SCHOOL OF SCIENCE & HUMANITIES

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

UNIT II – SHSB5104
 Introducing key terms to cultural Studies
Subjectivity and Identity:
Hall argues that five major ‗ruptures in the discourses of modern knowledge‘ have
contributed to our understanding of the subject as decentred. These are:
 Marxism
 Psychoanalysis
 Feminism
 The centrality of language
 The work of Foucault

The historical subject of Marxism:

Marxism, it is argued, displaces any notion of a universal essence of personhood that is
the possession of each individual. This is so because ‗men make history, but only on the basis of
conditions not of their own making‘. In other words, a historically specific mode of production
and social relations constitutes subjects in particular ways. Hence, what it is to be a person
cannot be universal. Rather, the production of subjectivity is located in a social formation of a
definite time and place with specific characteristics.
Thus a feudal mode of production is based on the power of barons who own land and
serfs. Consequently the identities of barons and serfs are quite different, not only from each
other, but also from the social relations and identities formed within a capitalist mode of
production. Thus, capitalists employ the ‗free‘ labour of the working class rather than own
slaves. It means to be a baron, a serf, a capitalist and a worker are quite different because of the
specific form of social organization of which they are a part.
Hall‘s interpretation of the Marxist subject could be held to be a simple sociological one
were it not for the significance he attributes to the Althusserism reading of Marx, in which the
place of ideology in the constitution of subjects is central. By the concept of ‗ideology‘ is menat
structures of signification or ‗world views‘ that constitute social relations and legitimate the
interests of the powerful. Crucially, for Althusser, the subject formed in ideology is not unified
Cartesian subject but a shattered and fragmented one.
For Althusser, classes, while sharing certain common conditions of existence, do not
automatically form a core, unified class consciousness. Instead they are cross-cut by conflicting
interests and are formed and unformed in the course of actual historical development. Though I
share similar working conditions with my neighbor, we do not share a homogenous working-
class identity. I am male and she is female; I am black and she is white; I am a liberal and she is
nationalist. The general point here is that subjects are formed through difference as constituted
by the play of signifiers. Thus, what we are is in part constituted by what we are not. Hall‘s
Marxism points to the historically specific character of identity and to a fractured subject formed
in ideology.
Psychoanalysis and Subjectivity:
Hall attributes the next of his ‗decentrings‘ to Freud and the ‗discovery‘ of the
unconscious through psychoanalysis. For Hall, Psychoanalysis has particular significance in
shedding light on how identifications of the ‗inside‘ link to the regulatory power of the
discursive ‗outside‘. Hall, along with many feminists, deploys psychoanalysis to link the ‗inside‘
with the ‗outside‘. He stresses the processes by which discursively constructed subject positions
are taken up by concrete persons. This procedure is achieved through fantasy identifications and
emotional ‗investments‘. Indeed, this contention is central to Hall‘s whole conceptualization of
‗identity‘ as
The point of suture, between on the one hand the discourses and practices which
attempt to ‗interpellate‘, speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of
particular discourses, and on the other hand, the processes which produce
subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be ‗spoken‘. Identities are
thus the points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive
practices construct for us.
According to Freud, the self is constituted in terms of an egos, or conscious rational
mind, a superego, or social conscience, and the unconscious, the source and repository of the
symbolic workings of the mind which functions with a different logic from reason. This view of
personhood immediately fractures the unified Cartesian subject. It suggests that we do and what
we think are the outcome not a rational integrated self but of the workings of the unconscious.
The unconscious is normally unavailable to the conscious mind in any straightforward fashion.
The self is by definition fractured into the ego, superego and unconscious. Thus the
unified narrative of the self is something we acquire over time through entry into the symbolic
order of language and culture. Through processes of identification with others and with social
discourses we create an identity that embodies an illusion of wholeness.
The great strength of psychoanalysis lies in its rejection of the fixed nature of subjects
and sexuality. Instead it concentrates on the construction and formation of subjectivity.
Psychoanalysis also points us to the psychic and emotional aspects of identity through the
concept of identification. By contrast, Nikolas Rose (1996) argues that psychoanalysis is a
historically of being human. He argues that the ―interiority‖ which so many feel compelled to
diagnose is not that of a psychological system. Rather, it is best understood as ―a discontinuous
surface, a kind of infolding of exteriority‖. That is, the ‗inside‘ is formed by the discourses that
circulate on the ‗outside‘.
Language and identity:
Language is not a mirror that reflects an independent object world. Rather, it is a resource
that ‗lends form‘ to ourselves and our world. Here identity is to be understood not as a fixed,
eternal thing, nor as an inner essence of a person to which words refer. Instead the concept of
identity refers to a regulated way of ‗speaking‘ about persons. The idea that identities are
discursive constructions is under pinned by a view of language in which there are no essences to
which language refers and therefore no essential identities. That is, representation does not
‗picture‘ the world but constitutes it for us.
 Signifiers generate meaning not in relation to fixed objects but in relation to other
signifiers. According to semiotic theory, meaning is generated through relations of
difference. Thus, ‗good‘ is meaningful in relation to ‗bad‘.
 The relationship between the sounds and marks of language, the signifiers and what they
are taken to mean, the signified, is not held in any fixed, eternal relationship.
 To think about an independent object world is to do so in language. It is not possible to
escape language in order to be able to view an independent object world directly. Nor can
we attain a God-like vantage point from which to view the relationship between language
and the world.
 Language is relational in character. Words generate meaning not by reference to some
special or essential characteristic of an object or quality. Rather, meaning is produced
through the network of relationships of a language-game in use.
 Any given word includes the echoes or traces of other meanings from other related words
in a variety of contexts. Meaning is inherently unstable and constantly slides away.
 Hence, difference, ‗difference and deferral‘, by which the production of meaning is
continually deferred and added to by the meanings of other words.

The Foucaultian subject:

Foucault is said to have produced a ‗genealogy of the modern subject‘. That is, he has
traced the derivation and lineage of subjects in and through history. Here, the subject is
radically historicized; that is, the subject is held to be wholly and only the product of history.
For Foucault, subjectivity is a discursive production. That is, discourse enables speaking
persons to come into existence. It does this by offering us subject positions from which to
make sense of the world while ‗subjecting‘ speakers to discourse. A subject position is that
perspective or set of regulated discursive meanings from which discourse makes sense. To
speak is to take up a pre-existent subject position and to be subjected to the regulatory power
of that discourse.
Foucault describes a subject that is the product of power which individualizes those
subject to it. For Foucault, power is not simply a negative mechanism of control but is
productive of the self. The disciplinary power of schools, work organizations, prisons,
hospitals, asylums and the proliferating discourses of sexuality produce subjectivity by
bringing individuals into view. They achieve this by naming and fixing subjects in writing
via the discourses of, for example, medicine.
For Foucault, genealogy‘s task ‗is to expose the body totally imprinted by history and the
processed of history‘s destruction of the body‘. The body is the site of disciplinary practices
which bring subjects into being, these practices being the consequences of specific historical
discourses of crime, punishment, medicine, science, sexuality, and so forth. Hence, power is
generative; it is productive of subjectivity.
Foucault concentrates on three disciplinary discourses:
 The ‗sciences‘ which constitute the subject as an object of enquiry.
 Technologies of the self, whereby individuals turn themselves into subjects
 ‗dividing practices‘, which separate the mad from the insane, the criminal from
the lay-abiding citizen, and friends from enemies.

Disciplinary technologies arose in a variety of sites, including schools, prisons, hospitals and
asylums. They produced what Foucault called ‗docile bodies‘ that could be ‗subjected, used,
transformed and improved.‘
Discipline involves the organization of the subject in space through dividing practices,
training and standardization. It brings together knowledge, power and control. Discipline
produces subjects by categorizing and naming them in a hierarchical order. It does this through a
rationality of efficiency, productivity and ‗normalization‘. In this way, we are produced and
classified as particular kinds of people. Classificatory systems are essential to the process of
normalization and thus to the production of a range of subjects.
Discourses of disciplinary and bio-power can be traced historically. Consequently, we
can locate particular kinds of ‗regimes of the self‘ in specific historical and cultural conjunctures.
That is, different types of subject are the outcome of particular historical and social formations.
Foucault attacks the ‗great myth of the interior‘. He sees the subject as a historically specific
production of discourse with no transcendental continuity from one subject position to another.
This is an anti-essentialist position in which the subject is not unified but fractured into many
‗identities‘.

Popular and Mass Culture

Mass Culture:
Mass culture is a pejorative term developed by both conservative literary critics and
Marxist theorists from the 1930s onwards to suggest the inferiority of commodity-based
capitalist culture as being inauthentic, manipulative and unsatisfying. This inauthentic mass
culture is contrasted to the authenticity claimed for high culture (as well as to an imagined
people‘s culture). In this context high culture is understood to be the peak of civilization and the
concern of an educated minority. Further, both the authentic culture of the people and the
minority culture of the educated elite are said to have been lost to the standardization processes
of industrialized ‗mass culture‘.
For traditional cultural and literary criticism the romantic idea of the ‗artistic object‘, produced
by the ‗artistic soul‘, is allied to a sense of the complexity and authenticity of the work of art. It
is argued that the quality work is distinctive in the subtlety, complexity and adequacy of its
formal expression of content. This in turn requires the necessary skills and work by readers in
order to access a genuine aesthetic experience. By contrast, mass culture is seen as superficial
and unsatisfying as a consequence of both its formal inadequacy and its production by capitalist
corporations seeking to maximize their profits by selling to the lowest common denominator.
Thus, ‗mass culture‘ is held to be inauthentic because it is not produced by ‗the people‘,
manipulative because its primary purpose is to be purchased and unsatisfying because it requires
little work to consume and thus fails to enrich its consumers.
These are the views of conservative critics like F.R. Leavis but they are not dissimilar from those
of the Marxist-inspired Frankfurt School on this issue. Thus, Adorno and Horkheimer coined the
term ‗the culture industry‘ to suggest that culture is now a production of capitalist corporations
who produce commodities that purport to be democratic, individualistic and diversified, but are
in actuality authoritarian, conformist and highly standardized. Thus mass culture is mass
deception. This involves not just ‗meanings‘ but the structuring of the human psyche into the
conformist ways of the ‗authoritarian personality‘.
On the whole, cultural studies has argued against seeing culture as ‗mass culture‘ and has
adopted the more sympathetic concept of ‗popular culture‘. This is in part because the
judgements of quality on which the idea of mass culture is founded are derived from an
institutionalized and class-based hierarchy of cultural taste. Indeed, judgements about aesthetic
quality are always open to contestation so that universal evaluations are not sustainable. The
concepts of beauty, harmony, form and quality can be applied as much to a machine as to a novel
or a painting and are thus culturally relative. Elite cultural critics have commonly by-passed
popular cultural forms for social as much as ‗creative‘ reasons.
Rather than be in the business of aesthetic judgement, cultural studies has tended to develop
arguments that revolve around the social and political consequences of constructing and
disseminating specific discursive constructions of the world. Nevertheless, the relativity of
‗value‘ within cultural studies leads to a dilemma. On the one hand, there is a desire to legitimize
popular and nonWestern culture as valuable in the face of a traditional Western high cultural
aesthetic disdain. On the other hand, there is a reluctance to sanction a position in which we are
disbarred from making judgements about the products of the culture industries. Of course,
cultural studies does make value judgements about cultural products. The critics of mass culture
tend to over-emphasize aesthetics and the internal construction of cultural products assuming
audience reaction from an analysis of texts. This is a position challenged by cultural studies
research into cultural consumption which argues that meanings are produced, altered and
managed at the level of use by people who are active producers of meaning. That is, rather than
being inherent in the commodity, meaning and value are constructed through actual usage. In
general, critics who stress the production of culture talk of ‗mass culture‘ while writers who
stress consumption prefer to call it ‗popular culture‘.
Popular Culture:
Popular culture studies is the academic discipline studying popular culture. It is generally
considered as a combination of communication studies and cultural studies. Academic
discussions on popular culture started as soon as contemporary mass society formed itself and
the views on popular culture that were developed then still influence contemporary popular
culture studies.
Following the social upheavals of the 1960s, popular culture has come to be taken more
seriously as a terrain of academic enquiry and has also helped to change the outlooks of more
established disciplines. Conceptual barriers between so-called high and low culture have broken
down, accompanying an explosion in scholarly interest in popular culture, which encompasses
such diverse mediums as comic books, television and the Internet. Reevaluation of mass culture
in the 1970s and 1980s has revealed significant problems with the traditional view of mass
culture as degraded and elite culture as uplifting. Divisions between high and low culture have
been increasingly seen as political distinctions rather than defensible aesthetic or intellectual
ones (Mukerji & Schudson 1991:1-2).
Traditional theories of popular culture:
The theory Mass society:
Mass society formed itself during the 19th-century industrialization process through the
division of labor, the large-scale industrial organization, the concentration of urban populations,
the growing centralization of decision making, the development of a complex and international
communication system and the growth of mass political movements. The term "mass society",
therefore, was introduced by anticapitalist, aristocratic ideologists and used against the values
and practices of industrialized society.
As Alan Swingewood points out in The Myth of Mass Culture (1977:5-8), the aristocratic
theory of mass society is to be linked to the moral crisis caused by the weakening of traditional
centers of authority such as family and religion. The society predicted by José Ortega y Gasset,
T.S. Eliot and others would be dominated by philistine masses, without centers or hierarchies of
moral or cultural authority. In such a society, art can only survive by cutting its links with the
masses, by withdrawing as an asylum for threatened values. Throughout the 20th century, this
type of theory has modulated on the opposition between disinterested, pure autonomous art and
commercialized mass culture.
The theory of culture industry:
Diametrically opposed to the aristocratic view would be the theory of culture industry
developed by Frankfurt School theoreticians such as Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and
Herbert Marcuse. In their view, the masses are precisely dominated by an all-encompassing
culture industry obeying only to the logic of consumer capitalism. Gramsci's concept of
hegemony (see: cultural hegemony), that is, the domination of society by a specific group which
stays in power by partially taking care of and partially repressing the claims of other groups,
does not work here anymore. The principle of hegemony as a goal to achieve for an oppressed
social class loses its meaning. The system has taken over; only the state apparatus dominates.
The theory of progressive evolution:
A third view on popular culture, which fits in the liberal-pluralist ideology and is often
called "progressive evolutionism", is overtly optimistic. It sees capitalist economy as creating
opportunities for every individual to participate in a culture which is fully democratized through
mass education, expansion of leisure time and cheap records and paperbacks. As Swingewood
points out (1977:22), there is no question of domination here anymore. In this view, popular
culture does not threaten high culture, but is an authentic expression of the needs of the people.
Contemporary popular culture studieseory of mass society:
If we forget precursors such as Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes for a moment, popular
culture studies as we know them today were developed in the late seventies and the eighties. The
first influential works were generally politically left-wing and rejected the "aristocratic" view.
However, they also criticized the pessimism of the Frankfurt School: contemporary studies on
mass culture accept that, apparently, popular culture forms do respond to widespread needs of
the public. They also emphasized the capacity of the consumers to resist indoctrination and
passive reception. Finally, they avoided any monolithic concept of mass culture. Instead they
tried to describe culture as a whole as a complex formation of discourses which indeed
correspond to particular interests, and which indeed can be dominated by specific groups, but
which also always are dialectically related to their producers and consumers.
A nice example of this tendency is Andrew Ross's No Respect. Intellectuals and Popular
Culture (1989). His chapter on the history of jazz, blues and rock does not present a linear
narrative opposing the authentic popular music to the commercial record industry, but shows
how popular music in the U.S., from the twenties until today, evolved out of complex
interactions between popular, avant-garde and commercial circuits, between lower- and middle-
class kids, between blacks and whites.
Traces of the theory of culture industry:
Still the traditional views have a long life (overview based on Clem Robyns, 1991). The
theory which has been abandoned most massively is the monolithic, pessimistic view on the
culture industry of the Frankfurt School. However, it is still hotly debated. The criticism raised
can be summarized in three main arguments. First of all, the culture industry theory has
completely abandoned the Marxist dialectic conception of society. Every impulse, according to
this view, comes from above. Resistance and contradiction are impossible, and the audience is
manipulated into passivity. Alan Swingewood and others emphasize that the Frankfurt theory has
to be seen in the light of left-wing frustrations about the failure of proletarian revolutions early
this century, and the easy submission of the European nations to fascism.
A second reproach is that this view may be as elitist as its aristocratic counterpart. Both
establish the lonely, autonomous, avant-garde intellectual as the only light in a zombie society.
Thus the former Marxists arrive at an uncritical praise of the elitist and antirevolutionary upper-
class culture. This brings us to a third argument, already made in the sixties by Umberto Eco
(1988). In a state-dominated mass society, the lonely, lucid, intellectual Übermensch can only
retreat in his ivory tower. The historicity of the contemporary situation is not taken into account,
so its internal contradictions are ignored, and thus revolution can only be seen as purely utopian.
The culture industry theory, therefore, would lead to passivity and thereby becomes an objective
ally of the system it pretends to criticize.
It is of course mainly the influence exercised by the Frankfurt School which matters here:
not all of their texts present the same rigid view. In Das Schema der Massenkultur (1973-
86:331), for instance, Adorno discusses a "nucleus of individuality" that the culture industry
cannot manipulate, and which forces her to continuously repeat her manipulation.
However questioned this view on popular culture may be, it still leaves some traces, for
instance, in theories depicting narrative as necessarily ideologically conservative, like Charles
Grivel's Production de l'intérêt romanesque (1973). Such theories see dominant ideology as
purely a matter of messages, propagated in this case through the forms of narrative fiction. Thus
they easily arrive at an exaltation of experimental literature as necessarily revolutionary.
However, they may neglect the fact that the ideology is never simply in the message, but in the
position of the message in the general social discourse, and in the position of its producers in the
social formation.
Other theories easily yielding to monolithic thought stem from the emancipation
movements of oppressed groups. Early feminist theory, for instance, often described society as
universally and transhistorically dominated by patriarchy in every aspect of life, thereby
presenting a pejorative view of the women they claim to defend. As Andrew Ross (1989) argues,
the same remark goes for the widely accepted account of rock history as a continuous
appropriation of black music by a white music industry. Only studies analyzing the cultural
oppression of homosexuality seem to take a less deterministic position.
Contemporary liberal pluralism:
In liberal-pluralist accounts of popular culture, the theorizing on its supposedly liberating,
democratizing function is nowadays most often pushed to the background. This type of criticism,
often produced by people who are also active in popular literary writing themselves, often
amounts to paraphrase and suffers from an uncritical identification with the study object. One of
the main aims of this type of criticism is the establishment of ahistorical canons of and within
popular genres in the image of legitimized culture. This approach, however, has been accused of
elitism as well.
To put it simply: the intellectual, in this view, can fully enjoy junk culture because of his
or her high culture background, but the average reader can never raise to the learned intellectual
discourse of which he or she is the object. An example of this form of appropriation is Thomas
Roberts's An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (1990). Though Roberts claims to take a distance from
studies of canonical fiction, he justifies his (implicit) decision to impose canonical models on
popular fiction as follows: "If people who read Goethe and Alessandro Manzoni and Pushkin
with pleasure are also reading detective fiction with pleasure, there is more in the detective story
than its critics have recognized, perhaps more than even its writers and readers have recognized"
(1989:5). This illustrates a frequent strategy: the legitimation of popular fiction on the basis of its
use of canonized literary fiction, and of the legitimized public's response to it.
Contemporary apocalyptic thought:
Equally alive is the aristocratic apocalyptic view on mass culture as the destruction of
genuine art. As Andrew Ross (1989:5) writes, a history of popular culture is also a history of
intellectuals, of cultural experts whose self-assigned task it is to define the borders between the
popular and the legitimate. But in contemporary society the dispersed authority is ever more
exercised by "technical" intellectuals working for specific purposes and not for mankind. And in
the academic world, growing attention for popular and marginal cultures threatens the absolute
values on which intellectuals have built their autonomy.
In the sixties, Marshall McLuhan caused wide irritation with his statement that the
traditional, book-oriented intellectuals had become irrelevant for the formulation of cultural rules
in the electronic age. This is not to say that they lost any real political power, which humanist
intellectuals as such hardly ever had. It does mean, however, that they are losing control of their
own field, the field of art, of restricted symbolical production ( Pierre Bourdieu). While in the
19th century, intellectuals managed to construct art as a proper, closed domain in which only the
in-crowd was allowed to judge, they have seen this autonomy become ever more threatened by
20th-century mass society. The main factor here was not the quantitative expansion of
consumption culture, nor the intrusion of commerce into the field of art through the appearance
of paperbacks and book clubs. After all, protecting art from simplicity and commerce was
precisely the task intellectuals set for themselves.
More important is the disappearance of what has been called the "grand narratives"
during this century, the questioning of all-encompassing world views offering coherent
interpretations of the world and unequivocal guides for action. As Jim Collins argues in
Uncommon Cultures (1989:2), there is no master's voice anymore, but only a decentralized
assemblage of conflicting voices and institutions. The growing awareness of the historical and
cultural variability of moral categories had to be a problem for an intellectual class which had
based its position on the defense of secular but transhistorical values.
This brings us to a second problem humanist intellectuals face, that is, the fragmentation
of the public. 19th-century intellectuals could still tell themselves that they were either writing
for their colleagues, or teaching the undifferentiated masses. 20th-century intellectuals face a
heterogeneous whole of groups and mediums producing their own discourses according to their
own logic and interests. Thus they cannot control the reception of their own messages anymore,
and thereby see their influence on the structuring of culture threatened. Many neo-apocalyptic
intellectuals, such as Alain Finkielkraut and George Steiner, emphasize their concern about the
growing "illiteracy" of the masses. In practice they seem to be mainly concerned with high
culture illiteracy, the inability to appreciate difficult art and literary classics.
The neo-aristocratic defense of so-called transhistorical and universal human values may
also often be linked to a conservative political project. A return to universal values implies the
delegitimation of any group which does not conform to those values. It is no coincidence,
therefore, that attempts in the United States to define a common "American cultural legacy" tend
to neglect the cultures of ethnic minority groups. Or that the fight against franglais (French
"contaminated" by American English) in France was mainly fought by intellectuals seeing their
traditional position in French society threatened by the import of American cultural products, as
Clem Robyns (1995) describes.
Recurring issues in popular culture studies:
If we forget precursors such as Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes for a moment, popular
culture studies as we know them today were developed in the late seventies and the eighties. The
first influential works were generally politically left-wing and rejected the "aristocratic" view.
However, they also criticized the pessimism of the Frankfurt School: contemporary studies on
mass culture accept that, apparently, popular culture forms do respond to widespread needs of
the public. They also emphasized the capacity of the consumers to resist indoctrination and
passive reception. Finally, they avoided any monolithic concept of mass culture. Instead they
tried to describe culture as a whole as a complex formation of discourses which indeed
correspond to particular interests, and which indeed can be dominated by specific groups, but
which also always are dialectically related to their producers and consumers.
A nice example of this tendency is Andrew Ross's No Respect. Intellectuals and Popular
Culture (1989). His chapter on the history of jazz, blues and rock does not present a linear
narrative opposing the authentic popular music to the commercial record industry, but shows
how popular music in the U.S., from the twenties until today, evolved out of complex
interactions between popular, avant-garde and commercial circuits, between lower- and middle-
class kids, between blacks and whites.
Traces of the theory of culture industry:
 Still the traditional views have a long life (overview based on Clem Robyns, 1991). The
theory which has been abandoned most massively is the monolithic, pessimistic view on the
culture industry of the Frankfurt School. However, it is still hotly debated. The criticism raised
can be summarized in three main arguments. First of all, the culture industry theory has
completely abandoned the Marxist dialectic conception of society. Every impulse, according to
this view, comes from above. Resistance and contradiction are impossible, and the audience is
manipulated into passivity. Alan Swingewood and others emphasize that the Frankfurt theory has
to be seen in the light of left-wing frustrations about the failure of proletarian revolutions early
this century, and the easy submission of the European nations to fascism.
A second reproach is that this view may be as elitist as its aristocratic counterpart. Both
establish the lonely, autonomous, avant-garde intellectual as the only light in a zombie society.
Thus the former Marxists arrive at an uncritical praise of the elitist and antirevolutionary upper-
class culture. This brings us to a third argument, already made in the sixties by Umberto Eco
(1988). In a state-dominated mass society, the lonely, lucid, intellectual Übermensch can only
retreat in his ivory tower. The historicity of the contemporary situation is not taken into account,
so its internal contradictions are ignored, and thus revolution can only be seen as purely utopian.
The culture industry theory, therefore, would lead to passivity and thereby becomes an objective
ally of the system it pretends to criticize.
It is of course mainly the influence exercised by the Frankfurt School which matters here:
not all of their texts present the same rigid view. In Das Schema der Massenkultur (1973-
86:331), for instance, Adorno discusses a "nucleus of individuality" that the culture industry
cannot manipulate, and which forces her to continuously repeat her manipulation.
However questioned this view on popular culture may be, it still leaves some traces, for
instance, in theories depicting narrative as necessarily ideologically conservative, like Charles
Grivel's Production de l'intérêt romanesque (1973). Such theories see dominant ideology as
purely a matter of messages, propagated in this case through the forms of narrative fiction. Thus
they easily arrive at an exaltation of experimental literature as necessarily revolutionary.
However, they may neglect the fact that the ideology is never simply in the message, but in the
position of the message in the general social discourse, and in the position of its producers in the
social formation.
Other theories easily yielding to monolithic thought stem from the emancipation
movements of oppressed groups. Early feminist theory, for instance, often described society as
universally and transhistorically dominated by patriarchy in every aspect of life, thereby
presenting a pejorative view of the women they claim to defend. As Andrew Ross (1989) argues,
the same remark goes for the widely accepted account of rock history as a continuous
appropriation of black music by a white music industry. Only studies analyzing the cultural
oppression of homosexuality seem to take a less deterministic position.
Contemporary liberal pluralism:
In liberal-pluralist accounts of popular culture, the theorizing on its supposedly liberating,
democratizing function is nowadays most often pushed to the background. This type of criticism,
often produced by people who are also active in popular literary writing themselves, often
amounts to paraphrase and suffers from an uncritical identification with the study object. One of
the main aims of this type of criticism is the establishment of ahistorical canons of and within
popular genres in the image of legitimized culture. This approach, however, has been accused of
elitism as well.
To put it simply: the intellectual, in this view, can fully enjoy junk culture because of his
or her high culture background, but the average reader can never raise to the learned intellectual
discourse of which he or she is the object. An example of this form of appropriation is Thomas
Roberts's An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (1990). Though Roberts claims to take a distance from
studies of canonical fiction, he justifies his (implicit) decision to impose canonical models on
popular fiction as follows: "If people who read Goethe and Alessandro Manzoni and Pushkin
with pleasure are also reading detective fiction with pleasure, there is more in the detective story
than its critics have recognized, perhaps more than even its writers and readers have recognized"
(1989:5). This illustrates a frequent strategy: the legitimation of popular fiction on the basis of its
use of canonized literary fiction, and of the legitimized public's response to it.

Contemporary apocalyptic thought:

Equally alive is the aristocratic apocalyptic view on mass culture as the destruction of
genuine art. As Andrew Ross (1989:5) writes, a history of popular culture is also a history of
intellectuals, of cultural experts whose self-assigned task it is to define the borders between the
popular and the legitimate. But in contemporary society the dispersed authority is ever more
exercised by "technical" intellectuals working for specific purposes and not for mankind. And in
the academic world, growing attention for popular and marginal cultures threatens the absolute
values on which intellectuals have built their autonomy.
In the sixties, Marshall McLuhan caused wide irritation with his statement that the
traditional, book-oriented intellectuals had become irrelevant for the formulation of cultural rules
in the electronic age. This is not to say that they lost any real political power, which humanist
intellectuals as such hardly ever had. It does mean, however, that they are losing control of their
own field, the field of art, of restricted symbolical production ( Pierre Bourdieu). While in the
19th century, intellectuals managed to construct art as a proper, closed domain in which only the
in-crowd was allowed to judge, they have seen this autonomy become ever more threatened by
20th-century mass society. The main factor here was not the quantitative expansion of
consumption culture, nor the intrusion of commerce into the field of art through the appearance
of paperbacks and book clubs. After all, protecting art from simplicity and commerce was
precisely the task intellectuals set for themselves.
More important is the disappearance of what has been called the "grand narratives"
during this century, the questioning of all-encompassing world views offering coherent
interpretations of the world and unequivocal guides for action. As Jim Collins argues in
Uncommon Cultures (1989:2), there is no master's voice anymore, but only a decentralized
assemblage of conflicting voices and institutions. The growing awareness of the historical and
cultural variability of moral categories had to be a problem for an intellectual class which had
based its position on the defense of secular but transhistorical values.
This brings us to a second problem humanist intellectuals face, that is, the fragmentation
of the public. 19th-century intellectuals could still tell themselves that they were either writing
for their colleagues, or teaching the undifferentiated masses. 20th-century intellectuals face a
heterogeneous whole of groups and mediums producing their own discourses according to their
own logic and interests. Thus they cannot control the reception of their own messages anymore,
and thereby see their influence on the structuring of culture threatened. Many neo-apocalyptic
intellectuals, such as Alain Finkielkraut and George Steiner, emphasize their concern about the
growing "illiteracy" of the masses. In practice they seem to be mainly concerned with high
culture illiteracy, the inability to appreciate difficult art and literary classics.
The neo-aristocratic defense of so-called transhistorical and universal human values may
also often be linked to a conservative political project. A return to universal values implies the
delegitimation of any group which does not conform to those values. It is no coincidence,
therefore, that attempts in the United States to define a common "American cultural legacy" tend
to neglect the cultures of ethnic minority groups. Or that the fight against franglais (French
"contaminated" by American English) in France was mainly fought by intellectuals seeing their
traditional position in French society threatened by the import of American cultural products, as
Clem Robyns (1995) describes.
The interactions between popular and legitimized culture:
The blurring of the boundaries between high and low culture is one of the main
complaints made by traditional intellectuals about contemporary mass society. It is hardly
surprising then that a lot of studies deal with this topic. There are, for instance, a number of
sociological studies on literary institutions which are held responsible for this mix. Among the
first were the commercial book clubs, such as the Book-of-the-Month-Club, appearing from the
twenties on. The aggressive reactions they provoked are described by Janice Radway (1989) in
"The Scandal of the Middlebrow". According to Radway, the book clubs were perceived as
scandalous because they blurred some basic distinctions of cultural discourse. In a society
haunted by the spectre of cultural standardization and leveling towards below, they dared to put
"serious" fiction on the same level as detective, adventure stories, biographies and popular
nonfiction. Book clubs were scandalous because they created a space where high and low could
meet.
Soon, the term " middlebrow" was introduced to qualify this phenomenon, and to dismiss
it as threatening the authenticity of both high and popular culture. A bit after the book clubs
came the paperbacks, and their influence was even more wide-ranging. More about this can be
found in Thomas Bonn's book (1989) on New American Library. It shows through what
elaborate strategies the respectable hardcover editors had to go in order to hide the fact that, from
the sixties on, paperback publishers had taken over the control on the production of serious
literature.
 The Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt school were one of the first neo-Marxian groups to examine the effects of
mass culture and the rise of the consumer society on the working classes which were to be the
instrument of revolution in the classical Marxian scenario. The Frankfurt School was a group of
scholars known for developing critical theory and popularizing the dialectical method of learning
by interrogating society's contradictions. It is most closely associated with the work of Max
Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. It was not a school, in
the physical sense, but rather a school of thought associated with scholars at the Institute for
Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in Germany.
In 1923, Marxist scholar Carl Grünberg founded the Institute, initially financed by
another such scholar, Felix Weil. The Frankfurt School scholars are known for their brand of
culturally focused neo-Marxist theory—a rethinking of classical Marxism updated to their socio-
historical period. This proved seminal for the fields of sociology, cultural studies, and media
studies.
Origins of the Frankfurt School:
In 1930 Max Horkheimer became the director of the Institute and recruited many of the
scholars who came to be known collectively as the Frankfurt School. In the aftermath of Marx's
failed prediction of revolution, these individuals were dismayed by the rise of Orthodox Party
Marxism and a dictatorial form of communism. They turned their attention to the problem of rule
through ideology, or rule carried out in the realm of culture. They believed that technological
advancements in communications and the reproduction of ideas enabled this form of rule.
Their ideas overlapped with Italian scholar Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural
hegemony. Other early members of the Frankfurt School included Friedrich Pollock, Otto
Kirchheimer, Leo Löwenthal, and Franz Leopold Neumann. Walter Benjamin was also
associated with it during its peak in the mid-20th century.
One of the core concerns of the scholars of the Frankfurt School, especially Horkheimer,
Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse, was the rise of "mass culture." This phrase refers to the
technological developments that allowed for the distribution of cultural products—music, film,
and art—on a mass scale. (Consider that when these scholars began crafting their critiques, radio
and cinema were still new phenomena, and television didn't exist.) They objected to how
technology led to a sameness in production and cultural experience. Technology allowed the
public to sit passively before cultural content rather than actively engage with one another for
entertainment, as they had in the past. The scholars theorized that this experience made people
intellectually inactive and politically passive, as they allowed mass-produced ideologies and
values to wash over them and infiltrate their consciousness.
The Frankfurt School also argued that this process was one of the missing links in Marx's
theory of the domination of capitalism and explained why revolution never came. Marcuse took
this framework and applied it to consumer goods and the new consumer lifestyle that had just
become the norm in Western countries in the mid-1900s. He argued that consumerism functions
in much the same way, for it maintains itself through a creation of false needs that only the
products of capitalism can satisfy.
 Ethnography
Ethnography is a research method central to knowing the world from the
standpoint of its social relations. It is a qualitative research method predicated on the diversity of
culture at home (wherever that may be) and abroad. Ethnography involves hands-on, on-the-
scene learning — and it is relevant wherever people are relevant. Ethnography is the primary
method of social and cultural anthropology, but it is integral to the social sciences and
humanities generally, and draws its methods from many quarters, including the natural sciences.
Ethnographic fieldwork is how anthropologists gather data. Fieldwork is the process of
immersing oneself in as many aspects of the daily cultural lives of people as possible in order to
study their behaviors and interactions. Nearly any setting or location can become ―the field‖: a
village along the Amazon river, a large corporate office in Tokyo, a small neighborhood café in
Seattle, or even a social networking site like Facebook.
Fieldwork takes time. Anthropologists enter the field location much like a newborn child.
They may have trouble communicating until they have learned the local language. They will
likely make mistakes, and locals will find them funny or strange. It can take months or years to
begin to accustom themselves to the society or community within which they will live and learn.
In the fieldwork process, anthropologists eventually piece together ideas about kinship, language,
religion, politics, and economic systems, which allows them to build a picture of the society.
Ethnography can mean two things in anthropology:
a) the qualitative research methods employed during fieldwork
b) the written descriptive and interpretive results of that research
Doing ethnography:
The hallmark method of ethnographic field research in anthropology is known as
participant-observation. This type of data-gathering is when the anthropologist records their
experiences and observations while taking part in activities alongside local participants or
informants in the field site. Anthropologists also engage in informal conversations, more formal
interviews, surveys, or questionnaires, and create photos, sound or video recordings, as well as
conduct historical or archival research into correspondence, public records, or reports, depending
on their research area. Some anthropologists use quantitative methods when analyzing their
research, such as producing statistics based on their findings.
Writing ethnography:
Ethnographic writing differs from other types of academic, historical, journalistic, or
travel writing about peoples and places. While ethnographers may also keep a fieldwork diary
containing personal notes, ethnography is much more than a recounting of daily events.
Ethnography engages with the theoretical foundations of anthropology and is written with
cultural contextualization in mind, speaking to anthropology as a discipline as well as furnishing
greater understanding of the cultural world that has been explored. The aim of ethnographic
writing is to produce work that contributes to, and advances, the comparative interpretation of
human cultures and societies.
Ethnography is a collaborative effort between the ethnographer and their research
participants. Anthropologists have ethical codes that guide their behavior in the field as they rely
on relationships with others in order to conduct their research. In the ethnographic process,
informants or key participants can help to induct the ethnographer into the society and explain its
customs and ways.
Traditionally, anthropologists have attempted to arrive at an emic perspective or
―insider‘s point of view‖. In other words, ethnographers wish to understand the structures,
categories, and patterns of behavior as conceptualized by members of the culture they are
studying. This is contrasted with etic models, which are analyses of cultural meaning as seen
from the ―outside‖ by an objective observer. This uneasy simplification of emic vs. etic gets at
the heart of the paradox of doing ethnography: what people say they do, what they say they
should do, and what they actually do, rarely – if ever – coincide.
Anthropologists today are increasingly aware of their own views and biases that they
carry with them into the field from their home cultures, acknowledging wherever possible how
this affects their methods and findings. Despite all of the best intentions, any practicing
fieldworker can tell you that fieldwork is, at best, unpredictable. A reflexive approach to
ethnography acknowledges that no researcher can be 100% objective, and that fieldwork
constitutes an ongoing dialogue of consent and mutual respect between participants and the
ethnographer.
References:
1. https://literariness.org/2018/08/18/mass-culture/
2. https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/p/Popular_culture_studies.htm
3. https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/Illumina%20Folder/kell16.htm#:~:text=The%
20Frankfurt%20school%20were%20one,in%20the%20classical%20Marxian%20scenari.
4. https://www.thoughtco.com/frankfurt-school-3026079
5. https://anthropology.princeton.edu/undergraduate/what-ethnography
6. https://hraf.yale.edu/teach-ehraf/an-introduction-to-fieldwork-and-ethnography/