'Mass culture was labelled as a drug which ‘lessens people’s capacity to experience life itself’

Culture, Popular Culture, Mass Culture, Subculture, Counterculture

[Working Definitions]

Raymond Williams calls culture, ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’. He suggests that, culture can be used to refer to ‘a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development’.

Popular Culture: One way of defining popular culture is to suggest that it is the culture that is left over after we have decided what is high culture. Popular culture, in this definition, is a residual category, there to accommodate texts and practices that fail to meet the required standards to qualify as high culture. In other words, popular culture is classified as inferior culture. For example, high culture might want to insist on formal complexity. In other words, to be real culture, it has to be difficult. Being difficult thus ensures its exclusive status as high culture.

After 1660 culture in England was decisively split along class lines so that the ‘polite’ and ‘proper’ values of the gentry aimed to dominate the ‘vulgarity’ of the ‘common’ people. By 1830 that split has been reshaped and reformed so that popular culture - in distinction to the high culture of the gentry - now in some degree expresses the values of the working class.

In Keywords (1976) Raymond Williams suggests that ‘popular’ is used to describe a culture ‘made by the people for themselves’. This requires a counter-definition: ‘popular’ to mean the mass media imposed on people by commercial interests.

In the West, from at least the 1890s popular culture and its distance from high culture became largely incorporated into the great contemporary media - newspapers, film, radio, television - whose condition of existence was modern technology, particularly in visual reproduction.

In Britain the generation that learned to read because of the 1870 Education Act began in the 1890s to buy weekly and daily popular journals. On 4 May 1896 a newspaper costing a halfpenny was launched [at a time when other dailies cost one penny]. The Daily Mail, started winning sales of half a million by 1898 and a full million by 1900.

Development of the popular press was followed by the cinema, especially in the decade after 1910. By 1920 Hollywood, [consisting of production, distribution and cinema ownership together], made up America’s fourth largest industry, after farming, steel and transportation. During the 1920s Hollywood was making 850 feature films per year, and at a peak in 1930 in the United States. 110 million cinema tickets were being sold each week.

Radio in Britain grew rapidly after the British Broadcasting Corporation was given an exclusive licence to broadcast in January 1923.

Television transmission was introduced in 1936. In the United States 3 per cent of the households owned sets in 1940, 88 per cent in 1960. The rise of television was matched by the decline of the mass audience for the cinema from 1950 onwards. During this period the divide between high and popular culture becomes decisive.

Literary Value as Hegemony: At present the prevailing notion of literary value is inextricably bound up with the conventional account of literary study. The high culture/popular culture opposition was founded in a conception of value: while literary value is present in the canonical work, it is absent from the texts of popular culture. Raymond Williams was probably the first to denounce literary value as an institutional construction.

Mass culture is the inevitable outcome of mass society and mass production. It was labelled as a drug which ‘lessens people’s capacity to experience life itself’. Critics have also termed it as a sign of impoverishment, which marks the de-individualization of life: an endless search after what Freud calls ‘substitute gratifications’. The trouble with substitute gratifications, according to the mass culture critique, is that they shut out ‘real gratifications’.

Subcultures are “pieces” of a larger culture or society, differing in some way from “mainstream” culture. It can be defined as - a relatively diffuse social network having a shared identity, distinctive meanings around certain ideas, practices, and objects, and a sense of marginalization from or resistance to a perceived “conventional” society.

Subcultures are important because they provide affirming spaces. In their opposition, they reflect back at our hypocrisies, forcing us to ask “oppositional to what?” Conformity? Racism? Intolerance? Violence? Hyper-consumption? Beauty standards? Subculturists may not be heroes, but if we listen, they may teach us something. For criminologists then, “subculture” was (and sometimes still is) used to describe a delinquent or criminal gang to be stopped or reformed by various authorities.

Countercultures involve extra-institutional challenges to cultural authorities. Theodor Roznak (1969/1995) used the term counterculture to describe the youth cultures of the 1960s. Counterculture seems to fill the conceptual gap between social movement and subculture. J.

Milton Yinger (1960) distinguished between “contracultures” in conflict with dominant society and subcultures, groups with distinctive norms that may or may not openly conflict with the larger culture. They place a premium on individuality, having perhaps even less coherence than many subcultures. Observing “The Counterculture” of the 1960s, Roznak noted a broad rejection of “technocratic society” and championing of creativity and self-fulfillment, exemplified by the hippies.

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Works Cited

Knowledges: Culture, Counterculture, Subculture. By Peter Worsley

The Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture. By Scott Macfarlane

Subcultures: The Basics. By Ross Haenfler

American Countercultures: An Encyclopedia of Nonconformists, Alternative Lifestyles, and Radical Ideas in U.S. History. Edited by Gina Misiroglu

Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction. Fifth edition. By John Storey