Culture Theory and Popular Culture

Last Book Read: Culture Theory and Popular Culture - John Storey

In this book, Storey presents the history of culture studies, with the center of this study being the relationship between high and low culture- that is art and popular entertainment. At the heart of this opposition is the ongoing conflict between elitism and populism. Elitism becomes too exclusive, while populism becomes far too inclusive.

The creation of consumer cultures produced a much more diverse and problematic study of culture. The advent of commercialization also created the view that consumerism severely reduced the authentic value from the products of culture. When is a display of youthful rebellion a commitment to politics or an adoption of the current fashion? This is one of the problems of culture and its commercialization. For instance, in music there is a divide between the art of serious music and the disposability of "pop" music. This pop music is standardized and repeated according to a profitable formula. "Details from one popular song can be interchanged with the details of another. Unlike serious music where each detail expresses the whole, popular music is mechanical in the sense that a given detail can be shifted from one song to another without any real effect on the structure as a whole." One of the most prominent theorists presented by Storey is Adorno. Adorno argues against populism and suggests that the music industry engages in pseudo-individualization, where popular music is "pre-digested" and promotes passive listening. Because life is demanding and promotes the need for escape while leaving little energy to explore that escape, the result is the consumption of pop that requires no active participation. It merely exists "confirming the world as it is." "Serious", authentic art, "offering engagement with the world as it could be" is avoided, as it demands too much from most people. Of course, as Storey notes, these distinctions have become much more complicated. I would argue, for example, that rock music could no longer be viewed as simply "popular", while classical music exists as "art." Now rock music could be viewed as "serious" when compared to the pop music that is based in dance and rap and much more disposable.

Experiencing popular culture "is a selective process, reading across the text from denotation to connotation." The level of reality found in popular culture depends upon the focus of attention given to it."Focus is shifted from the particularity of the narrative to the generality of its themes." In this sense, reality is not denied in favor of escapist fiction, but rather it is the "playing" with reality that produces pleasurable satisfaction. taking a populist standpoint is not very useful for the discreet analysis of popular culture because it is the viewpoint already adopted by the entertainment industry in making it as a commercial product. Here, I would also add, as I've noted before, that populism devalues all values by giving everything the same value and meaning. The result is that nothing can be any better or worse than anything else, only the viewer can decide. But this leaves us in a pure relativistic or nihilistic state, where no meaningful discourse, understanding, or advancement can be made.

Storey also discussed arguments about language, such as J.L. Austin's theories about how language can be performative or constantive, which is merely descriptive. But performative language "brings something into being."

Of course many older theories of pop culture are not as relevant today, in these changing contemporary times. So, the real heart of the book is the discussion of postmodernism. Storey offers an excellent quick, but thorough, description of postmodernism. Once the rebellious avant-garde of modernism achieved canonical status, it soon became clear that another struggle would rise to overcome and subvert the establishment. Postmodernism has been the result, throwing into question the divide that seperated high culture art from low culture pop. Art became intricately interwoven into daily life, rather than remaining aloof and distinct. Pop music, at this point rock, took on a new seriousness and political activism.

Postmodernism is uncertainty. Lyotard theorized that the metanarratives that describe the objective world became fragmented and the postmodern condition has becoem "marked by a crisis in the status of knowledge." "Taste has become irrelevant" and knowledge and intellectuals have lost their status. Baudrillard was also a central theorist of postmodernism, describing a key feature - hyperrealism and "a culture of simulacrum." In the postmodern world we interact with simulacrums, things that are copies with no originals. Simulation has become more real than reality. The ability to distinguish between fiction and reality has declined, as can be seen, for example, in the explosion of "reality-TV". The centers of knowledge have lost their authority of authenticity and truth and that has resulted in "the collapse of the real into hyperrealism." Storey quotes John Docker "Baudrillard offers a classic modernist narrative, history as linear, unidirectional story of decline. But whereas the early twentieth-century high literary modernists could dream of an avant-garde or cultural elite that might preserve the values of the past in the hope of a future seeding and regrowth, no such hope surfaces in Baudrillard's vision of a dying, entropic world. It's not even possible to write in a rational argumentative from, for that assumes a remaining community of reason."

Another key thinker discussed is Federick Jameson, who calls postmodernism the logic or "cultural dominant" of late capitalism. Besides being an ecelectic mix of history and style, postmodernism is a culture of pastiche , a "blank parody" and a"complacent play of historical allusion." It is a culture of "quotations" and "of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense." Storey considers postmodernism as schizophrenic, "locked into the discontinuous flow of perpetual presents. The 'temporal' culture of modernism has given way to the 'spatial' culture of postmodernism. An example of this is prsented in the film thoeries of Jim Collins. He presents Collins' arguments that "the ever-expanding number of texts and technologies is both a reflection of and a significant contribution to the 'array' - the perpetual circulation and recirculation of signs that form the fabric of postmodern cultural life." "This foreground, hyperconcious intertextuality reflects changes in terms of audience competence and narrative technique, as well as a fundamental shift in what constitutes both entertainment and cultural literacy." Storey continues with Jameson's theories that postmodernism is inherently linked to capitalism and intensifies the commercial culture, as everything is judged by economic activity. The "high seriousness" of modernism is replaced by "triviality" Because life itself is aestheticized, there is a loss of "critical distance." Jameson argues that this postmodern world blocks the transition to a socialist society. Also discussed is Marcuse's view of affirmative culture as culture that "invents a new reality." "The promises made with the emergence of capitalism out of feudalism, of a society to be based on equality, justice and progress, were increasingly relegated from the world of the everyday to the world of the affirmative culture."

Storey examines the world of postmodern pop music and televison. Here one could argue that rock music itself is a postmodern hybrid of art and pop. But even within rock there can be a division of artificial and authentic. Goodwin is noted as discussing the use of sampling as a postmodern artifact, "we need categories to add to pastiche, which demonstrate how contemporary pop opposses, celebrates, and promotes the texts it steals from." A more useful discussion, I would argue, than the blantant stealing and recycling that goes on in today's pop, would be the eclectic and extensive sources used by Peter Gabriel and Sting. These artists combine World music with various pop music, as well as literature, psychology, poetry, and their own past lyrical and musical phrasings. As for TV, Storey notes Twin Peaks, The Sopranos, and Lost as examples of polysemic works. Twin Peaks, he writes "is never simply camp - it is never simply anything- continually playing with our expectations, moving the audience, as it does, from moments of parodic distance to moments of emphatic intimacy." The "key point" in understanding "Twin Peaks and postmodernism is that what makes the programme different from other television programmes is not that it produces shifting viewing positions, but that it 'explicitly acknowledges this oscillation and the suspended nature of television viewing."

The discussion continues regarding the plurality of value and the "recognition that there is no absolute catergorical difference between high and popular culture." Although there is lack of fixed points for reference, there is "rigourous, if always contingent, standards." The discussion of postmodernism concludes with globalism, which has has a tremendous impact on the eclecticism of recent history as well as the spread of multi-national capitalism.

So, while postmodernism has, in some way, solved the elitist/populist opposition by mixing high and low cultures, it has also created new problems of critical distance. While I think the populist method is never the answer, postmodernism has shown that everything has the possibility to be art or high culture, popularity itself is not a defining factor. All sources can be used, and reused, meaningfully and artistically. Thus, elitism has lost its narrow-sightedness of strict exclusivity.
While being a difficult and quite dense read, this book presents a good basis for a study of contemporary culture theory and helps define the problems involved in that study.