THEORIES OF POPULAR

CULTURE
CULTURALISM
MARXISM
STRUCTURALISM
GENDER AND SEXUALITY
A. FEMANISM
B. POS FEMINISM
C. QUEER THEORY
POST MODERNALISM
CULTURALISM

Raymond Williams’ (1984) influence on studies has been enormous. The range of his work
alone is formidable. He has made significant contributions to our understanding of cultural theory,
cultural history, television, the press, radio, and advertising. The analysis of culture is the attempt to
discover the nature of the organization which is complex of these relationships. Analysis of specific
works or institutions is, in this context, analysis on their essential kind of organization, the
relationship which works, or institutions embody as part of the organization as whole.

In addressing the ‘complex organization’ of culture as a particular way of life, the purpose of
cultural analysis is always to understand what a culture is expressing: ‘the actual experience
through which a culture was lived’; the ‘important common element’; a particular community of
experience. ’In short, it aims to reconstitute what William calls ‘the structure of feeling. ‘By structure
of feeling, it means the shared values of a specific group, class, or society. The term is used to
describe a discursive structure that is a cross between a collective cultural unconscious and an
ideology.
CULTURE ALWAYS EXISTS ON THREE LEVELS:

1. There is the live culture of a specific time and place, only fully
accessible to those living in that time and place.

2. There is a recorded culture, of every kind, from art the most

everyday facts: the culture of a period.

3. There is also, as the factor connecting live culture and period

cultures, the culture of the selective tradition.
 MARXISM

• A worldview and method of societal analysis that

focuses on class relations and societal conflict,
that uses a materialist interpretation of
historical development, and a dialectical view of
social transformation.

• Inspired by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the

mid-to-late 19th century.

• Class struggles between the bourgeoisie

(capitalist) and proletariat that result to social
revolution.
MARXISM

Marx argues that each significant period in history is constructed

around a particular ‘mode of production’: that is, the way in which a society
is organized (i.e. slave, feudal, capitalist) to produce the material
necessaries of life-food, shelter, etc. specific ways of obtaining the
necessaries of life. As Marx (1976) explains, ‘the mode of production of
material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life process in
general’.
Products of Modes of Production:
I. Specific ways of obtaining the necessaries of life

II. Specific social relationships between workers and those who

control the mode of production, and

III. Specific social institutions (including cultural ones). At the heart of

this analysis is the claim that how a society produces its means of
existence (its particular ‘mode of production’) ultimately determines the
political, social and cultural shape of that society and its possible future
development.
Theodor Adorno (1991) and Marx Horkheimer (1978) coined the term ‘culture
industry’ to designate the products and processes of mass culture. The products of
the culture industry, they claim, are mark by two features: homogeneity, ‘film, radio,
and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and every part… all
mass culture is identical’, and predictability. While Malcom Arnold (2009) and F.R
Leavis (2009) had worried that popular culture represented a threat to cultural and
social authority, the Frankfurt School argue that it produces the opposite effects: it
maintains social authority. Leo Lowenthal (1961) contends that the culture
industry , by producing a culture marked by ‘standardization, stereotype,
conservatism, mendacity, manipulated consumer goods’, his worked to depoliticize
the working class – limiting its horizon to political and economic goals that the could
be realize within the oppressive and exploitative framework of capitalist society.
 The culture industry, in its search for profits and cultural
homogeneity , deprives ‘authentic’ culture of its critical
function, its mode of negation. Commodification (sometimes
understood by other critics as ‘commercialization’) devalues
‘authentic’ culture, making it too accessible by turning it into
yet another saleable commodity. It carries the key to unlock
the prison-house established by the development of mass
culture by the capitalist culture industry. But increasingly the
processes of the culture industry threaten the radical potential
of ‘authentic’ culture.
REFERENCES:

Adorno, Theodor (1991). ‘the schema of mass culture’, in The culture industry.
London: Routledge.

Arnold, Matthew (2009). ‘Culture and Anarchy’. In cultural theory and popular culture: A reader, (Fourth
Edition), edited by Rosalind Brunt and Caroline Rowan. London: Lawrence & Wishart
Thank you!