Culture Theory and Popular Culture Essay

The subscribe of nuance has, over the last a couple of(prenominal) years, been quite dramatically trans clayed as distrusts of modernity and post-modernity turn in re plazad the to a greater extent(prenominal) farsighted-familiar concepts of political orientation and hegemony which, from the mid-1970s until the mid-1980s, anchored ethnic analysis hard deep down the neo-Marxist subject mapped out by Al thuslyser and Gramsci. Modernity and post-modernity consecrate as well move far beyond the academic field of media or ethnical studies. Hardly star branch of the frauds, hu manities or neighborly sciences has remained untouched by the debates which have go with their presence.They have as well fix their air into the quality press and on to TV, and of trend they have entered the guile school studios ratting and giving shape to the mode in which fine graphics practiti acers including architects, painters and film-makers typeset and execute their encounter. unspoilt or pitiful, to be welcomed or reviled, these refer have corresponded to some sea-change in the way in which ethnical intellectuals and practiti unmatched and only(a)rs experience and test to lowstand the world in the be riped 1980s and into the 1990s. Storey claimed that postmodernism has disturbed some(prenominal) of the old certainties surrounding questions of ethnical place. This work will consider the issues of postmodernism versus modernism in general from the location of the tyros of postmodernism with reference to neat and bad try on. Post-modern heathenish movements firstly emerged in the mid-sixties in painting, architecture, and literary criticism. Pop dodge repugnd modernist art by experimenting with unexampled cultural radiation patterns and contents that embraced commonplace life, ancestor eclecticism, subcultures, outsize number media, and consumerism. Sociologist Daniel Bell was one of the first to shell out up the challenge of post modernism.In The heathen Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) he identified a moral crisis in Western union bound up with the decline of puritan bourgeois culture and the ascendence of a post-modern culture that he described in terms of an esthetic relativism and a hedonic individualism. Yet the most formidable critic of postmodernism and defender of modernity has been German philosopher and heir to the Frankfurt School tradition of searing system Jurgen Habermas. There ar both problems with postmodernism. The first problem comes into focus sightly about the meaning of the term atomization.This is a nateschat which, finished over-usage in recent cultural debates, has become shorn of meaning. Post-modernity has been associated by Fredric Jameson (1984) with the development of a broken, fractured shadow of a man. The tinny shall ca consumptioness of mass culture is, he argues, like a shot reflected in the schizophrenic subject of coeval mass thought. Against Jameson, Stuart hallway (1981) has recently said that it is average this decentring of consciousness which allows him, as a black person, to emerge, divided, yes, except like a shot fully foregrounded on the post-modern stage.So one of the fascinating things about this discussion is to find myself centred at last. Now that, in the postmodern age, you all feel so dispersed I become centred. What Ive thought of as dispersed and garbled comes, paradoxically, to be the representative modern educate This is coming home with a requital (34). These argon, then, two perspectives on the problem of postmodern atomisation. There is Jameson, who looks back nostalgically to the impulse of unity or totality and who sees in this a tolerant of prerequisite for radical governing, a goal to be striven for.And in that location is Hall, who sees in fragmentation something to a greater extent(prenominal) brooding of the ongoing and historical condition of subaltern groups. Jamesons coordinated man could be taken to be a preFreudian, enlightenment subject, and thus be discredited by those who have paid attention to La crumbs nonion of the fragmented subject. But the physiognomy of post-modern fragmentation is equally non without its own problems. Have we become more fragmented than before? Can we specifically name a time and a place for the fleck of fragmentation? Is fragmentation the anformer(a)(prenominal) of humanity?Or is the representation of fragmentation coincidental with political empowerment and sack? Christopher Norris (1990) has argued that post-modernity (and postmodern fragmentation) stands at the end of the long line of intellectual inquiry which starts with Saussure, whole kit and boodle its way through post-structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis and ends with Baudrillard. In Norriss terms fragmentation is to be at a lower places in like mannerd as marking an authoritative and irreparable break with the unified subject, a break which is straight writ large in culture.Present-day fragmented subjectivity is captured and expressed in post-modern cultural forms, a kind of superficial pick-and-mix of carriages. According to Jameson, however, unfragmented subjectivity, by contrast, produced great works of uncluttered gilded modernism. There is a degree of slippage in the relateions being made here. The problem lies, at least partly, in the imprecise practice session of the word fragmentation. There is a vacillation surrounded by the high psychoanalytic use of Lacan and a much looser notion, one which seems to sum up unsatisfactory aspects of present-day(a) cultural experience.Modernists, however, withal felt un system of logical and fragmented. Fragmentation, as a kind of body structure of feeling, is by no meat the sole property of those living under the shadow of the post-modern condition. Bewilderment, anxiety, panic such expressions can be attri just nowed to any historical moment as it is transposed into cultura l and delicate expression over the last a hundred and fifty years. The category of fragmentation seems to have become either also technical to be of general use (i. e.in Lacans work) or too vague to mean anything more than bust apart. The second question which tycoon be asked of neo-Marxist critics of postmodernity, concerns termination, and the return to a form of scotch reductionism in cultural theory. Fredric Jameson argues that postmodernism is the cultural logic of capital, nevertheless his argument, as Paul Hirst opus about trends in both forward-looking Times and post-modern paper, has suggested, slips from a rigid causal determinism into casual metaphor (45).Jameson, going back to Mandels Late Capitalism, has argued that the kinds of cultural phenomena which power be described as post-modern form part of the logic of advanced or late capitalism. This does away, at a sweep, with the serious issue of explaining the precise nature of the social and ideological relati onships which mediate between the delivery and the sphere of culture and it simultaneously restores a rather old-fashioned notion of last to that place it had occupied prior to Althussers relative autonomy and his idea of determination in the last instance (67).Quoting Lyotard, Harvey (1989) takes up the notion of the pacingrary contract as the hallmark of post-modern social relations. What he sees everyday in production, in the guise of red-hot forms of work, he also sees prevailing in emotional life and in culture, in the temporary contract of love and sexuality. alike(p) Jameson he decries this state and looks forward to something more robust and more reliable, something from which a little fractured sense of self and community energy emerge.He views postmodern culture disparagingly, as esthetical rather than ethical, reflecting an avoidance of politics rather than a rising to the challenge of a politics posed by pertly or changing conditions of production. disdain thei r sweeping rejection of post-modern writing, both Jameson and Harvey take receipts of the conceptual and methodological breadth build in these theories to circumvent (or short-circuit) the key problems which have arisen in cultural studies in the crusade to specify and under-stand the social relations which connect culture to the conditions of its production.Their conceptual leap into a critique of postmodernism allows these writers to avoid confronting more directly the place of Marxism in cultural studies from the late 1980s into the 1990s, a moment at which Marxism cannot be seen in terms distinct than those of eclipse or decline. Postmodernism exists, therefore, as something of a convenient bete noire.It allows for the default of the logic of cultural studies, if we take that logic to be the problematizing of the relations between culture and the economy and between culture and politics, in an age where the field of culture appears to be increasingly cavernous and where b oth politics and economics might even be seen, at one level, as being conducted in and through culture. Structuralism has replaced old orthodoxies with new ones. This is sp argon in its rereading of texts highly placed indoors an already existing literary or aesthetic hierarchy.Elsewhere it constructs a new hierarchy, with Hollywood classics at the top, followed by selected advert images, and girls and womens magazines rounding it off. Other forms of representation, especially symphony and dance, are missing altogether. Andreas Huyssen in his 1984 introduction to postmodernism draws attention to this high structuralist resource for the works of high modernism, especially the writing of James Joyce or Mallarme.There is no doubt that centre stage in critical theory is held by the immaculate modernists Flaubertin BarthesMallarme and guileaud in Derrida, Magritte in FoucaultJoyce and cheataud in Kristevaand so on ad infinitum (Huyssen, 198439). He argues that this reproduces unh elpfully the old distinction between the high arts and the low, little serious, emergeular arts.He goes on to color Pop in the broadest sense was the circumstance in which a notion of the post-modern first took shapeand the most meaning(a) trends within postmodernism have challenged modernisms dispirited hostility to mass culture. soaring theory was simply not outfit to craft with multilayered tonic. Nor did it ever show much exuberance about this set of forms, perhaps because pop has never signified within one discrete discourse, but instead combines images with performance, medicine with film or video, and pin-ups with the magazine form itself (Huyssen, 198416).In recent article, where Hebdige (1988) engages directly with the question of postmodernism, he disavows the playful elements in Subcultureand, more manifestly, in the new fashion and agency magazines. In contrast with what he sees promptly as an excess of fashion, a exultation of artifice and a strong cultural preference for pastiche, Hebdige seeks out the reassuringly real. He suggests that the slick joky tone of postmodernism, especially that found on the pages of The Face, represents a disengagement with the real, and an evasion of social responsibility.He therefore insists on a return to the world of hunger, ontogenesis and oppression and with it a resurrection of unfragmented, recognizable subjectivity. He fleetingly engages with an important characteristic of the post-modern condition, that is, the death of subjectivity and the emergence, in its place, of widespread social schizophrenia. Hebdige seems to be saying that if this rupturing of identity is what postmodernism is about, then he would rather turn his back on it.The position of Clement Greenberg in his 1980 visit entitled The Notion of the Post-Modern could be summarized in the following terms modernism in painting has been, since its inception with Manet and the impressionists, a despairing struggle against the encroachm ent of bad taste or kitsch in the demesne of art postmodernism is only the latest name under which commercial bad taste, masquerading as innovative advancedness, challenges the integrity of art. Any deviation from modernism, then, involves a betrayal or corruption of aesthetic standards.Seen from this vantage point, the post-modern cannot be much more than a renewed urge to relax, oddly pervasive after the advent of pop art, with its deleterious effects on the art world. This type of argument (modernisms self-aware mission, to exorcise bad taste from the domain of high art, is instantly as imperative as it ever was) appears in a variety of forms and shapes in the writings of the defenders of modernist uprightness against the infiltrations of commercialism and fashion. This realized art, however, is not in a harmonious universal style as Mondrian was envisaging.It consists mostly in forms of art considered stock(prenominal), sentimental, and in bad taste by most in the beaut iful ruse artworld. Further, because so many people have no interest in hunky-dory wile, it is very much thought that optical art has somehow lost its relevance and potency. concourse ask what the point of art is, and whether it is worthwhile spending public money on art. When people prize of art, they think of pretty subterfuge, and the influence of exquisite Art seems to be in decline. However, although Fine Art seems to be in decline as a cultural force, visual art has more power in culture now than it ever had.Visual art is not all Fine Art. There is a diversity of kinds of art in contemporary culture. Besides Fine Art, there is also Popular Art, foundation Art, and advertising. What Fine Art does for us is just a scurvy part of the total cultural value we get from art. As traditional culture recedes from memory, and technology changes our lifestyles, people look for new values and lifestyles. These new values and lifestyles are carried by the art broadcast over the m ass media and on the products we buy. The mass-media arts rig our heroes and tell us about the good. Advertisements define pleasure and lifestyle.With mass-market goods we dress our bodies and houses in art, thus using art to define who we are. These contemporary visual arts play a large part in organisation our values, fantasies, and lifestyles. However, conventional art histories tend not to treat the other powerful visual arts of our own time beyond Fine Art, namely, Popular Art, Design Art, and advertising. advertizement is not considered art because it is not functionless beyond being aesthetic. Also, the advertising does not typically show personal expressive creativity. So, the Design Arts are typically considered perfect decoration.Popular Art is thought of as in bad taste, banal, sentimental, and so not worthy of consideration either. Since art histories are only looking at good art, they tend not to consider these other arts. Standing as they most often do within the F ine Art art world, art historians use the ideology and sense of artistic value of Fine Art to evaluate all art. From the perspective of the contemporary art world, Popular Art is thought of as a kind of Fine Art that is, bad Fine Art or Fine Art in bad taste. It seems hackneyed and banal to the Fine Art art world.From their perspective, normal taste is bad taste. For example, Osvaldo Yero, an artist who emerged in the 1990s, has based his work on the proficiency and poetics of the plaster figures. These figures, mostly decorations, but also religious images, were perhaps considered the last pant of bad taste. They constituted the epitome of impetuous appropriation of icons from the high culture as well as from mass culture, through in a poor and substitute material par excellence, worked clumsily in a semi-industrial technique and polychromed with pretentious attempts at elegance.They symbolized the triumph of vulgarity, the failure of the aesthetic pedagogics of the masses pr oposed by socialism. By the mid-twenties business and advertising agencies had realized that move style and color choices into the products they made increase consumption. Through the use of advertising and by designing stylistic variety into their products, manufacturers raise things into the category of fashion goods that had before just been utility goods, like towels, bedding, and bathroom fixtures.antecedently these items did not have any style component, but now designers added decoration to their practicable design. This meant that now consumers could choose products not just for function, but also for style. People could now have pink sheets, green toilets, and distressing phones. There is a tension in design style between aesthetic formalist styles like the international style, and design styles that are figurative. Those favoring figurative design tend to think of products as coming in a great variety and designed to approach to the various tastes of consumers.Here t he style of the products are not dictated by function, but by market pressures. This is a march on development of design for sales. This gave rise to what is cognise as niche marketing, where the styling is betokened to a smaller, more specific group than mass marketing is. Thus, they shun the idea of a unified worldwide machine aesthetic. For example, a shave can be pink with flowers on it to target it to female users, and black with ghastly accent lines to target it to male users. The razor is the same, but the razor is packaged with different styling to sell the product to different markets.In designing for niche markets, the styling reflects the class, age group, profession, and aspirations of the target group. This goes hand in hand with advertising, and requires a great deal of research to light upon what these values are and what styling motifs succeed in communicating them. The exemplary text or the single, richly coded image gives way to the textual thickness and the visual density of everyday life, as though the slow, even feeble look of the semiologist is, by the 1980s, out of tempo with the times.The field of postmodernism certainly expresses a frustration, not merely with this seemingly languid pace, but with its increasing inability to make overt connections between the general conditions of life today and the practice of cultural analysis. Structuralism has also replaced old orthodoxies with new ones. This is apparent in its rereading of texts highly placed within an already existing literary or aesthetic hierarchy. Elsewhere it constructs a new hierarchy, with Hollywood classics at the top, followed by selected advertising images, and girls and womens magazines rounding it off.Other forms of representation, particularly music and dance, are missing altogether. Huyssen argues that Pop in the broadest sense was the context in which a notion of the post-modern first took shape, and the most significant trends within postmodernism have cha llenged modernisms relentless hostility to mass culture. High theory was simply not equipped to deal with multilayered pop. References Bell, Daniel. (1976). The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. advanced York prefatorial Books. C. Norris, Lost in the funhouse Baudrillard and the politics of postmodernism, in R.Boyne and A. Rattansi (eds) Postmodernism and Society, London, Macmillan, 1990. Hall, Stuart, Connell, Ian and Curti, Lidia (1981). The unity of current affairs television, in T. Bennett et al. (eds) Popular tv and Film, London BFI. Harvey, David (1989). The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford Blackwell. Hebdige, Dick (1979). Subculture The means of Style, London Routledge. Huyssen, A. (1984). Mapping the postmodern, youthful German Critique 33. Jameson, Fredric (1984). Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism, New Left Review 146.