Introduction and Reflection of Popular Culture Class on 1/23/12
I feel fortunate to be in Dr. Wexler’s class in Popular Culture because of the increasingly difficulty of registering due to budget cuts in education, Dr. Wexler’s knowledge and unique presentation of the material, and this is a splendid course to reinforce my knowledge of Major Critical Theories (English 436) which I took a year ago with Dr. Wexler. In our first class this week we had a discussion on defining Popular Culture and watching a clip of the film American Psycho, which is art emblematic of Popular Culture. Popular Culture was defined in class in different ways:
1. A snapshot of society.
2. Spirit of the times. (Zeitgeist).
3. A pattern of human activity and symbolic structures that give them significance. Determined by mass media. Depends on symbolic signs.
Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan in their introductory Chapter, “The politics of Culture,” define it broadly as “language and the arts, but it also includes the regularities, procedures, and rituals of human life in communities.” In our text book for this course, Cultural Studies, by Chris Barker, Chapter 2 deals with “Questions of Culture and Ideology” introducing the concepts of articulation, culturalism, hegemony, ideology, marxism, mass culture, popular culture, structuralism, poststructuralism, social formation and structuralism. Many of the theorists behind these theories are discussed in the manner of how their discourse relates to culture. Marxist influence overlaps many of these theorists such as Louis Althusser, John Fiske Gramisci, and Williams, just as Ferdinand de Sausserre, the founding father of semiotics and structuralism, has influenced Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida. Michel Foucault follows as a poststucturalist and “opposes hermeneutic methods that seek to disclose the ‘hidden’ meanings of language” (90). Chapter 3, which I have not finished reading yet, deals also with Laclau and Mouffe deconstructing Marxism, Lacan and Psychoanlaysis, and Wiggenstien. I look forward to reading this illuminating second half of chapter 3 tommorow and reflecting on it.
Back to Rivkin’s and Ryan’s discourse: they see culture generated by those at the top of the social hierarchy such as “the media, television, film, and the like. These are used as “instruments of economic, ethnic, and gender domination.” However, they posit that culture can be influenced from the bottom up in “such forms as music, from African American spirituals to the blues and rock in roll, express energies and attitudes fundamentally at odds with attitudes and assumptions (the deferment of gratification in order better to be able to work, for example) of the capitalist social order” which has the potential of erupting and rocking the social order. An exemplification of this is the 1960’s impact of drugs and music on popular culture, and the recent “Arab Spring uprising, catalyzed by Twitter and Facebook—in essence from below. Gramisci and subsequently Althusser also articulate influences and hegemony from above and below excellently. Our text explains that the furthest a artist is from the mass media and corporations, the more autonomous their products are; hence, they influence from the bottom up.
The film, American Psycho, epitomizes the cultural psychosis and late capitalism of the yuppie’s values during the 1980’s in Manhattan, New York. Patrick Bateman reflects the warped sense of values in commodities that represent social status and power, or late capitalism, possessing no practical use. Repressed anger by Bateman, in this non-nurturing, void less of meaningful values unreality, becomes unraveled in his Id overflows into his shattered and attenuated super-ego, and he becomes a serial killer, invariably unable to sublimate his rage.
