times (historical analysis), we have the chance of developing a perspective on what is common & what is unique

The Case of Reality TV

• the centre of Cultural Studies is that facts are not meaningful except in relation to other meanings; a fact is not a thing but a representation, its meaning comes from the position it has in a field of communication (these fields change rapidly, which complicates the task of building a universal curriculum in Cultural Studies)

• modern culture is super-dynamic in comparison with traditional culture; e.g. a decade ago Reality TV was unknown, today programmes like Big Brother, Survivor, The Osbournes & Celebrity Chef have developed international followings

• people selected from the public are elevated, however temporarily, into stardom

• the suspension of the hierarchy between celebrity & audience generates questions about the nature of fame & submission of consumers; Reality TV works by presenting improbable combinations of people in limited situations & recording the results (e.g. What happens when you invite someone to marry a millionaire on live TV?)

• such TV is attractive to TV broadcasting companies as it is cheap to produce yet draws attention of large audiences

• Reality TV (using TV to show the rules of everyday life & educate the public) is not a new genre, it has been present in public broadcasting since 1960s, when Candid Camera was aired in the USA & a cover version appeared in Britain - the format was a Reality TV version of everyday life disrupted by planned events organized by the producers

• in the 1970s, An American Family & its British version, The Family were produced as a view of everyday life in a typical family, filmed over several months, often with a clear moral message attached to each episode

• today satellite broadcasting of Reality TV offers live, unedited broadcasting which changes how we situate ourselves in relation to broadcast data: the show The Family was produced as designed to have a pedagogic effect, the viewers were invited to make practical, moral judgements about the behaviour shown on-screen, to apply this to their own lives

• today's reality TV works in what John Corner (2002) argues is a post-documentary genre - it presents a piece of life & is non-judgemental; both people playing & watching make comments about each other's behaviour but these judgements are not part of the planned production values of the programme; yet Reality TV is not like `real' life

• the fact that judgements about the difference between reality & illusion are constantly made in shows like Big Brother generates the question on the nature of Reality TV as a cultural genre

• to suggest that Sharon Osbourne in The Osbournes is acting normally or naturally is central to the conventions of the broadcast, but however comfortable she may feel in front of the camera, she is still conscious of performing `on-screen' in order to achieve an effect in the viewers at home; this dictates the pattern of behaviour that viewers see

• the issue is about the kind of `reality' that Reality TV is actually transmitting

• Nick Couldry's (2003,2004) suggestion that Reality TV exploits & develops rituals of performance is surely valid

• because behaviour is conditioned by the knowledge that it is enacted before a TV audience, its language & quality is different from everyday life; it is performance in a different key; rather than reflecting reality, Reality TV reflects how rituals of behaviour meant to convey reality are performed for TV transmission & consumed in consumer culture

• the matter of empirical research is why should Reality TV should appeal to us

Proposition 1: Reality TV calls upon the audience to decode a cultural genre by comparing it with `real life'

• as consumers of images & representations we are constantly engaged in trying to separate what is true from what is false, what is real & what is an illusion; showing a piece of life on TV engages us as it invites us to decode the rituals of TV performance & try to separate them from everyday emotions & responses

• Big Brother is a puzzle of cosmetic emotions, staged responses, calculated initiatives & uncontrollable passions - the same puzzle that the audience is engaged in as the condition of life

Proposition 2: Reality TV is a spectacular version of the power relations the audience experiences in everyday life

• following Foucault (1977, 1979), one might suggest that many positions that we present in everyday life reflect how we are positioned in relation to limited cultural, political, economic & social resources

• Couldry (2004) argues that part of the attraction of watching contestants under the microscope in shows like Big Brother is that the audience is used to behaving themselves in everyday life under observation

• the power games played out on screen represent the same conflicts that we face in ordinary life

• school and workplace have developed their own technologies of monitoring behaviour; our aggressive and sexual instincts can only be expressed in controlled places; we live in a society of observation & governance

• in governance developed in Western democracy, Reality shows are popular as they dramatize the human condition; they are metaphors for absurd problems we experience in our lives as `governed individuals' under observation

Proposition 3: Reality TV is pure escapism, allowing us to forget our own cares and worries by observing the antics of others as they seek to gain our attention and sympathy

• showing modern life as a series of opportunities & traps, this proposition invites us to regard Reality TV as an expression of the carnival tradition in the centre of `McDonaldized' society

• the concept of McDonaldization was defined by the American sociologist George Ritzer (1992) & means application & colonization of principles of predictability, calculation, control & efficiency into everyday life; the advantages: conditions of life are experienced as more uniform & dealing with them is more convenient as everyone knows what to expect; the disadvantages: the standardization of behaviour is experienced as flattening, for many it is also boring

• Mikhail Bakhtin (1968) suggested a way in which human societies fight tendencies of standardization: periodically, they stand this order on its head; he examined Carnival as a culture of escape, resistance & tension release: carnival takes `play' from the edge of everyday life & places it into the centre, which allows people to release emotions

• in Bakhtin' s work, the Carnival has a therapeutic effect in off-loading the repressed tensions that accumulate in cultures in which groups and individuals are unequally situated in relation to limited resources - it could be that Reality TV might play the same function of controlled tension release

Doing Cultural Studies 2: The internet

• although internet technology was initiated & applied by the military in the late 1960s, it was unknown 10 years ago

• today the web is everywhere in the developed industrial societies

• a variety of cultural forms such as blogging sites, web cameras, internet telephony have appeared on the web

• development of search engines( Google, Yahoo & MSN) has changed how we consume news & communicate data

• the internet greatly increased the volume of knowledge & information available to the billion or so regular web surfers

• this changed the way knowledge is researched & communicated

• the internet might be said to represent a major development in the enlargement of civil society, providing citizens with a great resource of data that potentially revolutionizes their capacity to take part in society, culture, politics & economy

The Red Guard, the panopticon and the web

• the internet strengthens democracy as it poses many problems for governments which want to dominate through central control of the police, the military, the economy & the media

• the liberization of economy, culture & society in China since the mid-1990s coincided with the expansion of the web; the Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong governed Chinese Communism in the 1940s with a rod of iron based on Bolshevik rules of inflexible central control

• the notorious Cultural Revolution of 1965 & 1975 demanded a return to fundamental Communist Party rules; Western fashion, literature, political ideas that conflicted with communist state were forbidden; the youth movement of the Red Guard was encouraged to promote the values of the Cultural Revolution by rooting them in their communities

• from today's point of view, the Chinese Cultural Revolution seems authoritarian & punitive

• Michael Foucault (1977) used the panopticon as a metaphor for the disciplined society in the 19th century

• the panopticon is a central observation tower, developed in copies of the ideal Victorian prison, from which prison officials are able to monitor the behaviour of inmates round the clock

• Foucault argued that panopticon is a metaphor for a field of central discourses that emerged in the 19th century which worked to regulate behaviour: the Victorian taboo around sexuality was only possible because sexual practice was constantly being monitored through speech & texts

• the conservative elements remained in government after Mao's death; however, since Tiananmen, even hardline Party leaders & officials have realized that globalization fatally restricts their power to act as they please

• the web is important in globalization, in China its growth makes it harder for the Party elite to impose central control

• there is also a dark side to the expansion of the internet: its growth created new opportunities for the development of spam-email & internet viruses, channels for pornography, paedophile rings, cultural stereotyping of racial hatred, etc.

Doing Cultural Studies 3: The mobile phone

• over 10 years ago, the development of mobile phones provided a similar revolution in mass communicational & popular culture; text dating emerged as a new popular phenomenon; the use of mobile phones & cameras became a significant means of exchanging family photographs

• mobile phones freed mass information & entertainment from fixed & dedicated places of broadcasting & reception

• new cultural genres emerged around mobile phones brands & service like Ericsson, Nokia, Vodafone & Orange

• web browsers turned mobile phone into a type of newspaper; the new mobile multi-media services became searched after status symbols & thus a novel element in cultural politics

• mobile phones are associated with new types of intrusion into public space - on public trains & buses they have been used as an extension of both office & domestic space; their use on planes interferes with signalling & is a flying risk

• mobile phones are a new way of sending & receiving information; although they are widely condemned for spreading `contentless culture' *empty conversations about nothing), they carry great potential for extending active citizenship

Multiple modernities

• because modern culture is super-dynamic, the curriculum in Cultural Studies must be in a state of constant change

• although it is correct to describe modern culture as super-dynamic, concrete cultural analysis reveals different rates of speed among groups - this is because people are situated in different relations of scarcity with respect to economic, political, technological, cultural & communication sources; some will be more used to living with dynamism than others

• because of this it is probably preferable to use the term “multiple modernities” to refer to the diverse patterns of lived experience in relation to the speed of life in modern culture

• the adjective `multiple' is meant to recognize plural character of cultural, technological, economic & social experience

• it is a defence against exaggerating the uniformity of culture in the explanations of modern culture

• the ethnic, sexual & religious mix of modern culture makes it risky to attribute unity to national cultures; cultural & postcolonial theorists argue that it is now necessary to examine cultures in terms of `difference' & `the other'

• within Western national traditions considerable variation with respect to ethnic belonging, sexual identity & religious belief are tolerated; multiple modernities generate questions about the nature of cultural belonging & solidarity

• while it is doubtless true that never was only one way of being British, there has never been as much internal diversity & variation as now

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