{Culture

Cultural product – what people in a culture makeCultural practice – what people in a culture do

Since the 19th Century the things we do and produce in our culture have been separated into two categories.

High and Low Culture

Scared both by working-class revolutionary movements in Europe and the increasing financial power of the middle-classes in 19th century Britain.

Matthew Arnold

For Arnold, exposure to the ‘best that has been thought and said’ would civilise people. So a section of British cultural production was separated from culture in general and called ‘High’ culture.

Wrote Culture and Anarchy

Civilisation

Because the poor and middle-classes could not read Greek, Arnold chose the best of British culture as a way of civilising the masses.

Exposure to this would make them cultured and less likely to want to have a revolution.

Britishness

Cultural products: Shakespeare, Chaucer etc.

Cultural practices: Theatre, Ballet, Opera, Painting, Literature

The idea develops that exposure to these things made you a ‘better’ person.

High Culture

All aspects of British culture that were not included as High Culture were classes inevitably as Low or Popular Culture.

Very quickly it became accepted that the cultural practises of the working-classes were a bad thing.

Low/Popular Culture

These ideas filter into the education system.

We study high culture in schools but low/popular culture is seen as a bad thing to be discouraged.

Education

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F.R. Leavis (1895 – 1978)

Leavis developed Arnold’s ideas while teaching at Cambridge University.

Came up with the idea of a ‘canon’ of the best English Literature

Studying this made you a better person He was the first to study popular culture

(Scrutiny) but as a warning of its dangers.

The Great Tradition

“After Auschwitz there can be no more poetry.” Adorno.

Theodore Adorno – a Marxist critic. Argued that the commandants of the concentration camps were ‘cultured’ men.

Their acts of utter evil meant the idea that there was a link between high culture and moral goodness was destroyed.

1903-1969

Adorno was part of a group of thinkers called the Frankfurt School.

Like Leavis they hated popular culture They saw it as bland repetitive rubbish

produced by the huge capitalise culture industries.

It numbed the masses into accepting their exploitation by distracting them with trashy pop and genre fiction.

Popular culture as the devil

After the Second World War the first generation of working-class schoolboys to attend the new grammar schools went to Oxford and Cambridge.

They began to question the dismissive attitudes towards the popular culture they had grown up with.

Cambridge in the 1950s

Influential theorist – working class Welsh background.

Argued that we have to consider popular culture if we are to understand a culture as a whole.

Popular culture is part of the cultural conversation of a society (soap operas etc.)

Raymond Williams

Distinguished between Mass Culture and Folk Culture

Mass = cynically produced by huge corporations to appeal to the masses and make money from them

Folk culture = emerges organically from the experience of the lower classes (folk music, street dance, football etc)

Richard Hoggart

So people realised that we cannot just dismiss popular culture

In the 1970s thinkers began to take it seriously

Subjects such as media studies, communication studies, cultural studies appear on the curriculum alongside the traditional High Cultural courses.

The birth of the subject

Postmodern ways of looking at cultural production saw no need to divide it into high and low and say one should be taught as it made you a better person, and the other resisted as something bad.

It took popular culture seriously – Hollywood, comics, pop music, shopping (communication studies?)

Postmodern cultural forms refused to be split into high or low – Pavarotti on TOTP? Bob Dylan studied at university?

Postmodernism and Culture