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Home , High culture, Low culture

Documentation, Preservation and UNIT 4 - 'HIGH' AND 'LOW'; Conservation of Culture POPULAR AND MASS

Structure 4.0 Objectives 4.1 Introduction 4.2 A history of the high/ debate 4.2.1 Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the beginnings of the debate 4.2.2 and the distinction between 4.2.3 F R Leavis 4.2.4 T S Eliot 4.3 Contemporary approaches to the debate 4.3.1 and the distinction between high and mass culture 4.3.2 Marxism and culture 4.3.3 Some later day approaches to the study of culture 4.3.4 and/as culture 4.4 Let us sum up 4.5 References and further readings 4.6 Check your progress: possible answers 4.0 OBJECTIVES After reading this Unit, you will be able to: x determine the meaning of the terms high/low culture, and popular/mass culture; x trace the history of the connotative and denotative progression of these terms; and x examine how the high/ low distinction was first posited, how they developed conceptually, and how the terms are approached within the study of culture in current times. 4.1 INTRODUCTION

What is ? What is low culture? And what is popular/mass culture? To begin with, let us say that high culture is talked of as something belonging to a privileged group, and or something held in high esteem in a particular culture, for example, the great , architecture or of a particular age. It was generally supposed to be the domain of the educated, the wealthy and the privileged sections of society. Popular or mass culture is usually explained as an oppositional concept to high culture. While high culture is supposed to be the culture of the ruling classes, is, as the name suggests, all that is popular, widespread or common i.e. the culture of the masses. It comprises what is popularly accepted in society. Low culture is a term that is used in a derogatory sense for certain forms of popular culture. The distinction between high culture and popular culture may be illustrated through the following example, which I found on the internet. The picture of a nude man/woman hanging in an gallery 104 is looked at as a work of art, while the picture of a naked man/woman that Conservation and Preservation: Some appears in a newspaper is not art, but the opposite of art (sometimes bordering Ethical and Legal on the pornographic). Issues The justification for the distinction is found not in the cultural form itself (a picture of a naked man or women is much the same whatever medium it is presented in) but in the theoretical elaboration of that form. Thus, when a painting is hung in an what is being admired is the skill and composition, the cultural references and representations. When a picture appears in a newspaper, these are absent and all that is left is a titillation factor. The idea of a hierarchy of was implicit in the earliest approaches to the study of culture. In fact, in the previous unit, we have seen how the whole idea of colonialism was based on the differential cultural capabilities of the colonizer and the colonized. Apart from this, and also partly in common to this are the issues of race and ethnicity, which have, for a long time, been considered natural markers for cultural hierarchy, thus stereotyping one community in relation to another in terms of ability, characteristics and behaviour. We can also observe an evident disparity in the portrayal of the male and the female and differences in cultural traits are determined. We will now try to analyze the history of how the debate of high and low in culture progressed, right from the earliest times to now.

4.2 A HISTORY OF THE HIGH/LOW CULTURE DEBATE

It becomes important for one to know the history of high/low cultural debate. We will be looking at some important scholars who have made important contributions to this debate. 4.2.1 Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the beginnings of the debate

The beginnings of this debate can be seen in the ideas of Sameul Taylor Coleridge. That culture is a resource that has to be marshaled in order to maintain the equilibrium of society was an idea that was first put forward by Taylor in the book titled On the Constitution of the Church and State. Coleridge establishes a distinction between and cultivation. According to John Fiske, civilization in Coleridge's ideas refers to the nation as a whole, while cultivation is the domain of a small minority whom Coleridge refers to as the 'clerisy'. Civilization is used by Coleridge as a term for culture. Coleridge defines the clerisy as a group of learned people who are responsible for the preservation and dissemination of national heritage. It is the clerisy who will thus guide the progress of civilization:

the objects and final intention of the whole order being these - preserve the stores, and to guard the treasures, of past civilization, and thus to bind the present to the past; to perfect and add to the same, and thus to connect the present to the future; but especially to diffuse through the whole community, and to every native entitled to its laws and rights, that quantity and quality of knowledge which was indispensable both for the understanding of those rights, and for the performance of the duties correspondent. 105 Documentation, Coleridge thus maintains some kind of distinctions between high and low culture, Preservation and Conservation of civilization and cultivation in his terms. Culture Cultivation, a term which was earlier used exclusively in relation to growing and preparing of crops and plants, and with agriculture in general, was used by Coleridge in a symbolic way to talk of the growth and development of human beings. The idea of cultivation/culture as a stabilizing factor in a society beset with the pangs of coming to terms with the industrial revolution was thought of by Coleridge in terms of the Romantic ideal of perfection that informs all human enterprise. Check your progress 1 Note: 1) Your answers should be about 30 words each; 2) You may check your answers with the possible answers at the end of the Unit. 1) How does Coleridge define cultivation and civilization? ...... 4.2.2 Matthew Arnold and the distinction between culture and anarchy The point of departure for the inquiry into the distinction between high and low/ popular culture is Matthew Arnold, a major English thinker of the nineteenth century, who, ironically, did not say anything about popular culture. In his discussion on the issue, which is contained in the book Culture and Anarchy, Arnold never once talks about popular culture. He first defines culture in the initial pages of the book as follows: The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically. In talking of the 'best that has been talked of and said in the world', Arnold sets the agenda for the debate on what constitutes culture. According to him, culture means 'high culture': it is the best that can be achieved by man, and is exclusive. It represents the pinnacle of human achievement, and is thus representative of both the potential and the aspiration inherent in him. It is a corpus of the best body of work which has to be upheld so that all of mankind may benefit from it. Culture is a body of knowledge, the concern of which is to 'make reason and the 106 will of god prevail'. Culture... is a study of perfection…perfection which consists in Conservation and Preservation: Some becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward Ethical and Legal conditionofthemindandspirit,notinanoutwardsetofcircumstances. Issues

Arnold suggests that culture is 'perfection', and also a striving for this perfection. This perfection is to be attained bythe process of 'reading, observing and thinking', as also by the 'disinterested and active use of reading, reflection and observation, in the endeavour to know the best that has been known'. Talking of the function of culture, Arnold goes on to say that culture 'seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light'.

Thus Arnold saw culture as a moral and political force which functioned for the betterment of a people. As said at the very beginning, Arnold never explicitly talks of popular culture in contrast to culture proper. However, as the very title indicates, culture is placed in direct contrast to anarchy, which is equated to popular culture.

At one stage in the text Arnold talks of 'a much wanted principle… of authority, to counteract the tendency to anarchy which seems to be threatening us'. He talks of the distinction beween the 'highly-instructed few' and the 'scantily-instructed many'. Arnold's main concern, it seems is that the anarchy that is characteristic of the working classes is to be mitigated by effective doses of 'the best that has been thought and said in the world'. In the later part of his discussion, he adds that culture also seeks to 'minister to the diseased spirit of our time'. Arnold's arguments to this effect, like Coleridge's before him, are informed by the effects of industrialization on the society. And culture is the panacea for these ills. He thus gives an insight to high and low culture in society by exploring culture and anarchy. 4.2.3 F R Leavis The ravages of industrialization, which was the impetus for both Coleridge and Arnold to theorize about culture, was there in the case of F R Leavis also. In the case of Leavis, there was also the experience of four years of World War I to cope with. Whereas the Enlightenment looked towards perfection in a distant future, Leavis projected his optimism into a golden age in the past. He regarded England in the seventeenth century as the golden age. It was an age more imagined than real, an age of which Leavis gives a romantic picture: 'there was in the seventeenth century, a real culture of the people… a rich traditional culture… a positive culture which has disappeared'. This culture was characterized by a coherence in society based on social codes. It signified a watershed in civilization, a time which saw a perfect balance between every form of life and living. Cultural coherence and integraton was lost, according to Leavis, sometime in the nineteenth century, and the twentieth century was merely an extension and intensification of the same. The world had been corrupted by commercial considerations which were the fallout of the industrial revolution. The 'culture' of the land, which was in the keeping of an educated minority was weakened, and mass culture, the culture of the uneducated majority, had gained prominence. His views give a new dimension to the high and low cultural debate, as the past was seen as positive and progessive while the twenthieth century sees the lack of any cultural integration. 107 Documentation, 4.2.4 T S Eliot Preservation and Conservation of Culture T S Eliot's cultural criticism views high culture and mass culture as necessary parts of culture as a whole. Eliot anayzed the breakdown of literary in the war-ravaged early decades of the twentieth century as a manifestation of a deeper malaise in society. The individualistic and fragmented responses in art and literature pointed to a 'dissociation of sensibilities' that was symptomatic of modern society. It pointed to the fact that society as a whole was unable to achieve a shared sense of belief, a sense of communication that is central to its cohesive functioning.

Eliot identifies three levels on which culture functions - on the level of the individual, the group and society as a whole. Eliot feels that individual achievements are restricted to the individual. Similarly, it is not possible to educate the majority into the culture of the elite. Certain facets of our cultural life like rituals and conventions are followed and upheld by all members of society, while it is the responsibility of the elite class in society to keep alive what are regarded as the high points of cultural achievement in a particular society. Thus he talks about both the high culture and mass culture. 4.3 CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO THE DEBATE Many scholars have contributed to the study of high/low cultures as well as mass/popular ones. The next few sections will discuss them in detail. 4.3.1 Cultural studies and the distinction between high and mass culture

Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel are collectively referred to as the culturalists.All of them were associated with the Centre for Contemporary Culture Studies, University of Birmingham. The work of all these people are similar in that all of them focus on the experential realities of particular groups or people in order to understand their culture and thus make distinctions between high and mass cuture.

Richard Hoggart's approach is closely linked to the approach of F R Leavis and at the same time progresses beyond the latter. Hoggart celebrates the working- class culture of his childhood in the 1930s, while at the same time pointing out how the 1950s culture that is available for the working-class is markedly inferior in terms of quality. Hoggart makes some interesting observations about working class culture. According to him the 1930s working-class culture is a culture 'of the people' that is characterized by communal approach and organicity. The distinctive feature of working-class culture of the time was its self-making approach. However, Hoggart is quite critical of the popular culture of the 1950s. According to him it is crude and commercial, and has nothing to contribute to the working-class culture of the people. However, he is quite confident that the natural resilience of the working-class culture makes it resilient to much of the machinations of mass culture, which are threatening to destroy its character.

The most significant member of the group is Raymond Williams. Williams has 108 impacted our understanding of culture in significant ways. Williams's definition of culture has three facets, and he insists that each of of them is important to our Conservation and Preservation: Some understanding, in the synchronic as well as the diachronic sense: culture as Ethical and Legal experienced, recorded, and interpreted, with respect to any particular time and Issues place. We have already discussed many of Williams's formulations on culture in the previous unit. He was one of the first advocates of the democratization of culture. In this way he makes a comment on the mass culture.

Similarly, E P Thompson talks of the working-class as an agency that is active in shaping its own history, albeit under the existing circumstances and conditions. Thompson's book, The Making of the English Working Class, seems to suggest the same dynamicity in the use of the verb 'making' in the title of the book. In the words of John Storey, the book deals with 'popular culture as a site of resistance to those in whose interests the Industrial Revolution was made'. Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel carry the argument on popular culture further. They do not posit a hierarchy of cultures, but attempt to distinguish between the acceptable and unacceptable forms of popular culture itself, for which they advocate a degree of critical awareness.

The discourse of these British thinkers exemplifies the tensions between working- class culture and mass culture as produced in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution. The ideas of Hoggart, Williams and Thompson were all formulated against the backdrop of the idea that the working class was a potent instrument of social change, and would eventually challenge capitalistic society. These ideas have been further influenced by Marx and materailists. We will discuss this in the next section. Check your progress 1 Note: 1) Your answers should be about 30 words each; 2) You may check your answers with the possible answers at the end of the Unit. 2) How does Hoggart describe the working class people? ...... 4.3.2 Marxism and culture

The British thinkers went beyond the confines of disciplinary formalism and attempted to analyse culture in terms of its social, economic and political coordinates. They were of the view that culture is imbricated in the system in which it is produced and consumed. The British culturalists, therefore, work with and upon the Marxist account of culture, sometimes corroborating and sometimes modifying it.

The Marxist approach to culture is based on the Marxist conception of history. Both Marx and Engels pointed out the inherently complicated and complex nature of human societies, and the role of ideology in such societies. It was only in the 109 Documentation, 1920s and after, that certain thinkers like George Lukacs, Ernst Bloch andAntonio Preservation and Conservation of Gramsci started extending the boundaries of Marxist analysis. Lukacs focussed Culture on the interrelation between politics, culture and literature. Bloch's work dealt with man's cultural preoccupation with a possible better way of life. Gramsci's theory of 'hegemony', or 'domination by ideas', which we briefly discussed in the previous unit, was his chief contribution. Gramsci's theory tried to analyse how hegemonic ideas are constituted, how they are politically legitimated and consolidated and what are the possible counterhegemonic forces that could challenge the hegemonic formations. This hegemonic formation influences the mass and the high culture.

Some others, like Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno, also turned their attention to cultural phenomena. These thinkers, alongwith others who were associated with or influenced by them, are collectively known as the Frankfurt School. It was Adorno and Horkheimer who coined the term '' - which served to include in the ambit of analysis all aspects of mass culture. Adorno and Horkheimer, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, point out that the culture industry, particularly , has established a stranglehold over people.According to them, "the whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture-industry", resulting in "a constant sameness". Their basic focus was on how culture was being industrialised and commercialised under a capitalist system. The Frankfurt School attempted to show a parallelism between cultural artefacts and other products that were industrially mass-produced, i.e. the process of commodification, standardization and massification.

Horkheimer, Adorno, Lowenthal and Herzog, all examined different aspects of the relationship between the culture industry and consumerist society. In contrast, Walter Benjamin, who was also loosely associated with the Frankfurt School, found certain progressive and positive dimensions in mass-media. In the oft- anthologized essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", Benjamin argues that mass-media, once freed of the association to high culture could cultivate a greater number of critical individuals.

Habermas, on the other hand, attempts a historical contextualization of Adorno and Horkheimer's concept of the culture industry. He traces a history of commercial mass media from the 'representational' culture of the pre-eighteenth century, through the idea of the 'public sphere' in the eighteenth century to modern times. He contends that before the eighteenth century, culture was representational. In his study of French popular culture, he cites the example of how the magnitude of the palace of Versailles was used to convey a sense of culture. In the eighteenth century, there was a transition, and, according to Habermas, the concept of the public sphere came into existence. The eighteenth public sphere was liberal in nature, and public opinion was generated through discussions and debates. But in a society of mass-culture, the relation of the individual to the public sphere has been ruptured, and opinion and consent are now manipulated and manufactured.

Significantly, the British culturalists of the post-1960s worked on the same lines as the Frankfurt School, and reached to similar conclusions. They had similar positions on how working-class cultures were being gradually subsumed into the mass culture, and the role of the media and the new consumerist reality in this regard. We shall now discuss the newer approaches to the study of mass and 110 high culture in the next section. 4.3.3 Some later day approaches to the study of culture Conservation and Preservation: Some Ethical and Legal Cultural Studies, structuralism and post-structuralism, new historicism and Issues feminism, among other newer approaches, served to redefine the field of studies in culture. Cultural Studies as practiced at Birmingham branched out into the study of youth cultures, ethnic , hybrid and class cultures. They studied various kinds of resistant cultures in detail.This marks a clear shift from the earlier emphasis on the study of high culture. The focus was, for them, clearly on the popular or the mass.

The structuralists and the post-structuralists also viewed culture as contested space. Using Saussure's work as the base, Claude Levi-Strauss hypothesized that myths also work like language. Myths have a similar structure and function. They serve to make the world comprehensible. Following Levi-Strauss, many studies of culture attempted to apply this model to interpret and analyse . Roland Barthes' Mythologies works in this direction. Barthes applies the Saussurean model to varied aspects of popular culture ranging from wrestling and tourism to toys and detergents. He adds an extra level of signification to the Saussurean distinction of signifier and signified. Barthes says that the signified has two levels, the denotative (primary signification) and the connotative (secondary signification). The connotative signification is generated from a pre- existing cultural repertoire or has strong cultural influences. And it is at the connotative level that myth is produced and consumed. Myth, for Barthes, also has a political significance. The idea that he proposes can be best understood through his famous example of the cover page of the magazine Paris Match which has a picture of a black soldier saluting the French flag: I am at the barber's, and a copy of Paris Match is offered to me. On the cover, [the siginifiier is] a young Negro in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on the fold of the tricolour. All this is the meaning of the picture. But, whether naively of not, [on the primary level] I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great empire, that all her sons, without colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors. However, on the secondary level, the intention implicit in this image is quite apparent: French imperialism condemns the saluting Negro to be nothing more than an instrumental signifier, the Negro suddenly hails me in the name of French imperiality; but at the same moment the Negro's salute thickens, becomes vitrified, freezes into an eternal reference meant to establish French imperiality.

Myths are thus meant to smooth over contradictions, to establish a world without contradictions and to justify issues. This gives mass and popular cultures new meanings.

The Saussurean model of the signifier and signified is further problematized by the post-structuralists. According to them, signifiers do not produce signifieds, they produce more signifiers.To Saussure, the meaning of a word could be established through difference. To post-structuralists like Jaques Derrida, meaning 111 Documentation, can never be fully pinned down. He coins the word difference to talk of this Preservation and Conservation of complex nature of the sign. It means both to differ and to defer.Applied to culture, Culture the oppositional nature of high and low culture are thus called into question. If there is a binary, one is naturally priveleged over the other. High culture is thus dependent on popular culture for its meaning and the consolidation of its meaning, and the meaning of high culture is consolidated in relation to popular culture.

Another significant post-structuralist thinker is Jacques Lacan, who carries Freudian psychoanalysis into Saussurean linguistics and into culture. He talks of the role of language in the creation of the self and psychic and sexual life. According to Lacan, the unconscious is 'structured like a language' and operates according to the rules of language. Thus the concept of the self and the other are also fashioned in terms of our ideology and culture.

Michel Foucault shifted the focus of examination from language to discourse. According to Foucault, discourse is that which defines and constructs our objects of knowledge. Thus discourses define what can be said (and what can't be said) on any given topic. Thus discourse is intimately connected to power. The natural corollary of this is the fact that all forms of thought, social, political or otherwise were linked to this interplay between knowledge and power. Foucault's power- knowledge nexus is used by Edward Said when the latter talks about Orientalism. Said shows the truth of Foucault's formulations in his elaboration of how the discourse about the Orient is constituted by the West, and how it helped the West in dealing with not just the Orient, but also with its own culture. According to the structuralists, then, all societies and their cultural practices can be analysed like language i.e. like signifying systems. Post-structuralists, on the other hand, challenge the notion of language as a stable system. The definitions of mass and popular cultures have also undergone some changes with postmodern condition. This will be discussed in the next section.

Check your progress 3 Note: 1) Your answers should be about 30 words each; 2) You may check your answers with the possible answers at the end of the Unit. 3. What posistion does Foucault take while studying culture? ...... 4.3.4 Postmodernism and/as culture Postmodernism - we are told - is neither a homogenous entity nor a consciously directed 'movement'. It is instead a space, a 'condition', a 'predicament', an aporia, an 'unpassable path' - where competing intentions, definitions, and effects, diverse social and intellectual tendencies and lines of force converge and clash. 112 Jean Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition is a significant book in this Conservation and Preservation: Some respect. It talks of the end of the metanarrative - the grand narrative, and also its Ethical and Legal universalist claims. Postmodernism heralded a multiplicity of voices, it promoted Issues heterogeneity in thought and experience and thus had a direct bearing on the study of culture. Thus the metanarrative of the distinction between high and low culture is dismantled. Jean Baudrillard's view of the reality of the world also points towards the absence of all certainty, a world where the distinction between the real and the imaginary are continually blurred, where appearances masquerade as reality. It is a stage of 'cultural exhaustion'. Hence all certainties, authorities and centres collapse. And if there is no 'real' meaning to be found beneath appearances, there can be neither meaning nor representation. Postmodernism acknowledges this fact and thus raises more questions than it answers. Instead of trying to read meaning into culture, we thus come to a point where culture exists in itself, where a proliferation of competing meanings are at play - those of race, gender, environment etc. Thus the distinction between high and low culture is blurred.

4.4 LET US SUM UP In this Unit, we began by making a distinction between the terms, high and low culture. We also attempted to lay down what we mean by popular/mass culture. The initial part of the discussion concentrated on the privileging of high culture in society. We have traced a history of evolution of this line of thought beginning with Samuel Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, through F R Leavis and T S Eliot. There was a paradigm shift after that. Later day culture critics recognized the fact that culture was a hegemonic arrangement, and that in any culture, some were privileged over the others. Later on, the postmodernists heralded the end of the grand narrative, and thus generated space for many competing micronarratives of culture based on he coordinates of race, gender, environment and so on. 4.5 REFERENCES AND FURTHER READINGS Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightment. Herder and Herder: New York. 1972. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. 117pp. 10 June 2008. http:// www.gutenberg.org /dirs/etext03/8cltn10.txt Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Paladin : London. 1973. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. On the Constitution of the Church and State. Dent: London. 1837/1972. Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. Routledge: New York and London. 1989. Jenks, Chris. Culture. Routledge: London. 1993. Leavis, F R. The Common Pursuit. Hogarth: London. 1984. Lyotard, Jean Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Manchester University Press: Manchester. 1984. Smith, Mark J. Culture: Reinventing the Social Sciences. Viva Books: New Delhi. 2002.

113 Storey, John. An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. Harvester Wheatsheaf: New York. 1993. Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. Penguin: Harmondsworth. 1965. 4.6 CHECK YOUR PROGRESS: POSSIBLE ANSWERS 1) Civilization is used by Coleridge as a term for culture. Coleridge defines the clerisy as a group of learned people who are responsible for the preservation and dissemination of national heritage. It is the clerisy who will thus guide the progress of civilization. Cultivation, a term which was earlier used exclusively in relation to growing and preparing of crops and plants, and with agriculture in general, was used by Coleridge in a symbolic way to talk of the growth and development of human beings. 2) Hoggart celebrates the working-class culture of his childhood in the 1930s, while at the same time pointing out how the 1950s culture that is available for the working-class is markedly inferior in terms of quality. Hoggart makes some interesting observations about working class culture.According to him the 1930s working-class culture is a culture 'of the people' that is characterized by communal approach and organicity. The distinctive feature of working- class culture of the time was its self-making approach. However, Hoggart is quite critical of the popular culture of the 1950s. According to him it is crude and commercial, and has nothing to contribute to the working-class culture of the people. However, he is quite confident that the natural resilience of the working-class culture makes it resilient to much of the machinations of mass culture, which are threatening to destroy its character. 3) Michel Foucault shifted the focus of examination from language to discourse. According to Foucault, discourse is that which defines and constructs our objects of knowledge. Thus discourses define what can be said (and what can't be said) on any given topic. Thus discourse is intimately connected to power. The natural corollary of this is the fact that all forms of thought, social, political or otherwise were linked to this interplay between knowledge and power.