35 Class in Popular Culture (Case Study)

Dr. Debomitra Kar

In this chapter you will learn:

• What is popular culture
• What is class: is class still valid in the present post-global society?
• The changing face of popular culture and how it accommodates the class consciousness
• The influence of some important western philosophers in formulating the relation between the class and popular culture
• How to relate these concepts to Indian popular cultural forms

Let us start this discussion with a thought-exercise. Take three subjects, A, B, C who are watching a cricket match. Assume that it is a final match for India. Now, consider the specifics:

A does not have a good TV set (LCD) at home. So the subject had come to a friend’s house to watch the game.

B is watching it at home with other family members.

C is watching it at a sports pub with a group of friends and of course in a giant screen. Now the questions:

1. Given that all of them are enjoying the game, is their experience of watching the game the same?
2. As an Indian is watching a game like cricket similar to watching any other game?
3. Do the means of watching reveal the characteristics of the subject’s social position?
4. What are their genders? Do women watch a cricket match differently from men?
5. Try to name the subjects. Did you notice anything particular?

There are obviously no right and wrong for these answers for we are looking at conjectures. You may feel that conjectures are individual insight formed on the basis of his/her previous experience, educational background, professional and personal status; yet they also reveal how we look and interpret a situation, what we accept it as normal or common and when is this conjecture formed, for our ideas of proper and improper do change with time. As a student studying culture you must learn to question the conjectures and interpret them so that conjectures do not lead to prejudice and jeopardise the well-being of the society.

As you have already noticed in the above example, the nature of watching a cricket match may also reveal the socio-economic condition of the subject. Thus what is usual and common to one, may be extremely luxurious to another. In the present chapter, we shall try to examine how the consideration of the class is hidden in the concept of the popular culture. But before we begin the discussion we must have a detailed understanding of the concept of ‘popular culture’ and ‘class’ and their various ramifications.

1. Defining ‘popular culture’

Taken separately, both the terms ‘popular’ and ‘culture’ are quite complicated. Culture, according to Raymond Williams, a well known Welsh academic and critic, is ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is so… mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought’ (87). The word has various connotations and associations which can be traced to its etymological roots. For instance, the original Latin root of the word was colere which has a range of meaning: inhabit, cultivate, protect, honour with worship. In sixteenth and seventeenth the word was associated with the concept of tending of something, particularly, crops or animals. In eighteenth century the meaning was extended to accommodate more abstract ideas, like ‘a culture of the mind’. This usage is still valid (particularly as verb, to culture, that is, to cultivate), though we do not simply mean a tending of the mind, but, rather, an overall development of the mind a specific manner. The modern usage of culture owes more to the German word kultur, which is associated with civilisation, encompassing both the concept of becoming ‘civilized’ or ‘cultivated’ and the deeper meaning of civilisation as endorsed by the eighteenth century historians and philosophers of Enlightenment which is a description of the secular process of human development. As you can see, the concept of civilisation, itself is a complicated one and hence, in the modern usage, the word culture thus means a variety of things:

• ‘a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development’
• ‘a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general’
• ‘the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity’

Extending Williams’ argument you could understand that culture is an intensely political word, for what would be considered ‘culture’ or its lack thereof, it dependant on the signifying practices of the society, its ideological considerations, at a specific historical time and geographical space. So classical music is cultural, all contemporary Bollywood songs are not, or folk songs are less cultured than bhajans—these are recurrent debates in India.

Now, let us take up the second word, ‘popular’. It was originally a legal and political term, from Latin popularis—belonging to the people. In sixteenth century, popular estate and popular government, ‘referred to a political system constituted or carried on by the whole people, but there was also the sense of “low” or “base”’ (Williams 110). However, the word in the modern times were more associated with ‘widely favoured’ or ‘well liked’ though this favour or like is at times tinged with a negativity, which corresponds to baseness and undue privileges. Like ‘popular journalism’ would signify, a deliberate courting of popularity at the cost of being honest. Similarly, popular could also mean inferiority, which is expressed in the phrase like, popular press, which is contrasted with the quality press.

By putting the two words together, ‘popular culture’ then, we come to a host of significations, each of which has its own historical roots, political motivation, ideological support and representational means. John Storey jots down a few probable working definitions to appreciate the variety of connotations:

• Popular culture is simply the culture that is well liked by many people. For instance, Bollywood movies, music albums, novels, can all be cases in point. But the question remains, is then popular culture a quantitative category? Like the ones that only did a 100 crore business in the box office?
• Popular culture is a residual culture, it accommodates texts and practices that fail to meet the required standards to qualify as high culture. Should we then assume that in order to be real culture the work of art should be difficult? How do we incorporate folk culture in this scheme for it is not at all difficult and yet extremely popular in certain sections of the society?
• Popular culture is synonymous with mass culture. It is a mass produced, commercialised culture that employs formulaic cultural codes and is consumed with a brain numbing passivity. However, this definition is that consumption is not always a passive activity, thus in spite of employing similar cultural standards, some works become popular, some fail; again, in spite of experimenting with the given cultural norms, some works become extremely popular. For example, think how a film like Kahani (a no hero film, made on a modest budget of Rs 80 million) became so popular (made Rs 1.04 billion in the box office).
• Popular culture is a culture that originates from the people. It is the authentic culture of the people, which contends any kind of hegemonic cultural imposition. In this regard, popular culture comes quite close to folk culture, which Gramsci believed to be the ground of resistance building. However, the definition of people is not always above contention. And, being popular in modern terms also means being commercially successful which folk forms cannot always be. There are instances, where the basic folk forms are taken up and given a more polished, consumer friendly form: think of the entire experiment of Coke Studio, which has brought the forgotten folk musical forms, instruments and artists and blended that music with western or traditional Indian music and shown as a serialised regular TV programme in a channel which is associated with a particular type of music listeners or uploaded in the Internet, which is mostly accessed by the urban middle class.
• A more cogent view of popular culture is drawn from the theories of the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), particularly from his concept of ‘hegemony’. According to this standpoint, popular culture is neither only by the people, nor is it an imposed cultural norm accepted by the undistinguished mass, rather it is the ground of contestation between ‘the “resistance” of subordinate groups and the forces of “incorporation” operating in the interests of dominant groups…. it is the terrain of exchange and negotiation’ between the imposing cultural norms and the grassroot cultural forms. Gramsci calls it the ‘compromise equilibrium’ (Storey 10).

This definition resolves a few crisis: i) popular culture is seen as an ideological struggle; ii) the conflict is not restricted to two classes—one who is imposing the cultural standards, the dominant class, and the dominated class that forms the counter- hegemony—it can also incorporate other conflicting group positions like that of gender, ethnicity, generation, disability and so on; iii) it creates a cogent idea of who the ‘people’ are and by establishing a relation between the individual and the group, and the group and the power bloc.

In the present context, which is by and large, identified as the postmodern, the typical difference between the high and low culture has been systematically eroded. Thus the modernist disdain for popular as low no longer applies to our situation. Any artist in order to succeed today must be able to communicate to the market in more accessible terms. This is an end to elitism in art and culture, however does the erosion of the high culture also erode the elitist class consciousness? Is every form of art available to everybody? And even they are available, does the experience of consuming that cultural form the same across classes?

Thus, we come to the next part of our discussion which is about class and class consciousness in the present age.

• Is popular culture similar to mass culture?
• Is popular culture folk culture?
• Is the distinction between the high culture and low culture valid?

2. Class

The theory of class comes from Marxian philosophy regarding society and social development. Deriving from Hegel’s dialectics, Marx believed that the progression of human history is dependent on the conflict between the two classes, which he termed as the bourgeois and the proletariat. Though Marx and Engels spoke about class they did not expound it any systematic form. In German Ideology, Marx pointed out that class itself is a product of the bourgeoisie, it is a feature of the capitalist society which always try to maintain the class dynamics. Marx’s concept of class is closely tied with the concepts of production (construction of any object that would require raw material, labour and instrument— extendable to non-material emotions such as, like, dislike, fear, hatred, war, nationalism, and so on) and the relations of production (between the one who is providing the labour, one who is providing the money or the land, and the ideological support that the latter group would exert in keeping the production channel working). Thus, the idea of class in this theoretical position is closely tied to the base-superstructure model that Marx propagated but was debated and edited by later Marxist scholars. In The Capital III, Chapter 47, Marx writes that class is ‘… always the direct relation between the owners of the conditions of production and the direct producers which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden foundation of the entire social edifice.’

There are several debates regarding Marx’s notion of the class, like, he never spoke about the interrelation between the two in any other term than that of conflict, or how the class is created, whether class consciousness creates class or the opposite; and most importantly, Marx did not emphasize on the function of the middle class who are situated midway between the workers and the rich landowners. Incidentally, this class has become a more important player in the social situations and politics in the contemporary period. In fact, if you look around you, there would be several instances, where you can no longer find the so called conflict between the worker and the capitalist landowner, for instance, the highly paid corporate jobs, where people want to work more to earn more, and the management sports several welfare policies for its employees. Now the question arises, does the theory of the class apply to such situations?

There are a few possible resolutions: (i)to believe that the working class have changed into a new identity; or (ii) to argue the importance of class difference is gradually declining in the society because the nature of jobs, income, access to multiple goods, education have significantly changed in the modern times, hence, the relation between the individual and the means of production is no longer that important; (iii) a new form of ownership has ensued, which is other than economic, and hence even the landowner class has also changed its nature.

Each of these above comments has raised serious academic and political debates. You must remember that the theory of class is not the final answer to every situation (even Marx would not have claimed so, in fact Engles called it ‘vulgar Marxism’), for instance it does not speak about the aesthetic choice of a particular colour in a particular painting by a painter, or how issues like ethnic violence or sexual oppression can be curbed; rather the class is a consciousness that does not die so easily and even if you cannot see the difference in many social situations, it determines our actions in a great way that you can imagine. It works behind every decision that you take, what you consider to be reality, how you perceive your status in the society and at a macro level, how the consciousness of the people at a group level can exert an influence on a political situation and change the course of history.

Think for yourself

• Given a choice, what is your favourite shopping destination: local market or the shopping mall?
• What are the various considerations that you have in mind when to go to a shopping mall to buy a product?
• Why do you choose a branded product over another one?
• What effect does an advertisement have over you?
• Do you buy a product because your favourite actor is in the ad film?

2.1. Weber: Status group

Max Weber (1864-1920), a German social scientist and philosopher changed the social stratification of Marx by introducing the concept of ‘status group’. Weber’s notion of stratification was based on the consumption behaviour rather than the production pattern or relations of production between the forces of the production and the individual. In contrast to classes, status groups are normally communities, which are held together by notions of proper lifestyles, and by the social esteem and honour accorded to them by others. The members of one group would have a restricted interaction with the members of the other group, which they consider to be ‘inferior’ to them.

Consider for instance, the concept of zoning in urban landscapes, where you have posh areas and slums demarcated into two separate localities. It is not that those who live in the posh area are all equally rich, but they have almost similar lifestyles, or at least try to flaunt similar ‘status’. Thus, status groups are related to the identity that the members believe themselves to be possessing and also on the prestige or the degrading that the other group or groups associate with them. It creates a social distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

You must understand that there is a correlation between the class and social status, though they are not exactly the same. The social status creates the notion of a pluralistic society, where there can be various equations between different status groups. Lewis Coser writes: ‘… in capitalist society, the economically ascendant class will, in the course of time, also acquire higher status; yet in principle, propertied and property less people may belong to the same status group.’

Thus, while Marx was associating power only with economic advantage, Weber thinks that economic power can be a result of power exerted in other ground, i.e., the ultimate source of power may not be necessarily economic in nature, it could have other sources, though it would ultimately relate to economic power. For example, a man who has greater access to bureaucratic organisations, or legal or political system, will have greater access to economic power, even though he is a salaried and not belonging to the landowner class.

There are a few points to remember before we move on to the next section of our discussion:

• Class is not only about a rigid social demarcation, but a consciousness that stems out of our relations with the forces of production
• It induces us to think and act in a certain manner
• There can be several groups in the society, deriving their power either from economic advantage or other alternate sources, but to be in power, in the capitalist era, the group should have better access to the economic vantage points.
• The ultimate control in the present society is not physical but, ideological
• The ideological roots are deeply embedded into our cultural consciousness; hence, by looking at various cultural artefacts we can identify, question and negotiate the ideological assertions.

3. Class in Popular Culture

In our above discussion on popular culture we have noted that popular culture is a cultural artefact that would have tremendous control over the people or the mass. Now, popular culture is a time and space specific concept for what is popular today in a particular space is not popular in another time or in another space. For example, Shakespeare’s plays were quite popular during the Elizabethan times, but they are only read in classrooms or for personal pleasure by the well-read handful even in England today. Again, Harry Potter is quite popular all over the globe, though arguably among the ones who have access to English education and the ability to purchase the books priced in a particular way. Once again, television is a more easily accessible medium all over the world today, though fifty years ago it was in the possession of the lucky few. What you must also notice that popular culture, since it has a greater access to the millions, can be a useful tool in propagating ideas. In the following section, we shall thus read the popular culture from two perspectives, one as a production of the culture and the other as the consumption of the culture.

3.1. The Production of Popular Culture

The period between the 1890s and 1930s saw the rise of popular culture as the new printing and distribution technologies made newspapers, magazines, and novels widely available and affordable, and this was followed by the introduction of radio and cinema into the public space. Technically speaking this was also the time of the Modernist movement, which to a great extent wanted to maintain a critical distance from the notion of the popular thinking that good art/high art would require a certain amount of knowledge on the part of the consumers/audience to understand or enjoy the real worth of it. Literary critic like Frank and Queenie Leavis believed that

… schooling should include explicit instruction aimed at making people more critical of this profit-driven mass production of entertainment for mass production. An educated public… would grasp the debased nature of this supposedly ‘popular’ culture and understand the value of authentic ‘organic’ culture ranging from skilled country crafts to sophisticated drama. (Scott 47)

Thus, the general trend indicates that at this time, instead of it being a mass event, the production of art/culture was mostly based on individual merit. Culture was seen as a resistance against the popular or normative mass produced culture, which to great extent contributed to the difference between the high and low art. The basis of this entire argument rests solely on two premises, firstly, that there is a distinct demarcation between two kinds of art, high and low, and popular culture is closer to the latter one; secondly, the production of this art is solely dependent on a hegemonic agenda that aims at confusing the mass for some economic or ideological gain. Taken together, these two ideas assert the third one that the consumption of art is a rather passive act, and the consumers of the culture are determined subjects who do not have much agency of their own.

3.1.1. The Frankfurt School and the Notion of a Culture Industry

The production of popular culture for mass consumption is a concept that was theorised upon and popularised by the scholars of the Frankfurt School in Germany which was established in Germany in 1923. Though the school had a number of scholars both in its inner and outer circle, four philosophers, are considered to be of primary importance; they are: Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas (though a much later inclusion). In spite of their different ideological standpoint and method of philosophical investigation, these writers were hostile to both capitalism and Soviet socialism and hence, they tried to find an alternative path to Marxist philosophy by blending the positions of others philosophers like Kant, Hegel, Marx, Weber, Lukács and Freud. They also believed that the present Marxism has turned out to be oppressive state machinery.

Contrary to this state sponsored Marxism, they showed how the state itself was interfering into more and more areas hitherto reserved for private preferences and thus, the traditional difference between the base and the superstructure was gradually being erased, giving rise to what is called ‘culture industry’. The term was first used by Horkheimer and Adorno in their book called Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947, and later explained more fully in Adorno’s essay ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, 1975 (the essay will be found in the book The Culture Industry, 1991) where Adorno defined the function of the culture industry:

The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above. To the detriment of both it forces together the spheres of high and low art, separated for thousands of years…. although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, the masses are not primary, but secondary, they are an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery.

Thus, if you notice the claims made by Adorno, the culture industry is markedly different from mass culture which is the spontaneous cultural forms produced by the masses, the contemporary form of popular art (like the wall graffiti, for instance). The culture industry considers the individuals as consumers who are given a pre-defined taste and behavioural pattern. Contrary to the critics’ claims that the Frankfurt school considers the audience as historically and economically determined, Adorno actually suggests that it is the nature of the industry that determines its audience as reified commodities.

Adorno also points out that the existence of the ‘culture industry’ is only possible when the capitalist society has reached a certain state of maturity, in which it can integrate the economic and the political (think for example the media barons, who control the media houses), subordinate the local cultural manifestations (you must have heard of the term ‘homogenisation’ though it has different political manifestations), and achieve a social situation in which the domination or social control is done through impersonal bureaucratic means. Under such circumstances, the culture industry is able to create a standardised identity of the viewer/reader/ consumer and create a coded text/programme through which it could represent a certain type of reality which homogenises cultural differences and erodes the class consciousness. Every viewer/reader is nothing but a consumer, with no individual distinction, but with an ever-increasing passion or longing for consumption. The industry survives on this want. It creates diversions and distractions.

Take for instance, in the televised serials, which enjoys tremendous popular attention, we mostly get to see a particular class of people, who dress in a lavish manner, stay in a specific house; it is not that the lower classes are not shown, but even if they are, they are also shown in a specific manner. the content of the serial usually does not deal with the class issues, the economic matters are mostly resolved through personal sacrifices or someone’s benevolence. This sort of mass-production, which is shown regularly, repeatedly, creates a sense of fatalism, obligation and dependence. Interestingly, as an individual, one would always tend to avoid such a situation, he/she would like to be the agent rather than the sufferer, yet, when the individuals see such televised operas, they do not notice their ideological implications, since the set, the actors, the music, and numerous other methodological tools create a sense of escape from the daily drudgery and responsibility. Thus, the popular culture in such instance becomes the monitoring device, through which the leisure time activities are controlled to: i) provide a temporary relief so that they can go back to their work next day, thus keeping the production channel working; ii) to school them to submit to conventional values and authorities and superstitions, so that they can become standardised individuals, mere stereotypes, who can be controlled more easily.

• Read the other well-known famous scholar of the Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin’s essay on ‘The Work of art in the age of Mechanical Production’. The essay says that capitalism would create such conditions which would make it possible to abolish capitalism itself. See how Benjamin argues about the decay of the aura or authority of the text, and opens it to multiple interpretations. Do you think that while Benjamin is speaking about the mass, he has a specific class in mind? Is the consumption also a mass event?
• Also read the essay on ‘Repressive Tolerance’ by Herbert Marcuse, another scholar of this school. He writes: ‘the market… absorbs equally well art, anti-art, and non-art, all possible conflicting styles, schools, forms, provide as a complacent receptacle, a friendly abyss’. Do you agree with his view? Do you find the view similar to Adorno’s view of mass culture?

3.2. Consumption in Popular Culture

The main problem of the Frankfurt school is that it tends to focus more on the production rather than the consumption, suggesting that the individuals who see/read/listen to such popular cultural texts are passive and these texts would meet no resistance or transformation while being seen/read/listened to by the individual. In the following section we shall read about scholars who would tend to focus more on the consumption of the popular culture.

The other important thing that you must keep in mind is that, most of the scholars who belonged to the Frankfurt school wrote at a time, when Modernism was the dominant movement in art and culture. The next group of scholars are more contemporary, writing when postmodernism is the operating movement. The differences between modern and postmodern are quite fundamental (though some scholars, like Delanty, believe that the postmodern is a mere continuation of the modern), since the postmodern calls for a complete re-structuring of our philosophical set-ups. Thus, the notion of the market, art, class, gender—every determining term that we have used so far, undergoes a complete change. Hence popular and class both need to be re-examined under this new philosophical system.

3.2.1. Stuart Hall and the Coding/Decoding of a Text

Contrary to Frankfurt school’s assertion that the consumption of culture is a passive act, Stuart Hall (1932-2014), the Jamaican-born British Marxist sociologist, speaks of a more active consumption model in his theories on popular culture. For him, popular culture is the site of struggle between the dominant and subordinate cultures, where each culture tries to assert its ideological politics. Away from Louis Althusser’s structural Marxism, he looked for inspiration in Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and organic intellectuals, which speaks about the resistance of the working class against the consensual domination of the powerful class. Hall was the founding member of the New Left, an intellectual group that published the journal New Left Review. He remained with the group from 1956 to 1961, after which he left the group due to the ideological differences with the other members. In his essays published in this journal, titled, ‘A Sense of Classlessness’ (1958), Hall rejected Marx’s deductive notion of culture as a passive, secondary exercise to stress its active, primary and constitutive role in society. He also pointed out that after the post war economic boom, the so-called working class enjoyed a greater access to commodities and products, an event which instils in them the sense of classlessness:

The purpose of a great deal of advertising… is to condition the worker to the new possibilities of consumption, to break down the class resistances to consumer- purchase which became part of working class consciousness in an earlier period….

Hall also went against Marx’s notion of a fixed base and superstructure model, suggesting that it is not only the base that influences the superstructure but it works both ways; he also suggested that base is not singularly economic but comprised of ‘constituent factors’ (which are cultural, social and political) and they all determine the superstructure. Extending his arguments, we come to three conclusions: i) popular culture does not have a fixed, guaranteed form determined by the economic base; hence its meaning and function can be constantly negotiated and re-configured through cultural interventions; ii) popular culture can be seen as a site of resistance, and not necessarily a capitalist instrument; and iii) popular culture is central to political debate. In his first editorial in New Left Review Hall wrote:

The purpose of discussing cinema and teenage culture … is not to show … that we are keeping up with times. These are directly relevant to the imaginative resistances of the people who have to live within capitalism—the growing points of social discontent, the projection of deeply felt needs…. The task of socialism today is to meet people where they are… to develop discontent and, at the same time, to give the socialist movement some direct sense of the times in which we live.

Hall was one of the most important members of the Birmingham School (established by Richard Hoggart in 1964) which unlike Frankfurt school placed greater onus on the ability of the popular art to question the hegemonic assumptions. Their research areas included film, television, youth cultures and press. Together with his colleague Paddy Whannel, Hall published the book The Popular Arts in 1964. Written against the background of concern about the rising influence of popular culture in school classroom Hall and Whannel argued that all popular culture is not necessarily second rate culture but there are several forms within it of different values. Thus, Hindustani classical is not superior to folk music, but both the cases the artists have different values in mind, hence we must, as listeners ‘recognise different aims… assess varying achievements with defined limits’ (qtd. in Storey 53). Thus popular art is not the art failing as high art or real art, but art that operates within the realm of the popular.

You must have realised that Hall’s appreciation of the popular art form is more oriented towards the viewer/audience/reader-response. He develops this idea further in his most seminal book, which had a deep impact on the cultural studies, called Encoding/Decoding (1980). According to Hall a text is embedded in a cultural context, and the context is determined by the power and hegemony. These various agencies ‘encode’ the text according to their cultural experiences. For instance, a text like a movie is a product of the various cultural assumptions of the director, script-writer, producer, cinematographer, music director, actors, and so on. They all interpret and represent the text according to their own ideological standpoints. Extending the idea to all texts, it can be said that a text is a product of individual, hegemonic and cultural ingredients. It can have various interpretations, and the possibility of various meanings or interpretations is called ‘polysemy’.

The most interesting part of Hall’s argument is the decoding, which is a mirror process of encoding, whereby the audience/viewer/reader decode the meaning of the encoded text (product) according to their knowledge, hegemonic assumptions, cultural norms, values, and so on. You can understand that like encoding, decoding also gives rise to various interpretations, and varied readings. Take for instance, how the recent film like Haider, which is inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, re-codes, encodes the original text to present a text which could be decoded through a nationalist ideological framework. Thus, just as the director has decoded the original play, the audience would again decode the film and hence, the final text-product undergoes a series of encoding and decoding processes. Hall believes that the mass media thus offer opportunities for the presentation of significant cultural values and ideologies which may reinforce the interests of dominant groups. However, the dominant group is not always be a negative concept because the ‘organic intellectuals’ (as called by Gramsci, who influenced Hall the most), were the fundamental requirement in any social change.

3.2.2. Pierre Bourdieu and the Cultural Capital

Unlike Hall, who has rejected the traditional concepts of class by supplanting it with polysemy of encoding/decoding according to different interpretations of the producer/recipient of the text, Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), the French sociologist and anthropologist, has worked directly on the issue of class and popular culture. He developed a several interesting terms, such as ‘habitus’, ‘cultural capital’, ‘symbolic violence’ which are now widely used in sociology and anthropology. In a survey done by the International Sociological Association in 1997, his well known book, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979) was regarded as the sixth most influential book in social sciences, written in the twentieth society.

In the final part of our discussion we shall briefly refer to his idea of taste and cultural capital. Instead of directly speaking about class, Bourdieu speaks about the taste making which distinguishes our perception of class. For instance, a well-to-do man may sip his wine at an expensive restaurant, while an unskilled labour might drink local liquor in public bars. The respective consumption practices reinforce the social position of the consumers, indicating their occupation, education and income. Thus, the taste in wine is not simply a superior cultural taste, but also a social insignia. Bourdieu argued that all cultural symbols and practices, from artistic tastes, style in dress, eating habits to religion, science and philosophy, even language, embody the marks of social distinctions. It is the cultural capital, a social capital which include these material and non-material resources that are passed from one generation to the other to maintain the social hierarchy of the particular social bloc. It is a de- personalised capitalist model, through which the elite group demarcates itself and exert its power over the other groups. To continue the tradition of transferring the cultural capital, the parents deploy specific educational policies, through which the children are aware to learn the ‘rules of the game’ and earn the credentials to continue with their privileged position.

Bourdieu’s model is highly adequate towards explaining the distribution of power and status in the upper and middle classes. In his empirical work he made a survey of around 1200 respondents across a wide cross-section of the society. The study revealed the complex relationship between the class and economic position for in many cases within the middle class there happens to be a distinction between the vulgar, tasteless, nouveau riche and the well-educated, highly informed professional. This is what Bourdieu explains as ‘symbolic capital’, where the capital is more than simple income structure but also dependent on the expenditure or consumption pattern. Thus, fashionable furnishing at home, engagement with a certain kind of music, branded consumer products, speech intonations—all these may be consciously adopted to show a class. For instance, in a country like India, the ability to speak English fluently is frequently associated with a kind of passage to the elite group. Interestingly, such concepts also give birth to popular films like English Vinglish, where the issue of linguistic proficiency determines the domestic hierarchy. Thus the matters of culture and class are ultimately linked to power and hierarchy in the society.

To Conclude

From modernism to postmodernism the nature of popular culture has changed considerably. The attitude of Frankfurt school, which believed that all popular art is aesthetically poor and is only meant for hegemonic control, has been challenged both by Hall and Bourdieu. Hall showed that the recipients of cultural forms are also active participants in transmitting culture. Bourdieu shows how cultural consumption could be translated to a capital which could be transmitted from generation to generation. Thus, the issue of class is not only an economic proposition, it is related to the consciousness and consumption habits of the individuals. When we make an accusation against a person for lacking in taste or culture or class, we unconsciously vouch for a social hierarchy. The nexus between economy and power may not be as simple as it were in the time of Marx, for the demarcation between the rich and the poor may not be so easily identifiable. We also have the rise of a middle class, which appropriates an indeterminate position in the social hierarchy. However, different forms of domination by the more successful groups remain operative though in more mediated and covert manner. The popular cultural forms represent it and question it. Its success as art depends upon its ingenuity and ability to resist the social assumptions.

Glossary of Some Useful Terms

Text

A text is an inclusive term that applies to anything written or made or shown. It could be a book, a film, a script, an advertisement, a song, a fashion symbol and so on. It is a structuralist word, which suggests that any text is made of two components a signifier and a signified and the complex relation between the two determines the meaning of the text.

Ideology

A complex term, which Marx used to denote a set of beliefs and practices that is used as a tool of domination of the more powerful group over the less powerful one. According to Louis Althusser, the Marxist structuralist philosopher, it is the representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of experience, so that the relations of production and the conditions of production could be reproduced. There is a raging debate whether ideology is a false consciousness, but as Althusser or later Terry Eagleton puts it, ideology is an active and operative tool in maintaining the status quo in the social structure. After Marx, the concept of ideology further developed in four principal directions, exemplified by the works of Gramsci, Mannheim, Durkheim and the critical theorists (scholars of the Frankfurt school).

Hegemony

It is an extension of the idea of ideology by Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), the Italian political scientist and philosopher. For him, ideology was more than a system of ideas; it has the capacity to inspire concrete attitudes and give certain orientations for action (praxis). It is in ideology that social classes become conscious of their position and historical role, it is by hegemony that they exercise control and domination. Thus, hegemony is the ability of a class to secure the support and consent of the masses. It is a two-faced tool, it creates a consensual domination of one class and the willing submission of the other class. The maintenance of the social order or consensus is achieved through ‘strategic management’. The hegemony neutralises dissent, instils values, beliefs and cultural meanings into the generalised social structures. For instance, democracy is an ideology, but its maintenance through different apparatuses, is hegemonic. Hegemony cannot erase the discrepancies in power distribution, but one kind of hegemony can lead to its opposite kind that would resist it. For instance, the colonial hegemony gave rise to nationalist politics in India.

Organic intellectuals

The social group that is responsible for the dissemination of the hegemony. The term was once again coined by Gramsci. Accordingly, these people perform the function of intellectual leadership. All social groups produce their own organic intellectuals, whose role is to organise, negotiate, reform, distribute values and behaviours within their group or class. They construct the group’s identity by giving it homogeneity, creating a consensus among its members and making it aware of its own function.

References

• Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.
• Lewis, Jeff (ed). Cultural Studies. Los Angeles and New York: Sage, 2008.
• Procter, James. Stuart Hall. London and New York: Routledge, 2015.
• Scott, John (ed). Sociology: Key Concepts. London and New York: Routledge, 2015.
• Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction. Sixth Edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2014.
• Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.