Prof: Leonardo Mendoza
Exploring American Culture: Popular and Consumer Culture///Some Basic Terms and Working Definitions
"Popular Culture" is not a specific thing with concrete boundaries--it's a series of possibilities requiring different methods, questions, tools; it's flexible, contingent, contextual, and therefore dynamic. But the quest for precise definition WITHIN A SPECIFIC PROBLEMATIC is crucial. We must know what we are talking about, what we are leaving out, what we are emphasizing, what we are uncovering that before we had ignored or assumed to be true or false. This is the first step of critical inquiry. Popular culture is not a thing but a process. There are populart culture texts, but popular culture itself, like all culture, it is lived, experienced.
Some working definitions for the larger project of the course:
Culture: The entire way of life of a defined group of people, which includes the interrelated spheres of the physical world, material social conditions, ideology, spirituality, affect.
Mainstream, marginal, and elite culture: Signifies the relationship of the group to its access to power. (I am using "marginal" the way some texts use "subculture.")
Subculture: A subset of the main cultural group.
Texts: Any entity or phenomena that conveys meaning.
Popular culture: The process by which people and institutions produce, distribute, and receive cultural texts that shape a collective entity, thereby making meaning and interacting with the ideological nexus.
Popular culture texts: Those texts that convey meaning to a collective consciousness; that are part of the overall system of meaning of a culture or subculture.
Consumer culture: The process by which popular culture texts are commidified by producing, distributing, and consuming them for the purpose of profit, often by drawing on consumers' fears and desires.
Discourse: The means by which language, broadly understood, through the production, distribution, and reception of texts, conveys meaning (especially ideology) on a conscious and unconscious level.
Ideology: The discursive process whereby meaning is produced that affects relations of power.
Institutions: The organized structural entities that serve as sites of power.
The following terms are especially contested, contingent, flexible, dynamic when they are applied. They are not intended o be perjorative or celebratory in themselves.
Mass culture: Popular culture texts that are produced, distributed, and/or consumed with the intention and/or effect of reaching a broad, usually mainstream audience.
Folk culture: Popular culture texts created by a group of people, usually growing out of (in response to, celebrating) a way of life, which is not intended to be/nor has the effect of being part of mass culture.
Oppositional culture: Created to have the intended effect of challenging mainstream ideology in form and/or content, or its production/distribution/reception.
Alternative culture: Created to have the intended effect of by-passing mass culture but not consumer culture
Low, middle, high culture: Highly contested terms that mark a continuum and may be multi-dimensional depending on form/content, and which usually relates to the intended social class of the audience.