Stuart Hall
02 March 2022 / Beyond Containment & Resistance: Culture Industry & Popular Culture
Take a Minute///
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0tU18Ybcvk
Agenda
Check-in
What song has been getting you through this week?
New Business
Main points
Key words
Questions for discussion
Map of Main Points:
“The Culture Industry” - Horkheimer & Adorno
The culture industry has taken over and made everything uniform: organization and management planning is necessary as “identical needs” are needed in mass amounts to satisfy all. The lack of resistance to this shows that it was, in fact, based “on consumer need.”
The argument: standardized products make standardized people.
This creates a cycle of manipulation: the system creates more which the consumer buys into, and on and on. Every consumer is accounted for through “statistics” so that “none may escape” (408). The eternal consumer is produced (413).
“A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself” (p. 407). (IE: TV show with family/nice house/fence/dog/etc → watching → buying into the “American Dream”)
Technological power & economic power go hand in hand.
Productions become an extension of the “real world”
Cultural products → profit → consumers→ adapt to capitalist system
Culture industry is a system on non-culture, the negation of style (411). Art becomes commodified and used to sustain the system.
Because of this, reality and entertainment become one; entertainment becomes as depressing as the everyday world. Nice.
Clarifying Qs: “The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises…which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached…(412).”
I want to relate this quote back to the point about leisure being akin to work: is the argument that leisure does not exist or the culture industry individual is so consenting that true leisure does not exist (I suppose I mean to say, is leisure here a mental or physical role?)?
What is the difference between non-culture and chaos culture?
There are comparisons between US film and fascist Germany…which are meant to be viewed as contextual. Nevertheless, how and in what ways does this article relate to today? What does this say about today’s culture within the U.S.
“Deconstructing the Popular” - Hall
Between the 1880s-1920s, a structural change occurred that reconstituted the terrain of political struggle (as opposed to just shifting relations). Traditional “popular culture” comes from this time period and Hall argues that historically examining popular culture must be done within a (time) period that resembles our own. The scenario:
The popular, commercial press connected the dominant and dominated classes.
Popular culture in the postwar period experienced an intense rupture in the cultural relations between classes AND new cultural apparatuses.
Technological revolution monopolizes cultural industries.
Popular culture is the place of transformation, a constant tension of containment and resistance, and a constantly changing field whose main focus of study is the relationship between hegemony and culture. This should be imagined as a verb (p. 356, second para). This is the definition Hall likes.
Relations of control and subordination constantly shift.
Alternative popular culture can not exist as a whole, autonomous culture outside of the power/domination of culture (349)
But, people are not totally autonomous or totally encapsulated. Hall argues that people can see the ways reality is repurposed in cultural industries; but, this industry has the power to constantly work on the individual, which reworks interior feelings and perceptions. This is what cultural power means.
In other words, people are always connected and linked to society and constantly negotiating cultural struggle. Culture & class are related but not interchangeable.
Clarifying Qs:
How does this relate to hegemony?
What is the relationship between material power and ideological power?
“Encoding/Decoding” - Hall
Limitations of the traditional conceptualization of mass communication process
Linearity of sender/messages/receiver
Concentration on level of message exchange
Absence of a structured conception of different moments as a complex structure of relations
Hall’s four stage-process of mass communication
Process is produced and sustained through the linked, but distinct, moments of production, circulation, distribution/consumption, and reproduction
The purpose of each practice in the process is to produce encoded meanings and messages
Circulation (how the message is transmitted) and distribution (how the message is interpreted) occur in a discursive form
For the circuit of communication to be completed, the discourse produced must be translated into social practices
“Raw” forms of historical events cannot go through the communications process, they must be turned into a “message form”
The television communicative process
Broadcasting institutions are required to produce a programme
Production constructs encoded messages
Within this process there are two determinate moments
Encoding/meanings structure 1: broadcasting structures employ a code and this yields a message
Decoding/meanings structure 2: how the message is interpreted by audience, and how this interpretation features into social practices
Encoding and decoding may not be perfectly aligned, leads to distortions/misunderstandings
Visual discourse is only a sign for a referent (the actual thing), but representation sometimes appears real because of codes
All codes are constructed and actually quite arbitrary with respect to the real thing but there are naturalized codes and iconic signs (visual codes) which appear natural
Hall hopes that the discussion of codes can clarify the meaning of some terms in linguistic theory
Denotation: widely equated with the literal meaning of a sign; confused with a literal transcription of “reality” in language, especially when visual discourse is used; is thought of as a “natural sign” (not an encoded one)
Connotation: refers to less fixed and more conventionalized and changeable, associative meanings, which clearly vary from instance to instance and therefore must depend on the intervention of codes
Hall uses the terms for analytical purposes, but recognizes that in the real world signs will have both denotative and connotative aspects
Barthes’ example of a sweater: already coded signs, at the most connotative level, may take on more ideological dimensions
Connotative codes are not equal: there is a dominant cultural order
Hall brings up back to misunderstandings: broadcasters worry that their audiences have failed to understand messages as the broadcasters have intended
There is “no necessary correspondence” between encoding and decoding; any articulation between the two is constructed
Three hypothetical decoding positions
Dominant-hegemonic position: when the viewer decodes the message the way the broadcasters have intended; the viewer is operating inside the dominant code; this happens in the case of a “perfectly transparent communication”
Professional code: the particular choice of presentational occasions and formats, the selection of personnel, the choice of images, the staging of debates…all the “neutral-technical” aspects of broadcasting which operate within the dominant code
Negotiated position: mixture of accepting and rejecting elements: readers acknowledge the dominant message, but do not accept everything the way the encoder intended
Oppositional position: consumer understandings the literal meaning of a message, they form an interpretation that is the exact opposite of the intended meaning.
“What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture” - Hall
Colonel West’s genealogy of the moment: three coordinates
The displacement of hegemony of European models of high culture
Emergence of US as world power and center of global cultural production, which signals also a shift in the definition of culture as “high” to “mainstream,” “popular” culture
Decolonization, followed by civil rights struggles by decolonized people
Hall’s qualifications to West’s genealogy
Ambiguities in the shift from Europe to America
The cultural globalization in progress contains the “global postmodern”
Global Postmodernism is fascinated by sexual, cultural, racial, ethnic difference as opposed to “high culture’s” inability to speak about difference
Global postmodernism’s goals are met by attempts to restore the canon of western civilization
Hall’s deconstruction of popular culture
Popular culture’s base is the experiences, pleasures, memories of the people
Stallybrass and White’s The Politics and Poetics of Transgression maps the high and low cultures in psychic forms, in the human body, in space, and in the social order
The role of the popular in popular culture is to root popular forms in the experiences of popular communities that are subordinate but which resist its status as low and as outside
Contradictions: Popular culture has become the dominant form of global culture and it is a scene of commodification, of control over narratives in the hands of established cultural bureaucracies
Black popular culture as a site of contradiction: rooted in popular experience but able to be expropriated
Black popular culture manages to create other modes of representation
Style, music, and the body are central features of diasporic traditions
Black popular culture is overdetermined by inheritances and diasporic conditions; no pure forms, rather products of cross-cultural engagement
Weaknesses of “essentializing moment”
This moment sees difference as a mutually exclusive, autonomous one; cannot grasp the hybridity of the diaspora aesthetic
This moment naturalizes historical categories
Experience is privileged, representation is casted aside
Concluding thoughts on popular culture
Popular culture (because of its commodification and stereotyping) is not where we find the truth about our identity or experience
The terrain of the popular does not contain distinct boundaries of the low and high
Key Words
Culture Industry
Cultural production becomes uniform and factory-like, to which society buys into (in a keeping up with the jones like mentality, from what I understand) and subdues their imagination, creativity, and true art.
Conspicuous production: everyone is accounted for in a culture industry, and price differences are not reflective of factual values or the meaning of the products themselves.
Pseudo-individuality: the individual is an illusion in the culture industry.
Deconstructing the Popular:
Popular culture:
As related to the masses (in a manipulative/debased way, Hall is not a fan of this definition and uses popular differently, but does not entirely dismiss it. Does not believe in the working class as passive consumers).
All the things the people do that defines their way of life. (But, this is too descriptive and does not take into account time periods and the forces/relations that exist with “things” that make it popular or periphery culture.
“This looks, in any particular period, at those forms and activities which have their roots in the social and material conditions of particular classes; which have been embodied in popular traditions and practices” (355).
Cultural dopes: if people enjoy this type of popular products then they themselves are debased or in a permanent state of false consciousness. This is a purely passive outake on people.
Linguistic ventriloquism: popular culture is neither this nor that, and is communicated the same way. Dominant language is combined with working class language - maintaining roots to the vernacular and thereby the “popular”.
Tradition: the way elements of popular culture are linked together/articulated.
“Encoding/Decoding”
Message form: the discursive form in which a historical event is presented in media; this form complies with the aural-visual forms of television discourse
Encoding/meanings structure 1: broadcasting structures employ a code and this yields a message
Decoding/meanings structure 2: how the message is interpreted by audience, and how this interpretation features into social practices
distortions/misunderstandings: lack of symmetry between the encoding and decoding (between the meaning the encoder produced and how the receiver understood the message)
Naturalized codes: codes that appear to not be constructed because they widely distributed and learned very early on
Iconic signs (visual codes): appear more natural than linguistic ones because they are widely distributed and appear to possess some of the qualities of the referent
Denotation: widely equated with the literal meaning of a sign; confused with a literal transcription of “reality” in language, especially when visual discourse is used; is thought of as a “natural sign” (not an encoded one)
Connotation: refers to less fixed and more conventionalized and changeable, associative meanings, which clearly vary from instance to instance and therefore must depend on the intervention of codes
Dominant cultural order: a society’s imposition of its classification of the social and cultural and political world. Events that run counter to the dominant cultural order must be rearticulated to fit the dominant order. It is possible to reorder or decode an event within a non-dominant meaning.
Dominant-hegemonic position: when the viewer decodes the message the way the broadcasters have intended; the viewer is operating inside the dominant code; this happens in the case of a “perfectly transparent communication”
Professional code: the particular choice of presentational occasions and formats, the selection of personnel, the choice of images, the staging of debates…all the “neutral-technical” aspects of broadcasting which operate within the dominant code
Negotiated position: mixture of accepting and rejecting elements: readers acknowledge the dominant message, but do not accept everything the way the encoder intended
Oppositional position: consumer understandings the literal meaning of a message, they form an interpretation that is the exact opposite of the intended meaning
“What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture”
Global postmodern: a shift from high culture to popular culture (everyday practices of ordinary people). This shift opens up a space for struggle over cultural hegemony. Hall is interested in how the global postmodern can help shift the disposition of power and make difference visible.
Black popular culture: the culture of the black community, their perseverance in the face of struggle, black aesthetic, and black counter-narratives. Despite being rooted in the experience of the people, black popular culture can be expropriated, but it still manages to create other modes of representation. Style, music, and the body have become central features of diasporic traditions. These features are overdetermined by inheritances and the conditions of diaspora, so that cultural forms are not pure but rather products of cross-cultural engagement.
Media/Discussion
The Culture Industry:
1-3-All Activity:
Let’s join the debate posed in the editor’s introduction: how does this article fit into today’s culture/society? Does it? What has expanding media/entertainment done to the argument? Are we all pseudo-individuals?
Is the violence of the “top” actually open? Do we *see* it? Has this power grown and, if so, can we not consent?
How is encoding/decoding work in relation to the Culture Industry?
Deconstructing the Popular:
Does popular culture change more quickly in this day and age? What are the consequences of this to Hall’s argument, if any?
How does this article speak with/to/against “The Culture Industry.” How is culture industry similar/different within these two articles?
“Encoding/Decoding”
How does Hall’s four-stage process of mass communication address the critique of the traditional model as being too linear in its conception of the process of communication (where we have a sender/message/receiver)? How does Hall’s model identify the complexities within each of the components (sender/message/receiver)?
In Slack’s article “The Theory and Method of Articulation in Cultural Studies,” Hall is quoted as arguing that some articulations are “lines of tendential force” which serve as powerful barriers for potential rearticulation. Communicative institutions are said to be lines of tendential force. How does “Encoding/Decoding” help us understand communications as perpetuating the dominant cultural order?
“What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture”
Using Hall’s definition of black popular culture, how does black popular culture present a challenge/rebuttal to what Hall identifies as the “weaknesses” of the “essentializing moment”?
Despite the expropriated and inauthentic forms in which black people have been represented, black popular culture continues to produce counter-narratives/modes of representation. Can we think of current examples of these modes of representation? Can we think of these as re-articulations and/or decodings?
Media:
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds gives the 2022 Condition of the State address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CT59Hl71Ozo
Time span: 17:57-21:55
In groups, how does the clip of Gov. Reynolds’ address relate to the main claims of your assigned article?
Group 1: Culture Industry
Group 2: Deconstructing the Popular
Group 3: Encoding/Decoding
Group 4: What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture
MEME:
Group 5: How does the meme/meme culture fit within our readings/media clip, specifically Culture Industry and Deconstructing the Popular? I think Shannon’s question from the blog can also be posed here: If popular culture can be defined as a terrain of struggle, are the publics engaged in these struggles getting smaller and smaller? What do they look like? How is this/not a version of cultural production Abby discusses in her post?
Another Example:
Glenn Houlihan also has a great media example and questions if we want to explore further!! (RE: the superbowl half time show). https://stuarthall2022.blogspot.com/2022/03/what-is-this-super-in-super-bowl.html
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