3 Culture, Popular/Mass Culture II

Dr. Saradindu Bhattacharya

Section 1: Mass/Popular Culture – Theoretical Positions

The concept of culture as something that can be manufactured and consumed at a mass level has its origin in the modern industrial society, wherein the capitalist motive of economic profit is perceived to drive the entire process of cultural production and signification. As a result, cultural artefacts and phenomena of this kind have been described by traditionalists as ‘mass culture’, with negative connotations of assembly-line uniformity and a perceived lack of originality, taste and refinement that supposedly mark true culture. The distinction between popular and mass culture is of fairly recent origin, and one that borrows from the assumption that the mass scale production, distribution and consumption of cultural commodities in industrial societies renders the audience into passive targets. This is the position assumed by critics like Horkheimer and Adorno in their conception of a ‘culture industry’ that functions on the principle of homogenization of public taste for the purpose of making economic profit. Such a theoretical position concedes little room for any individual or collective role or agency for the audience in the matter of cultural signification, as it simply assumes them to be unquestioning recipients of the industrially pre-determined meanings that commodities bear. From this point-of-view, it would seem that ‘culture’ in an industrial society means whatever the owners of the means of production want it to mean. The notion of mass culture is thus producer-centric and does not account for the fact that cultural commodities are integrated by consumers into their lives in various ways and contexts that often deviate from their intended meanings.

It is this gap in the process of cultural signification, arising from the audiences’ ability to revise and re-appropriate the meanings encoded in industrially produced commodities, that theorists of popular culture like Stuart Hall, John Fiske and John Storey focus on. They suggest that popular culture represents not the wholesale subsuming of individual tastes and preferences under the homogenizing regime of mass scale production and distribution of cultural commodities, but the emergence of multiple and out of the process of their consumption. Such a theoretical position is audience-centric, as it perceives the consumer of culture as an active agent, and not as the final destination, in the process of meaning-making. Thus, for example, while Ekta Kapoor’s family dramas on Indian television channels mostly reinstate patriarchal notions of femininity, they also enable their target audience, housewives, to claim for themselves an exclusive domain, both in terms of time and space, within the domestic territory as well as evolve a means of communication and bonding with other female viewers on the basis of their shared knowledge of the conventions of such shows. In addition, it is also significant that the producer, in this case, is a single, media-savvy, female entrepreneur (of whom there are not too many in India) who effectively uses traditional norms of gender to make economic profit in an overwhelmingly male-dominated entertainment industry, thereby offering to her audience a dramatic contrast to the fictional role models her shows feature. Thus, while the cultural commodity certainly encodes a particular set of values that signify feminine conformity to patriarchal social norms, it also allows for appropriation by its audience for purposes that are revisionary. In certain cases, the audience is not only able to appropriate popular culture for their own purposes but also influence the meanings that the producers seek to communicate through their commodities. An early example of this would be the resurrection of the immensely popular fictional character of Sherlock Holmes, whom the author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had killed in a combat with his arch-nemesis, Moriarty, but had to subsequently bring back to life under the pressure of his readers’ demands.

It must also be pointed out here that theorists of mass culture express a certain anxiety about the mechanization of the process of cultural production in industrial societies, which suggests an underlying assumption that aesthetic value is somehow integrally related to individual talent and authorship. While it is true that in many cases cultural production happens on the basis of an industrially pre-determined format rather than as the spontaneous expression of a creative genius, we must also remember that many of the cultural commodities we now consider as being the ultimate repositories of aesthetic value have actually always had a mass audience and have therefore always been a part of popular culture. For example, Shakespeare’s plays or Dickens’ serialized novels were immensely popular with Elizabethan and Victorian audiences much before their canonization as classic works of literature in college and university curricula. In fact, these authors were themselves quite actively and consciously involved in the business of making money out of their writing by addressing a wide audience; their subsequent elevation to the status of great artists and appropriation by apologists of ‘high’ culture was not a key factor in their popularity in their own lifetimes. Theorists of popular culture focus on the history of the evolution and reception of certain cultural commodities to reveal that the ‘value’ of culture, traditionally determined on the basis of principles of taste and uniqueness, is more a function of class politics and less of any intrinsic, immutable, universal aesthetic merit.

Section 2: Mass/Popular Culture and Media

The media play a crucial role in the creation, dissemination and reception of popular culture, especially within the context of modern capitalist societies wherein geographically dispersed and diverse audiences are exposed to images, objects and ideas that constitute them as members of an increasingly globalized community of consumers. Media not only become the technological means of transmitting information about cultural objects, events and practices but also the very site for the performance of cultural identities. Thus, for example, the Republic Day parade in India is not only a localized annual spectacle meant for a small group of politicians and civilians in Delhi but, as a cultural ‘event’ that is telecast live on national TV, is a ritualized and mediatized performance that foregrounds the idea of Indian culture as marked by ‘unity in diversity’. In this case, the significance of the cultural ‘text’ is not limited to the actual participants and physical territory of its occurrence but includes a much larger body of spectators who bear witness on their television screens to this spectacle of national identity. While on the one hand, this televised spectacle purportedly represents the regional, communal or ethnic specificities of the members of its dispersed audience, on the other hand it also becomes a media text whose consumption becomes a part of the audience’s declaration of their own national identity. Thus, such a ‘public’ event, though orchestrated and sanctioned by governmental machinery, becomes an integral element in the audience’s ‘popular’ understanding of their own Indianness in its performative capacity. This becomes more evident if we take a look at the coverage an India-Pakistan cricket match receivesin print and electronic media, wherein the discourse of national achievement and pride is literally played out to a witnessing public. As a popular form of entertainment, cricket in India has emerged prominently through and because of its televisation. While the audience consume images of a wide variety of consumer products, ranging from health drinks to electronic gadgets, in the form of advertisements during commercial breaks, they also participate (often through repeated exposure to such events) in assessing and commenting upon specific aspects of the game itself. The constant supply of information about the technique and past achievements of individual players, the track record of specific teams and the history of the stadium itself, enables the audience to acquire a certain amount of ‘vernacular’ knowledge and expertise in the game via media. Thus, the televised cricket match, with its obvious economic investment in consumer culture and its political significance in forging a national identity, also becomes a participatory form of mass entertainment and is an instance of the convergence of public and popular culture.

In fact, some media texts themselves become cultural artefacts in the collective consciousness and imagination of their audience. For instance, cinema in India is not only one of the most popular forms of public entertainment but also a marker of specific cultural identities. The booming film industries in many states of the country cater to particular linguistic communities, showcasing the traditions and practices, music and dance, as well as the everyday life and rituals of their audience. In their capacity to bring together, either within the actual physical space of the cinema hall or the more amorphous, deterritorialized cultural space of spectatorship, an audience whose members identify themselves as belonging to a group, films function as tools as well as texts through which popular culture is defined. For example, a film like Mani Ratnam’s Roja, set partly in Tamil Nadu and partly in Kashmir and dubbed into several regional languages, becomes ‘popular’ at once through its appeal to specific regional and linguistic codes as well as the cinematic text’s translatability across those cultural specificities to represent a pan-Indian identity.

Another significant aspect of media’s role in the domain of popular culture is its ability to absorb elements from already existing cultural forms and practices and re-present them in new combinations to a wide section of audiences. Thus, the popular appeal of ‘bhangra’ music and dance in the 1990s, both within the country and abroad, resulted largely from Bollywood’s appropriation of this folk art form and its large-scale repackaging as an identifiably ‘Indian’ characteristic of joyous, colourful world-view. Media texts often also function on a principle of repetition and recycling of elements already present in the public domain in order to perpetuate and enhance their popularity. For example, the brief but remarkable spurt of ‘desi’ pop music in the mid-1990s in India banked as much on native folk music and dance forms as it did on ‘remixing’ old Hindi film songs, chiefly those composed by R.D. Burman, with contemporary Western orchestration. The role of such intertextual referencing in making certain texts ‘popular’ is evident from the success of Hindi films like Om Shanti Om and Dum Lagake Haisha, which appeal to their audience on the basis of their shared knowledge of the popular cinematic norms of the 1970s and 1990s respectively.

Section 3: Mass/Popular Culture: Icons and Trends

The nature of culture in a mass mediated, capitalist society is essentially flexible and transient, as the producers of culture need to constantly supply newer objects and forms of consumption to their audiences. Thus, popular culture acquires and projects the necessary attribute of currency in the age of mass media as opposed to the supposed value of permanence that was traditionally associated with the concept of culture in pre-industrial societies. The association of a group or community with the cultural artefacts or practices popular with it is no longer organic, as the members of that group or community do not necessarily produce, preserve or transmit that ‘culture’ beyond the context of their own immediate consumption. The idea that culture must transcend the barriers of age and time has given way to an acceptance of the ‘popular’ as a form of cultural expression of the here and the now. It is in this context that a discussion of icons and trends becomes crucial to an understanding of the workings of popular or mass culture.

Broadly defined, icons are objects, texts or people that come to represent a certain set of values relating to gender, class, age, region, religion or lifestyle to a wide enough audience to command instant recognisability. It is important that an icon enjoys constant and widespread visibility in the public domain for it signify popular cultural meanings to its audience. For example, Virat Kohli has become a youth icon not merely through his swashbuckling style of playing cricket on the field but also through the media attention he has been garnering for his activities off the field, ranging from the brands of grooming products he uses to the women he dates. Kohli’s popular appeal results from his ability to move across domains of sports, fashion and lifestyle and thus represent a composite image of a ‘cool’, young, urban, Indian man. Kohli also represents the new face of Indian cricket, one that is unapologetically fun-loving, adventurous and ambitious. While Kohli’s iconicity draws undeniably from the popularity of cricket in India (as opposed to hockey or tennis), it also recursively feeds into the glamour of the sport itself and thus perpetuates the popular appeal of both. In many cases, it is the icon who signals the emergence of a cultural phenomenon or activity in the popular imagination of a group. For example, the commercial success of Chetan Bhagat has made creative writing an attractive option for young English- speaking men and women in the country. Though Bhagat did not inaugurate the practice of writing English novels in India, he did manage to appeal to a numerically large cross-section of young Indian readers with themes (like career, romance and family) that they found relevant and in an idiom that they could identify with. The exponential rise in the number of young Indian writers of popular fiction in English since Bhagat’s rise to prominence bears testimony to the centrality of icons in the public domain of culture. Sometimes, texts and objects also become icons in terms of how they circulate within the popular parlance of the members of a group or community. For instance, Pepsi’s advertising slogan “yeh dil maange more” became a popular catchphrase for Indian teenagers and youth in the newly liberalized economy of the 1990s, as it represented their desire for greater consumption and pleasure.

The deliberate code-mixing of Hindi and English in the slogan echoed the lingo of the target audience, and combined with the use of popular youth icons like Shah Rukh Khan, Sachin Tendulkar and Aishwarya Rai in print and television advertisement campaigns, effectively turnedthe soft drink into a symbol of the aspirations of a new generation exposed to the delights of consumer culture.

It is by means of icons that trends are created by the producers of culture and acquired by the consumers.Any particular pattern of speech, clothing, behaviour or action shared by a large number of people in a group may be defined as a trend. In capitalist societies, trends in domains like fashion and technology are generated by industrialists and disseminated by mass media and appropriated by large sections of consumers as part of their collective identity. For example, Aamir Khan’s haircut in Ghajini became a trend for millions of young Indian men not only as a means of publicly declaring their adoration of their favourite star but also as a symbolic transference of the brand of vengeful heroism that he portrayed on screen into the context of their own ‘real’ lives. Interestingly, it was Aamir Khan himself who, more than a decade earlier, had made the romantic pursuit of one’s own dreams trendy with the youth of the country with the immensely popular song he had performed on screen: “Papa kehte hain bada naam karega”. As followers of a common trend, members of a group identify themselves with one another as well as declare their uniqueness in contrast to other groups. For example, users of smart-phone applications like WhatsApp belong to a virtual community that represents a young, upwardly mobile, tech-savvy consumer profile, distinct from those who prefer using more traditional modes of communication on and offline. Trends are necessarily transitory and replaceable, as ‘trending’ topics on social networking sites show us now. It is not so much the public significance of the subject discussed on a popular social forum like Twitter that determines the popularity of the matter and the medium. Thus, there may be just as many responses to jokes about Anushka Sharma’s influence on Virat Kohli’s performance in a World Cup matchas there are to the Nepal earthquake. It is the act of participation in such discussions that constitutes the identity of the users as ‘Twitterati’. Thus, trends created through mass media become an integral aspect of the way in which popular culture is assimilated into the identities of individuals and groups.

Section 4: Mass/Popular Culture: Contexts of Consumption

The most significant way in which mass or popular culture differs from ‘high’ culture is in its capacity to become integrated into the everyday experience of living of its practitioners. By virtue of being accessible to a great number of people in the quotidian contexts and spaces of their work and leisure, popular culture becomes an inalienable element of the social environment they exist in. For example, a person living in any of the Hindi- speaking states in India is likely to encounter the songs of Lata Mangeshkar and Kishore Kumar almost on a daily basis, while traveling on public transport, on television and radio, at shops, street-corners and wedding parties, as mobile phone ringtones of people around or as ‘remixed’ versions in pubs. However, one is less likely to encounter a recital by Pandit Ajoy Chakraborty or Shiv Kumar Sharma in similar contexts. The difference between the popular appeal of the former and the classical status of the latter both results from and leads to the creation of different (though not exclusive) audiences – one whose members identify and share their vernacular knowledge of music through the widely accessible medium of Bollywood songs, the other whose members distinguish themselves in terms of their cultivated ‘taste’ in performance arts that are usually available only in concerts or as expensive music CDs. It is the free circulation of Bollywood music, in common public spaces as well as across various media that transforms playback singers into popular icons and the tunes and lyrics of ‘hit’ songs into hummable catchphrases. The popularity of film music, as opposed to classical music, is thus a function of its pervasive presence in the everyday lives of its audiences.

In some cases, popular culture also functions through a transference and recombination of certain elements of ‘high’ or ‘folk’ culture within the public domain. Thus, for example, Channel V’s Coke Studio presents collaborations between classical and folk musicians and mainstream singers and composers like A.R. Rahman, Shankar Mahadevan and Sunidhi Chauhan in the popular format of fusion music. It is the televisual medium’s wide appeal to a cross section of audiences, and especially the channel’s image as a youth- centric domain, that renders such little known forms and performers popular. Similarly, filmmaker Vishal Bharadwaj’s trilogy – Maqbool, Omkara and Haider – borrows directly from Shakespeare’s great tragedies (which, in the Indian context, are still a fairly niche area of interest and knowledge restricted to the academia) and turns them ‘popular’ through the medium of cinema and in a language that has a far greater reach than English in India. What is significant in this case is also the way in which the ‘original’ Shakespearean texts have been transposed into specific social, political and cultural contexts familiar to Indian audiences, and thereby rendered them identifiable. Thus, Haider is set in strife-torn Kashmir of the early 1990s and Maqbool in the Mumbai underworld, offering contexts that are already familiar to an Indian audience through other films and news reports about these regions and bringing Shakespeare’s characters closer home. Such cinematic adaptations of literary classics mark a certain vernacularization of ‘high’ culture by making elements of it widely accessible and comprehensible to a mass audience.

Another significant aspect of popular culture is that the objects and practices that constitute it are malleable enough to signify diverse meanings to smaller groups within their audience rather than suggest a single, uniform, homogenous ‘standard’ of values as ‘high’ culture does. For instance, a visit to a shopping mall may result in different forms of satisfaction and pleasure for different people based on their gender, age and intent. Thus, for young men and women in India, the mall offers a safe space of interaction (both romantic and platonic) where they can simply ‘hang out’ without the threat of family intervention or social scrutiny. For children visiting the mall with their parents, the vast, well lit, open spaces and the various gaming sections offer a substitute for the lack of parks and playing grounds characteristic of crowded Indian towns and cities. On the other hand, for the parents themselves, the mall is often a convenientone-stop destination for making essential purchases such as groceries and clothes at competitive prices, as well as aplace for a family outing where one can shop, eat and watch a movie, all under the same roof.Similarly, the act of reading romance novels or watching family soap operas on television can signify for the target female audience a reiteration of patriarchal norms of femininity but may also be seen as enabling the creation of a communal space of bonding amongst women based on their shared familiarity with popular texts. In the digital age, the internet serves as a potentially democratic, polyphonic space of cultural expression. Thus, while popular websites like Youtubeserve as a means of promoting mass produced cultural artefacts like films and music albums, they also facilitate the creation of an audience for the work of independent artists by putting up short-films, cover versions of songs and parodies of already popular shows.

Section 5: Mass/Popular Culture in the Age of Globalization

In the context of a networked global economy and mass media, it is impossible to think of ‘culture’ as representing the values and practices of any single, ‘pure’ ethnic, religious or national community. The defining characteristic of popular culture across the globe in the late 20th and early 21st centuries is hybridity, that is, an admixture of elements from diverse sources into forms that cannot be properly said to ‘belong’ to any one particular group of people, though they may be consumed by a wide range of audiences across various geographical and cultural locations. Take, for instance, the popularity of Chinese cuisine across India: it results from the appropriation of certain generic food recipes (such as noodles or fried rice) by Indian establishments and a recombination of those with spices that appeal to the average Indian palate. In fact, ‘authentic’ or ‘original’ Chinese food is significantly less spicy than what we usually get in Indian eating joints. Not surprisingly, the ever popular ‘chow-mein’, the short-hand for Chinese food in India, was a recipe developed by diasporic Chinese cooks in Kolkata using native herbs and spices and even evolving vegetarian versions of originally meat-based recipes to suit the tastes of local customers. It is also interesting to note that unlike the food items unique to many ethnic and regional groups in the country (say, the Bihari ‘litti’ or the Gujarati ‘thepla’), Chinese food is widely available across domains, cooked in homes, sold at street-side carts and served at gourmet restaurants.It is this pervasive presence of Chinese food that renders it ‘popular’ across barriers of class and region and makes it an integral part of contemporary India’s fast-food culture.In a similar instance, the ‘curry’ has emerged as one of the most favourite dishes of British citizens over the last fiftyyears or so, thanks to the sizeable number of Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani migrants who have entered the food business there. In fact, the curry has even been described as the national food of Britain – an ironic reversal of the country’s history of political colonization of the very countries whose cuisine now seems to be overtaking the popular ‘native’ food culture. In many cases, what is originally unique to the culture of one particular class, gender or region becomes marketed across the globe through the devices of industrial economy. For example, jeans, originally the garment of working-class cowboys in the American mid-West, have now become globally popular as a unisex piece of apparel, ranging from expensive, high-end brands like Diesel to the ones that are sold on street pavements. In fact, in India, jeans are often teamed up with kurtas by both men and women (especially in urban centres), representing a hybrid cultural form of clothing that brings together elements of native Indian tradition and Western modernity.

While the forces of the global economy – led by giant corporate houses and conglomerates in the domains of food, clothing, travel, entertainment and media –effect a certain homogenization of culture across audiences, it would be wrong to assume that consumers are undifferentiated mass on whom the values of the manufacturers are mechanically imposed. Critics like Tony Bennett have used the Gramscian concept of hegemony to explain how popular culture functions in society. Bennett points out that popular culture implies neither the imposition of mass culture by the dominant classes nor oppositional culture spontaneously produced by ‘the people’; rather, it is the site where continuous negotiations between the two take place and the ideological values of different classes and groups are ‘mixed’. The recent controversy surrounding the AIB roast is a case in point. The concept of the ‘roast’, fairly popular in the United States, is a new cultural import in India. The show was performed to a live audience in Mumbai who could afford to pay for the tickets; it was only when it was put up on Youtube a week later that the general ‘public’ could watch the show. The hosts of the show, Arjun Kapoor and Ranveer Singh, are both popular Bollywood heroes and youth icons who can be assumed to represent the average upper-class, urban Indian man. While the celebrity status of these film stars was certainly a factor that contributed to the roast’s large online viewership, it was also the content of show itself – irreverent, self-deprecatory, sexually explicit jokes targeting (mostly) Bollywood personalities – that also attracted a wide audience. The wide range of criticism that the show garnered, on diverse grounds of public morality, gender sensitivity and individual freedom in democracy, is suggestive of the essentially plural nature of the ‘meaning’ of such a popular ‘text’ and its capacity to signify different aspects of individual and group identity. Thus, while the show appealed to a vast section of its audience in terms of its resonance with the actual idiom of thought and speech of modern Indian youth, to many others it represented a breach of traditional ‘Indian’ cultural values that forbid public discussions of sex and sexuality in a mixed group. What is noteworthy in this case is that the controversy itself added immensely to public curiosity about the show and thus played a crucial role in its going viral. Thus, in the age of mass media, while the large-scale dissemination of cultural artefacts leads to the creation of global audiences, it is in the act and through the process of the heterogeneous interpretation of ‘texts’ that the popularity of such culture becomes manifest.

REFERENCES:

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• Zach Lahey, Globalization and Indian Cultural Values<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoimUYti25A>
• James Gifford, The Industrial Production of Popular Culture: SFU Continuing Studies Lecture, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gXQBmyTXlQ>