Discussion: Unit 3,
Unit 3
Pop Culture, Politics, and New Media
Popular culture—the music, movies, and stories that we hear and see in the mass media every day of our lives—plays an important role in American social life. Many of the words and images generated and marketed by the “pop culture” industry attempt to reflect the realities of American life and frequently help shape those realities.
In some cases, images and sounds from pop culture are relevant to the way we see and think about government and politics.
Watch: The intersection of pop culture and politics: Mike Muse at TEDxRVA
No transcript is currently available
Estimated time to complete: 11 minutes
As you watch the video, think about the following:
Why would young adults know more about pop culture than politics and history?
Consider: Pop Culture’s Influence on Politics
If it were real, then what we saw on CNN was fiction; if it was real, then we must be tricks of the light. – Jonathan Raban, Hunting Mr. Heartbreak
Analyze: The Pop Culture of Politics
Estimated time to complete: 4 minutes
Topic 1: Politics and Pop Culture
This topic addresses the following objectives: Analyze an artifact of popular culture from multiple perspectives.
Estimated time to complete topic: 2 hours Evaluate: Popular Culture influences on Politics
Watch: How Pop Culture Shapes Politics
No transcript is currently available
Estimated time to complete: 14 minutes
Popular culture is becoming ever more important to political communication and political understanding. Many examples testify to this trend: notorious is the appearance of Bill Clinton in the popular Arsenio Hall talk show, playing the saxophone in the campaign of 1992. At least one Dutch liberal candidate for parliament is known to have followed the Clinton example in 1994 by playing his saxophone in a Dutch popular show. Television offers the most visible expressions of the popularization of politics. As an entertainment medium, television contains many popular genres which politicians increasingly are using to circumvent the traditional channels of political journalism. The American presidential campaigns again provide a landmark: the Larry King talk show witnessed the beginning of Ross Perot’s 1992 campaign; Clinton started his 1996 campaign on local television and breakfast television. Television not only offers many popular genres, but has also popularized traditional information genres like news and current affairs. Whereas this situation has been part and parcel of the American political scene, it is relatively new to the European situation which saw the popularization of politics exacerbated by the emergence of commercial television in the late eighties. Much more than traditional European public broadcasting, commercial broadcasting is dominated by infotainment genres in which human interest stories and interviews with ordinary people and celebrities about their private lives and emotions are core ingredients. Adjusting to commercial competition serious informative programmed of public broadcasters have incorporated entertainment conventions.
Although politics has always contained elements of popular culture, the present situation is often said to be different in the sense that popular culture at present seems to have overwhelmed and concurred politics. The current assumed ubiquitous popularization of politics is thought to undermine the quality of the political process and the viability of democracy in the long run. In such arguments, politics and popular culture are constructed as each other’s antagonists which seems justified by their origins in the two different social traditions of modernity on the one hand (politics) and orality on the other (popular culture). As I have argued extensively elsewhere, the folkloric world of popular culture ruled by coincidence and marked by suspicion and sensation seems to be thoroughly at odds with the modern tradition of contemporary politics and political culture, with its belief in rationality, progress and the capacity of people to take control over their own destinies.
Despite these antagonistic roots, the present convergence of popular culture and politics in the way parties and politicians organize their various communicative efforts suggests that they have become complementary resources for political communication rather than oppositional. This suggestion is supported by the few studies that have examined whether and how people use popular culture as a source for the development of their political knowledge and understanding. Barnhart, for instance, investigated the paradox that while young citizens have turned their backs on traditional news media and seem deeply unaware of basic political facts and information, they do hold strong political opinions and rather sophisticated views on the distribution of power in society. Working with the self-written life histories of young citizens in the United States and Spain, Barnhart traces the development of their political knowledge to a scattered understanding arising from various popular genres such as pop songs, TV commercials, documentary films and personal discussions. In Gammon’s study of how ordinary people make sense of politics, traditional news media are not found to be as marginal as in Barnhart’s group of young citizens. However, traditional news media appear to be only one resource together with experiential knowledge and popular wisdom, the latter defined as shared knowledge of what everyone knows, often expressed in proverbs and rules of thumb.
Consider: Pop Culture as a form of Political Communication
Despite the self-evident importance of popular culture in the institutional processes of political communication, as well as in the everyday understandings of politics, theory and research on such articulations of popular culture and politics is rare. The present volume is part of a wider effort to put these issues on the academic and political agenda. If popular culture emerges as a prominent resource for political communication and for political understanding, what then is the political nature of popular culture? How does political culture function as a form of political communication?
We will answer these questions in this volume along three related dimensions: popular culture as political fiction, which occurs when politics and politicians are the subject of, for instance television series, movies or novels. A second dimension concerns popular culture as political stage which occurs when politicians appear in popular genres. A third instance of political popular culture is when popular culture itself takes on the form of political practice, as has happened with many kinds of popular music ranging from the protest song of the sixties to the black rap music of the nineties. In this volume Göran Bolin examines the political dimension of a popular public practice of film swapping. This introduction explores the common threads in these three dimensions of popular culture as political communication. To do so we first need to discuss the structure and ideology of popular culture in more general terms.
Analyze: Structural and Ideological Features of Popular Culture
As argued before, popular culture is firmly embedded in the social tradition of folklore and orality. Television in particular has been shown to be the storyteller of contemporary societies. Popular culture stories carry all the features of oral and folklore narratives, as laid out in Vladimir Propp’s classic study on fairy tales. These features pertain to the syntagmatic structures of stories moving through an initial stage of harmony, to disturbance, conflict or other kind of intervention which then can be complicated by misunderstandings and subplots, to fi- 8 Nally end in resolution. On the paradigmatic side of folk stories we see oppositional dichotomies between characters such as heroes and villains, virgins and whores, victims and perpetrators, etc. We find these features in many contemporary popular genres, like various kinds of television drama and the wide range of popular journalism. Popular culture is not only a schematic genre in terms of its paradigmatic and syntagmatic structures, it is also highly personalized and individualized. Individual actors and their actions are what move popular narratives forward. They are discussed in rhetoric labelled as private language by Kress, which positions its readers or audiences as individuals guided by common sense. It is a rhetorical style that is typical of the oral spoken tradition, but that is nevertheless found in the many written forms of popular journalism. The syntagmatic, paradigmatic and personalized characteristics of popular culture have an unmistakable gender dimension to them. Thus in syntagmatic terms, women are very seldom the actors that move the story forward; some paradigmatic oppositions are limited to women (virgins and whores), whereas others are projected primarily (but not exclusively) onto men (heroes and villains). As a result of gender, popular culture stories about women are usually markedly different from popular stories about men. One difference, for instance, is that women feature often in family stories and men in action and adventure stories and another is that women appear more often as victims and whereas perpetrators tend to be men.
The structural features of popular culture can thus be identified as schematic, personalized and gendered. As a result popular culture has often been condemned as a politically conservative and intellectually debilitating force. Sparks claims, for instance, that the personalized character of popular culture conceals the structural nature of social problems: The central problem is rather that [it offers] the experience of the individual as the direct and unmediated key to the understanding of the social totality. The simple reality is that the nature of the social totality is neither constituted through immediate experience nor entirely comprehensible in its terms. Between the individual and the social totality are complex mediations of institutional structures, economic relations and so on. Such a comment and other critical approaches to popular culture can be traced to the work of the members of the Frankfurt School which was dominant until the mid-seventies and early eighties. However, with the emergence of feminist and cultural studies, popular culture has been reclaimed as a possible site of protest. A classic example is Janice Roadway’s study on reading romance novels, in which she argues that reading romance novels can be seen a form of protest against the distanced rational forms of masculinity that patriarchy prescribes. Other radical interpretations of popular culture as a form of resistance can be found in the work of John Fiske. Such studies have received as much criticism as they have received support, indicating that the specific ideological (conservative or progressive) character of popular culture is very much in debate. In addition, popular culture as a whole and its specific genres seem too wide and complex to expect any kind of general outcome on its ideological leanings. Rather, specific genres may offer or prevent specific political opportunities. The Dutch gossip press, for instance, has on the one hand a very open and appreciative coverage of homosexual relations, but frames women on the other hand in rather traditional terms of family life. Likewise, Joke Hermes has shown that women’s magazines function for individual female readers both as a source of empowerment and as a means to realign them with traditional femininity.
Evaluate: Popular Culture Effect on Political Performance
When thinking about the political nature of popular culture then, we need to think of its structural features (schematic, personalized and gendered) rather than of its ideological features. The latter are bound to be diverse and contradictory and contingent on specific contexts of use and interpretation. How then, do the structural features of popular culture affect its political performance as fiction, stage and practice?
· Popular Culture as Political Fiction
· Popular Culture as Political Practice
Popular Culture as Political Fiction
Politics is not a very current subject matter for popular culture. Hollywood has shied away from the topic, and in television series the professions that have feature more prominently are lawyers, doctors, policemen and journalists. Nevertheless, politics and politicians have been constructed in popular fictional forms in small but substantially significant proportions. In these fictions, the schematic, individualistic and gendered features of popular culture have produced regularly recurring frames of meaning. Consider how politics occurs in two romance novels. In one of Barbara Cartland’s hundreds of booklets, The Enchanted Waltz, which is set in Vienna on the eve of the great peace conference of 1815, the heroine is told: Women should stay out of politics and out of diplomacy too. At its best it is dirty business. In a Mills and Book novel, this one set in contemporary America, the heroine is left by her fiancée after having supported him in his campaign for a women who is more befitting to his career. Someone else asks her: Tell me what a nice girl like you is doing in a dirty business like politics? The man asking the question turns out to be the hero of the story and sometime later the heroine ponders that he seemed really interested in her as a human being. That was something she wasn’t used to in the hard chaotic world of politics where everyone seemed to use each other. It is not uncommon to see politics and femininity constructed as each other antithesis. In popular genres, politics is often represented as a cesspool of dishonesty in which corruption, bribery and blackmail are not uncommon. Women as traditional symbols of innocence and virtue often figure to demarcate the opposition of corrupt politics with humanity and decency.
Consider: From Popular Culture to Politics and Vice Versa
If what we mean by popular culture is conditioned by history, by ideology and by institutions, and if these also affect people’s relationship to popular culture, then we need to look more closely at how popular culture can engage with politics and vice versa.
· Perspective 1: from popular culture to politics
Consider: Perspective 1: from popular culture to politics
There are many ways in which popular culture seems to engage with politics, the way its pleasures are linked to political thoughts and actions. Think of the way we respond to our favorite films or songs or television programs: the way we laugh and cry, dance and dream. Popular culture makes us feel things, allows us to experience sensations, which are both familiar and novel. It does not simply echo our state of mind, it moves us. And in articulating emotion, popular culture links us into a wider world.
Popular culture’s ability to produce and articulate feels can become the basis of identity, and that identity can be the source of political thought and action. We know who we are through the feelings and responses we have, and who we are shapes our expectations and our preferences. People’s sense of themselves has always come from the use of images and symbols (signs of nation, class and sexuality, for example).
Popular culture can, in the way it offers forms of identity, become engaged with politics, in particular with the politics of citizenship, the right to belong and be recognized.
Popular culture’s ability to focus passion and to express defiance also allows it to become a form of political management. This opportunity, can, of course, be used to malign and benign effect, just as the identities constructed through popular culture can be liberating or oppressive. An example is to recall the propaganda machines of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia to remember the ways in which the machinery of culture can be deployed to legitimate a political order and to orchestrate a popular sentiment.
· Perspective 2: from politics to popular culture
Evaluate: Populism
Watch: What is Populism?
No transcript is currently available
Estimated time to complete: 4 minutes
Both these varieties of populism – whether political or cultural – have a superficial appeal; they appear to guarantee neutrality and legitimacy. The popular choice is the democratic choice. It is not imposed; it is the product of free individuals responding to their preferences. Any alternative to this involves acts of judgement and interference, exercises of power that require the introduction of partial values and the prosecution of particular interests. But this is a false distinction. In reality, populism is itself as much the product of political judgements and interests as are imposed choices. And in understanding the relationship of politics and popular culture, we need to understand what populism represents. It oversimplifies the ways in which popular culture takes on political significance, or the ways in which politics engages with popular culture.
Politics against Populism
The blending of politics and popular culture runs the risk of seeing politicians as simply representing the people, and popular culture as being just a form of popular expression. Running parallel to this political populism is a cultural populism, one that allows broadcasters, artists, cultural analysts, and others to claim that popular culture expresses the wishes and desires of the people. Both political and culture populism are, however, highly suspect ideas, at least in their unqualified form.
Politics is in large part an attempt to secure pre-eminence for one version of the people over another, to define the people in a way that serves a particular set of interests or practices. The ‘people’ are the product of politics, not its origins.
In achieving dominance, populist rhetoric adopts a variety of codes and genres. It can, for example, appeal to the past myths or future fears; and It can dress them in different styles – it can be hectoring or homely, grandiose or folksy. But what each is intended to do is to link its audience to a vision which in turn legitimates a particular course of action. First, there is the question of who is to be included in the idea of the people, and secondly, there is the question of what they want. The people do not have a ‘voice’; they are given one by the opinion pollsters, commentators, journalists, politicians, interest groups. The ‘people’ are created through the ways in which they are represented and spoken for. The people are made; they do not just exist.
· Pop Culture against Populism
Watch: What’s Behind the Global Rise in Populism?
Estimated time to complete: 3 minutes
No transcript is currently available
Consider
Our relationship to popular culture and the popular press cannot be seen as the relationship of cause and effect. Instead popular culture has to be understood as part of our politics.
This is not to deny the political importance of the popular press, but rather to understand it as part of the wider and more complex relationship we have with popular culture. This is to link popular culture directly to our histories and experiences.
Unit Knowledge Check
Estimated time to complete: 15 minutes
This 10 point activity is designed to assist you in determining your understanding of the unit’s content.
· Return to Canvas and complete the unit knowledge check to assess personal knowledge on topics covered in this unit.
· Take note of questions that are difficult.
· Review difficult topics prior to repeating the knowledge check or moving on to the next unit.
· You have two attempts available, the highest score will be used.
References
· Books
· Videos
Storey, John (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 4th edition, Harlow: Pearson Education, 2009.