Culture - debates and history

1. {
Culture
Cultural product – what people in a culture make
Cultural practice – what people in a culture do

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

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

6.  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

7.  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

8.  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

9.  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

10.  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

11. dd
F.R. Leavis (1895 – 1978)

12.  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

13. ‚After Auschwitz there
can be no more poetry.‛
Adorno.

14.  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

15.  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

16.  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

17.  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

18.  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

19.  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

20.  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