Harris, Neil. Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Chapters 1, 8, 9, 13, 14 (Different essays)
Chapter 1
Addresses changing appeal of the city by constructing an overview of urban culture as its institutions developed in America during four periods: 1. coloniol, 2. early republic to 1870s, 3. 1870s to before WWII, 4. Our own times
Concludes that interest in fostering urban public institutions (museums mainly) peaked before World War II and has since declined, reflecting a broader decline in the appeal of the city.
Chapter 8
Utopian Fiction and its Discontents: Rather than examine turn-of-the-century utopian fiction for the way it reveals the classic, broad anxieties about modernization, Harris uses it to explore relatively more mundane "subterranean anxieties" of the age. "Their urge to describe other worlds was rarely based on any need for artistic fulfillment. More often they wrote from a passion to commnicate some secial idea. Their books, in fact, demonstrate the impact of modernization upon American life, presenting worlds ruled by strange machines, crowded with masses of people, and reverent toward scientific truth. The novels' solutions to political and economic problems built on the classic anxieties we associate with this period. But their fictional details answered more intimate and perhaps more fundamental personal fears. These crudely written books offer surprising insights into long-vanished sensibilities." 150-151
"...faced with disorder the utopians sought to structure and even confine life, rather than expand it. The revolutions we have marked, until recently, as milestones of scientific progress sobered them. Their optimism about the future rested on the achievement of an environmental stasis. Unlimited growth seemed as dangerous as decay." 173
Chapter 9
The Drama of Consumer Desire
Exams 1. ideological national problems in 19th century growing consumer nation, 2. reference to age of consumer consciousness in fiction at end of 19th century, 3. description of 20th century trends, particularly 1920s, which intensified American object consciousness, and 4. examples of the way mass distribution affected novelistic sensibilities.
"mass-produced objects and object relationships came increasingly to enter the American novel, both as symbols and as experiences. But the very standardization which produced such triumphs for the manufacturing and distributing systems is here defined as a major problem for the creative imagination. Thus a national style of purchasing began to be adumbrated by our literary figures, and fixed upon as a cultural metaphor."
To sum: novels revealed consumer consciousness of the importance of objects as representing their own identity.
Chapter 13
The changing Landscape of America
Development of shopping centers
Rise and decline of hotel lobbies
Parking garages
Chapter 14
We need to consider the incredible importance of the turn-of-the-century development of the halftone effect as way to cheaply reproduce images in newspapers. Images burst into mass production, for mass consumption.
Definition of Culture
"[The word culture] has had a complex history and is the subject of continuing debate. Until the nineteenth century changed its meaning, culture was more an activity than a state of being; it represented growth or nourishment and could be applied to almost anything. Some years ago Raymond Wlliams showed how Victorians made culture into a noun signifying the highest and most valued human activities, connected particularly with the high arts. People were defined as cultured according to their interest or proficiency in certain traditional areas: music, painting, architecture, belles letters. In the twentiethc century the word culture has been transformed again, made more comprehensive and catholic. We assume that every people, every civilization, and even every subgroup possesses a culture of some kind, that is, a pattern of value structures, mores, and institutions." 14
Connections
Jackson - Crabgrass Frontier, Cohen - A Consumer's Republic, Marchand - Advertising the American Dream
Showing posts with label Culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Culture. Show all posts
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Douglas - Symbollic Pollution
Douglas, Mary. "Symbolic Pollution." From Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Steven Seidman. Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Comparative religion struggles to apply modern medical understandings. Some argue that ancient rites have a hygenic basis. Others argue that a great gulf lies between our hygienic understanding and what ancients actually believed. Douglas suggests that the problem in both sides is that they fail to consider OUR ideas about hygiene and dirt. Guess what her article is about? Confronting our ideas about hygiene and dirt!
Douglas places dirt and hygiene within a broader conception of pollution: things that should not be in a certain place for their symbolic (often actual) threat to the individual and/or social order. She winds through various examples from various cultures, demonstrating how pollution is identified and dealt with. A corrupt politician is removed from office. A pregnant woman's unborn child has an ambiguous position between life and death because of the hazards of birth and infancy - thus many cultures treat the mother herself, carrying the fetus, as a danger to others around her.
Comparative religion struggles to apply modern medical understandings. Some argue that ancient rites have a hygenic basis. Others argue that a great gulf lies between our hygienic understanding and what ancients actually believed. Douglas suggests that the problem in both sides is that they fail to consider OUR ideas about hygiene and dirt. Guess what her article is about? Confronting our ideas about hygiene and dirt!
Douglas places dirt and hygiene within a broader conception of pollution: things that should not be in a certain place for their symbolic (often actual) threat to the individual and/or social order. She winds through various examples from various cultures, demonstrating how pollution is identified and dealt with. A corrupt politician is removed from office. A pregnant woman's unborn child has an ambiguous position between life and death because of the hazards of birth and infancy - thus many cultures treat the mother herself, carrying the fetus, as a danger to others around her.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Geertz - Notes on the Balinese Cockfight
Geertz, Clifford. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” From The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
Geertz examines the Balinese Cockfight, from the ritual actions involved, to the masculinity issues, to the gambling, ultimately revealing it to be a site for inter-personal and inter-familiar relations to be on symbolic display.
Definition of Culture
"Like any art form...the cockfight renders ordinary, everyday experience comprehensible by presenting it in terms of acts and objects which have had their practical consequences removed and been reduced (or, if you prefer, raised) to the level of sheer appearances, where their meaning can be more powerfully articulated and more exactly perceived." (443)
I like this definition because it engages with my own interest in sports, although the Cockfight is working on a more personal level while American sports operates between much larger communities. The cockfight is not itself an obvious text, but when Geertz submits it to his search for a thick description, it reveals symbolic meaning injected by humans and reflecting the social interplay of Balinese people and villages.
Geertz examines the Balinese Cockfight, from the ritual actions involved, to the masculinity issues, to the gambling, ultimately revealing it to be a site for inter-personal and inter-familiar relations to be on symbolic display.
Definition of Culture
"Like any art form...the cockfight renders ordinary, everyday experience comprehensible by presenting it in terms of acts and objects which have had their practical consequences removed and been reduced (or, if you prefer, raised) to the level of sheer appearances, where their meaning can be more powerfully articulated and more exactly perceived." (443)
I like this definition because it engages with my own interest in sports, although the Cockfight is working on a more personal level while American sports operates between much larger communities. The cockfight is not itself an obvious text, but when Geertz submits it to his search for a thick description, it reveals symbolic meaning injected by humans and reflecting the social interplay of Balinese people and villages.
Monday, March 7, 2011
Barthes - (i) Operation Margarine; (ii) Myth Today
Barthes, Roland. “(i) Operation Margarine; (ii) Myth Today.” From Durham, Meenakshi Gigi, and Douglas Kellner. Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, 2001, 99-106.
Taken from Mythologies, Barthes' examination of how bourgeois societies assert values in their cultural productions
(i) Notices a trend in film, fiction, and advertising - certain things (institutions like the army, products like margarine) are first critiqued in regards to their drawbacks to the point of dismissal before being exalted at the close.
(ii) Here's how these "myths" work for the petit-bourgeoisie:
- Inoculation - acknowledge accidental evil in an institution to conceal its principal evil
- Privation of history - Remove the history of the object, leaving it to merely be enjoyed without wondering where it came from
- Identification - Can't imagine the Other. Can only blind himself, ignore and deny, or else transform him into something else. If he can identify with nothing in the Other, he calls it exotic, thus transforming the Other into an object.
- Tautology - A distrust of language, rejected because it has failed, leads to the dead and empty tautology: i.e. "because that's how it is.
- Neither-Norism - Stating, balancing, and ultimately rejecting two opposites, allowing one to flee from an intolerable reality.
- The quantification of quality - Intelligence, artistic experience, leisure have all been economized, so that their experience is balanced by the cost of a ticket.
- The statement of fact - Myths tend toward proverbs. Common sense provides the foundation for a truth that is formed by the arbitrary values of the ruling order.
Scales - These essences are also weighed in relation to each other to support the values of the ruling order.
Big problem: if we try to locate the very meaning at the heart of an object we will liberate it but destroy it. If we acknowledge its full weight we respect it but it remains mystified.
Conclusion: we are doomed to speak excessively about reality, "seeking a reconciliation between reality and men, between description and explanation, between object and knowledge."
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Rieff - The Triumph of the Therapeutic
Rieff, Philip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic; Uses of Faith After Freud. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.
Argument
"The religious psychologies of release (Jung, Reich, Lawrence) and the social technologies of affluence do not go beyond release and affluence to a fresh imposition of restrictive demands." (254)
"...a sense of well-being has become the end, rather than a by-product of striving after some superior communal end..." (261 [last sentence of book])
Rieff argues Freud's theories triggered the most consequential cultural revolution since Christianity subsumed the Roman Empire. (Note: Rieff is speaking of an apparently global revolution, but speaks mainly of Western culture. The East to Rieff in 1966 is the Soviet Union, which he argues is merely a more conservative attempt at a society designed for maximum improvement of individuals.) Freud replaced Christianity (and the religious impulse in general) with psychological analysis designed to release the individual from his psychological problems.
Rieff dedicates a chapter each to three of Freud's predecessors, Jung, Reich, and D.H. Lawrence, each of whom attempted to re-institute an element of faith into Freud's purely scientific system.
Jung - Unable to set his protestant faith aside as Freud had done with his Judaism, Jung imagined the "subterranean God" - the inner impulses Freud identified at work within man - as a replacement for the Heavenly Father.
Wilhelm Reich - Reich called himself a Freudo-Marxist. Reich, who admitted in his late-life memoirs that he thought himself a sort of prophet, imagined "Orgone," a universal energy (sexual...a replacement for Freud's libido...love is the supreme form of energy) which, if unleashed and embraced by individuals, would help bring about a moral and social revolution.
D.H. Lawrence - Lawrence idealized the innocent child, accepting Freud's theories about the sexuality of the child, and arguing the child is the perfect state of humans, one to be striven for.
A Definition of Culture
"To speak of a moral culture would be redundant. Every culture has two main functions: (1) to organize the moral demands men make upon themselves into asystem of symbols that make men intelligible and trustworthy to each other, thus rendering also the world intelligible and trustworthy; (2) to organize the expressive remissions by which men release themselves, in some degree, from the strain of conforming to the controlling symbolic, internalized variant readings of culture that constitute individual character." (232-3)
How this Fits
Freud is the revolutionary intellectual elite. Rieff is identifying his effect on culture, particularly, as he states over and over, his effect on American culture where he was most strongly embraced. As Freud's followers demonstrate, Freud left the world short of a full replacement of Christianity, but he seems to have started the process.
I feel like I was reading too much criticism of Freud into Rieff's writing, because the end of the first and last chapter seem to celebrate the potential for Freud's revolution to eventually replace the way Christianity created a culture that accepted social hierarchies and consoled the discontented with a promise of a better afterlife.
In a way, Rieff suggests Freud destroyed Christian culture and replaced it with nothing but individualism just as the US student movement critiqued fifties conformist culture and replaced it with nothing but individualism.
Rieff does critique the replacement of the Christian concern for community with a more selfish concern for the individual well-being, and acknowledges the loss of a clear moral system at the close: "What is moral becomes and remains self-evident only within a powerful and deeply compelling system of culture." (261) That system of culture has yet to to arise as of 1966, but Rieff seems to be hopeful for the the end of the cultural revolution Freud started.
However, here is where Lasch, Bell, Slater, Putnam, Lasch-Quinn, Hunter, and even Riesman (writing before Rieff, and perhaps more like Rieff than these others optimistic about the eventual results of this cultural revolution) begin to suggest how problematic the loss of a moral system is turning out to be. Lasch-Quinn bemoans the turn in the Civil Rights movement from the MLK/Christian concern with the community to the Black Power concern with individual well-being. Lasch, Bell, and Slater critique the 60s student movement for a similar obsession with individual well-being at the cost of the community. A decade later than these three, Putnam offers the sociological proof that the individual is being emphasized over the communal, while Hunter (less explicitly) explores the how religion has divided social activists on the right and the left to such an extant that they are unable to speak to each other, much less work together for the community's benefit, much less agree on how the community should be improved.
Argument
"The religious psychologies of release (Jung, Reich, Lawrence) and the social technologies of affluence do not go beyond release and affluence to a fresh imposition of restrictive demands." (254)
"...a sense of well-being has become the end, rather than a by-product of striving after some superior communal end..." (261 [last sentence of book])
Rieff argues Freud's theories triggered the most consequential cultural revolution since Christianity subsumed the Roman Empire. (Note: Rieff is speaking of an apparently global revolution, but speaks mainly of Western culture. The East to Rieff in 1966 is the Soviet Union, which he argues is merely a more conservative attempt at a society designed for maximum improvement of individuals.) Freud replaced Christianity (and the religious impulse in general) with psychological analysis designed to release the individual from his psychological problems.
Rieff dedicates a chapter each to three of Freud's predecessors, Jung, Reich, and D.H. Lawrence, each of whom attempted to re-institute an element of faith into Freud's purely scientific system.
Jung - Unable to set his protestant faith aside as Freud had done with his Judaism, Jung imagined the "subterranean God" - the inner impulses Freud identified at work within man - as a replacement for the Heavenly Father.
Wilhelm Reich - Reich called himself a Freudo-Marxist. Reich, who admitted in his late-life memoirs that he thought himself a sort of prophet, imagined "Orgone," a universal energy (sexual...a replacement for Freud's libido...love is the supreme form of energy) which, if unleashed and embraced by individuals, would help bring about a moral and social revolution.
D.H. Lawrence - Lawrence idealized the innocent child, accepting Freud's theories about the sexuality of the child, and arguing the child is the perfect state of humans, one to be striven for.
A Definition of Culture
"To speak of a moral culture would be redundant. Every culture has two main functions: (1) to organize the moral demands men make upon themselves into asystem of symbols that make men intelligible and trustworthy to each other, thus rendering also the world intelligible and trustworthy; (2) to organize the expressive remissions by which men release themselves, in some degree, from the strain of conforming to the controlling symbolic, internalized variant readings of culture that constitute individual character." (232-3)
How this Fits
Freud is the revolutionary intellectual elite. Rieff is identifying his effect on culture, particularly, as he states over and over, his effect on American culture where he was most strongly embraced. As Freud's followers demonstrate, Freud left the world short of a full replacement of Christianity, but he seems to have started the process.
I feel like I was reading too much criticism of Freud into Rieff's writing, because the end of the first and last chapter seem to celebrate the potential for Freud's revolution to eventually replace the way Christianity created a culture that accepted social hierarchies and consoled the discontented with a promise of a better afterlife.
In a way, Rieff suggests Freud destroyed Christian culture and replaced it with nothing but individualism just as the US student movement critiqued fifties conformist culture and replaced it with nothing but individualism.
Rieff does critique the replacement of the Christian concern for community with a more selfish concern for the individual well-being, and acknowledges the loss of a clear moral system at the close: "What is moral becomes and remains self-evident only within a powerful and deeply compelling system of culture." (261) That system of culture has yet to to arise as of 1966, but Rieff seems to be hopeful for the the end of the cultural revolution Freud started.
However, here is where Lasch, Bell, Slater, Putnam, Lasch-Quinn, Hunter, and even Riesman (writing before Rieff, and perhaps more like Rieff than these others optimistic about the eventual results of this cultural revolution) begin to suggest how problematic the loss of a moral system is turning out to be. Lasch-Quinn bemoans the turn in the Civil Rights movement from the MLK/Christian concern with the community to the Black Power concern with individual well-being. Lasch, Bell, and Slater critique the 60s student movement for a similar obsession with individual well-being at the cost of the community. A decade later than these three, Putnam offers the sociological proof that the individual is being emphasized over the communal, while Hunter (less explicitly) explores the how religion has divided social activists on the right and the left to such an extant that they are unable to speak to each other, much less work together for the community's benefit, much less agree on how the community should be improved.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
McLuhan - "The Medium is the Message"
McLuhan, Marshall. “The Medium is the Message.” From Durham, Meenakshi Gigi, and Douglas Kellner. Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, 2001, 107-117.
Argument
McLuhan addresses the focus of media critics on the content of new technology (TV, radio, film) rather than the effect and nature of these new, faster mediums themselves. The medium itself effects the society in which it exists to an even greater degree than the content it carries.
McLuhan uses the light bulb as a basic example. It does not have content, but changes society anyway by creating space in the dark. Similarly, a story about a heinous murder has less an effect on society due to the specific story itself then the fact that such a story will change attitudes and perceptions in society.
Critique
While I can see why McLuhan was considered a key scholar at the time, this essay feels a bit dated. I think post-modern media scholars (such as Jason Mittel in "A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory") have managed to heed McLuhan's advice and consider the nature of the medium itself, while simultaneously discussing content. While he makes important points about the power of the medium itself, I find his theories and argument rather elusive and tenuous.
Argument
McLuhan addresses the focus of media critics on the content of new technology (TV, radio, film) rather than the effect and nature of these new, faster mediums themselves. The medium itself effects the society in which it exists to an even greater degree than the content it carries.
McLuhan uses the light bulb as a basic example. It does not have content, but changes society anyway by creating space in the dark. Similarly, a story about a heinous murder has less an effect on society due to the specific story itself then the fact that such a story will change attitudes and perceptions in society.
Critique
While I can see why McLuhan was considered a key scholar at the time, this essay feels a bit dated. I think post-modern media scholars (such as Jason Mittel in "A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory") have managed to heed McLuhan's advice and consider the nature of the medium itself, while simultaneously discussing content. While he makes important points about the power of the medium itself, I find his theories and argument rather elusive and tenuous.
Gurstein - “On the obsolescence of "Puritanism" as an epithet.”
Gurstein, Rochelle. “On the obsolescence of "Puritanism" as an epithet.” From Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn. Reconstructing History: The Emergence of a New Historical Society. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Argument
The term "Puritanism" was often used as an epithet by modernists such as H.L. Mencken and Margaret Sanger to criticize the attempts at censorship by Andrew Comstock and the Comstock Laws. Modernists such as Sanger celebrated the act of rebelling as a sign that they were on the forefront of positive change from traditional to modern world.
Gurstein concludes that, while freedom of speech and availability of birth control were positive outcomes, the argument has gone too far, forcing, for example, critics of pornography to demonstrate its relation to victims of sexual violence rather than arguing its negative effects on society as a whole. Thus, "Puritanism" as an epithet should be considered obsolete.
Key Terms
Modernity - Indirectly deals with modernity, and people who thought themselves modern relative to so-called-Puritans/those with Victorian values.
The Morgan Memorial "Deja Vu - You've Seen this Before"
This relates closely to Hunter's Culture Wars who deals much more broadly and in a way more focused on religion on the cultural debates of the 80s and early 90s. (Gurstein writes in the late 90s, bracketing her discussion of early 20th century debates with contemporary issues.) The essay also somewhat relates to Lears' No Place of Grace which deals generally with antimodernists; however, the individuals Lears discusses do not agonize over slipping moral values as much as the psychic crisis they are dealing with in their rapidly changing world.
Argument
The term "Puritanism" was often used as an epithet by modernists such as H.L. Mencken and Margaret Sanger to criticize the attempts at censorship by Andrew Comstock and the Comstock Laws. Modernists such as Sanger celebrated the act of rebelling as a sign that they were on the forefront of positive change from traditional to modern world.
Gurstein concludes that, while freedom of speech and availability of birth control were positive outcomes, the argument has gone too far, forcing, for example, critics of pornography to demonstrate its relation to victims of sexual violence rather than arguing its negative effects on society as a whole. Thus, "Puritanism" as an epithet should be considered obsolete.
Key Terms
Modernity - Indirectly deals with modernity, and people who thought themselves modern relative to so-called-Puritans/those with Victorian values.
The Morgan Memorial "Deja Vu - You've Seen this Before"
This relates closely to Hunter's Culture Wars who deals much more broadly and in a way more focused on religion on the cultural debates of the 80s and early 90s. (Gurstein writes in the late 90s, bracketing her discussion of early 20th century debates with contemporary issues.) The essay also somewhat relates to Lears' No Place of Grace which deals generally with antimodernists; however, the individuals Lears discusses do not agonize over slipping moral values as much as the psychic crisis they are dealing with in their rapidly changing world.
Monday, January 3, 2011
Sontag - "Notes on Camp"
Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” From Against Interpretation: And Other Essays. New York: Dell Pub. Co, 1966.
Argument
If I may attempt to summarize a definition Sontag spends the entire essay grappling with, Camp is art, broadly defined, created with seriousness whose intended content is a failure and is thus appreciated, with nostalgia, ironic humor, and not too much cyncism, purely for its style.
It is almost impossible to intentionally produce camp, at least it is impossible to intentionally produce good camp.
Other Thoughts
Sontag's written reminded me of Bill Simmons's appreciation for "unintentional comedy."
She places homosexuals at the vanguard of camp taste, acknowledging that there is something propagandistic about that position. (That reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Homer deals with his homophobia as he interacts with the owner of a store that sells Camp-y knick-knacks.)
If anything, Camp has become more mainstream in the half-century since this essay was written. See: the Internet especially YouTube.
Argument
If I may attempt to summarize a definition Sontag spends the entire essay grappling with, Camp is art, broadly defined, created with seriousness whose intended content is a failure and is thus appreciated, with nostalgia, ironic humor, and not too much cyncism, purely for its style.
It is almost impossible to intentionally produce camp, at least it is impossible to intentionally produce good camp.
Other Thoughts
Sontag's written reminded me of Bill Simmons's appreciation for "unintentional comedy."
She places homosexuals at the vanguard of camp taste, acknowledging that there is something propagandistic about that position. (That reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Homer deals with his homophobia as he interacts with the owner of a store that sells Camp-y knick-knacks.)
If anything, Camp has become more mainstream in the half-century since this essay was written. See: the Internet especially YouTube.
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