GE 6222 / Philippine Popular Culture

1
Pop Culture and Culture Industry

Module 3: Pop Culture and Culture Industry

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Define pop culture.
2. Extract pop culture in order to understand the categories.
3. Explain culture industry.

Pop and the Culture Industry

In the work 'Cultural Theory and Popular Culture,' John Story describes Culture and Popular Culture as
'works and practices of intellectual and creative activity, texts and practices whose main role is to
represent, create or be an opportunity for meaning development. This Concept of Culture is synonymous
with what structuralists and post-structuralists call 'important practices,' or pop culture, will enable us to
talk as examples of culture about soap opera, pop music, and comics. Typically these are referred to as
documents. Popular culture is further broken down into six subdefinitions. The first is culture that is
popular or valued by others by measurable means, such as sales of songs, playing on the radio, attending
screenings or concerts, and ratings of viewers on TV shows. The second subdefinition of culture is culture
that is not high culture, for example, culture seen in a gallery is high culture, this category would include
all art and media that are not regarded as 'cultural' in other cultures. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu notes that
the cultural concept of non-high culture serves as a symbol of social and economic status, although the
distinction for this classification is a little blurred in contemporary times, for example artist Banksy would
fall into this category, but his works have now made it into some of the best galleries for sale to the 'high
society.' Popular Culture's third term is consumer culture, and consumer is the key word in this concept as
it refers to the majority of society, and this culture is mass production and consumption. The fourth sub-
definition of culture is people's culture, identified as people's or working class's authentic culture, in the
past also known as 'folk culture.' Rock or punk bands may be described as making people's authentic art
under this category. Community in fifth group is Supremacy. This is characterized as a culture that uses the
site of struggle between the lower economic and social class to those of a much higher social and economic
demographic or a compromise area between the two, where the dominant, subordinate and oppositional
cultural meaning is mixed depending on what message they express in the society. The sixth category of
culture refers to Postmodernism and this is characterized as culture that no longer sees the difference
between high and low art, some celebrating the end of high art, and the other divide is desperate by the
achievement of trade over culture. Also known as critical culture, for considering and discussing an
argument or problem. Therefore mass media is a place where daily life can be attacked.

Course Module
 GE 6222 / Philippine Popular Culture
2
Pop Culture and Culture Industry

Culture industry

The critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) coined the word
culture industry (Deutsch: Kulturindustrie); In the chapter "The Cultural Industry: Enlightenment as a
Mass Illusion," from the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), it was described as a critical vocabulary.
They suggested that popular culture imitate a factory that produces uniform cultural goods — films, radio,
magazines, etc. –which are used to exploit passivity in mass society. Consumption of the simple pleasures
of popular culture, made accessible through the mass media, makes people docile and happy, no matter
how complicated their economic circumstances may be. The fundamental risk of the culture industry is the
creation of false psychological needs that only the products of capitalism can fulfill and satisfy; Adorno and
Horkheimer therefore especially viewed mass-produced culture as harmful to the more technologically
and intellectually demanding high arts. In comparison, true psychological needs are independence,
imagination, and genuine happiness, referring to an earlier demarcation of human needs, which Herbert
Marcuse had created.

Reference and Supplementary Material

Online Supplementary Reading Material

1. Orthentix; https://medium.com/@orthentix/critical-inquiry-ddce4d1897fa; March
30, 2020
2. Wikipedia; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry; March 30, 2020