Structuralism and post-structuralism

The theoretical method of structuralism as it applies to the study of cultural texts and practices is largely derived from the work of Saussere. By exploring the nature of language and what role the individual plays in the process of meaning Saussere inspires theorists from other disciplines to expound on the theory and apply it to pop culture. Cultural texts and practices are analogous to language and structuralists are interested in the underlying rules that make meaning possible. Structuralism is theoretical, not political; analytical, not evaluative; indifferent to cultural values. But by examining how language is created and how subject meaning is to experience and cultural influence (largely one and the same) we can see how language becomes ideological. There is no objective reality contained within a word, only meaning derived from context and cultural agreement (No wonder it’s so tiring to communicate!).

We can examine the interplay between images and the written word, itself a system of symbols, and the many differences between speech and written language. Levi-Strauss contributes the concept of binary oppositions and says that myths work like a language articulating the homogenous underlying structure in many different ways, but by always using the similar structures of binary oppositions. He says all myths serve a similar socio-cultural function and that is to resolve the contradiction of these binary oppositions, explaining our world and giving us peace. The post-structuralists say that meaning cannot even be present in an underlying structure because it is constantly in process. They also say that since the process is constant, the signifier itself can be as ideological as the signified. And there really is no author of a text because all of those meanings are already in existence and floating around until the reader assembles them in a unique way, becoming the author, in a sense. Semiology, the science of studying signs in society, is explained as it applies to pop culture. Ideology enters at the second level of signification and this is where myth is produced for consumption. Storey provides examples of these theories applied to pop culture through westerns, advertisements and news media.

Marxism

Classical Marxist theory has made many contributions to cultural studies, utilizing its political nature. Marxism maintains that cultural texts should be analyzed based on the historical condition of production (method of production – MOP), but it warns against seeing culture as a direct consequence of economic analysis. Several other theories are presented as they utilize Marxist tradition.

The Frankfurt School of German thought combines Marxism and psychoanalysis to bring us ‘critical theory’. It maintains that the ‘culture industry’ provides homogeneous and predictable products that function to maintain social authority, and it makes a division between pop culture and high culture, whereby high culture functions as a religion harboring the human desire for a future better world. This theory claims the culture industry uses pop culture to prematurely deliver on the promises of a capitalist success (equality and justice) while maintaining domination, and this democratization of culture prevents the demand for true democracy. The culture industry stunts political imagination with pop culture and threatens high culture by ironing out the conflict between the two (won’t yearn for a better tomorrow when today is so nice). Storey shows how the works of Adorno and Benjamin exemplified differences within the Frankfurt school; one end of the spectrum represents the consumer of culture as a drone before the MOP and the other end as responsible for deriving meaning regardless of MOP.

Althusserianism deals with the concepts of ideology, social formation and symptomatic reading. Two definitions of ideology are very relevant to the study of pop culture. Althusser said that ideology is the way we live our reality through representation. An Althusserian analysis seeks to deconstruct the problematic by revealing the structure of what is both present and absent from a text. The second definition sees ideology as a lived practice that has a function of constructing individuals as subjects, social identification being a question of what we consume rather than what we produce. Ideology produces self mis-recognition.

Neo-Gramscian cultural studies focus on the concept of hegemony; hegemony being a result of negotiations between dominant and subordinate groups. This concept defines pop culture as the result of our active consumption of texts and practices provided by the culture industry. Neo-Gramscian hegemony gives more creative and intellectual power to the individual, even if success does ironically maintain the power structure that ‘allowed’ it through marketing.

Feminism

The use of feminism as a theory for analyzing popular culture arose in the 1980’s. Due to the great debate within feminism there are a number of ‘feminisms’ in practice with at least 4 major groups identified by Storey; radical, Marxist, dual systems theory, and liberal. Each theory identifies the cause of women’s oppression, as a result of patriarchy in radical feminism, capitalism in Marxist feminism and both patriarchy and capitalism in dual systems theory. Liberal feminism explains oppression as a result of male prejudice embedded in law. Feminism is useful in the analysis of popular culture because popular culture is the battleground for meaning and for politics.

Feminism is political in nature and is concerned with ending female oppression in our patriarchal society, therefore a feminist approach to pop culture will reflect this agenda. Due to feminism’s political nature and the fact that in our society the only socially recognized sexes are male and female it seems likely that feminist analysis would be controversial and perhaps draw opposition from men, particularly men content with the status quo. But how do we explain feminist opposition from women? There seems to be a great deal of debate within the female circle over what feminism means and what role it should play for each of us. There is an elitism regarding some feminist analyses of popular culture, culture that is more ‘primitive’ than the feminist herself. I believe this elitism may be responsible for much of the debate within feminism.

Storey presents detailed discussion of several feminist analyses with different perspectives. Modleski and Coward look at many genres of female fantasy culture. Modleski says that contradictions in women’s lives lead to the production of the fantasy industry (stepping around Marxist comments on religion) and that the way narratives solve these problems in the text will rarely please a feminist. She asserts that a feminist analysis of reading by women is necessary. Coward is part of the culture she is studying in that she herself consumes romantic fantasy. She sees romantic fantasy as successful Oedipal drama, though the discourse sustains the male position of power. Coward maintains that the feminine position in society is a product of the identifying fantasy culture offered us, not of a determined female condition.

Feminist analyses of pop culture have been presented in studies of film, romance novels, TV soap opera and women’s magazines. Mulvey and Stacey study film. Mulvey focuses on the text as constructed by a patriarchal society to produce visual pleasure in male viewers (political psychoanalysis; universal) whereas, in contrast, Stacey focuses on the female audience and their negotiated interpretation of meaning (not passive and not universal).

Radway analyzes romance novels by studying a select group of avid readers, paying close attention to both the rejected text and the chosen text. She sees fantasy as the need for reciprocated devotion such as that found originally with the mother. This is an interesting twist, or perhaps an extension of the Oedipal drama proposed by Coward. For Radway the romance novel serves as a myth where women reproduce themselves. She says we must look at both the meaning of the act of reading and the meaning of the text.

Ien Ang analyzed the audience of Dallas and the pleasure the show produced, without much emphasis on the implications of pleasure. She found that pleasure depended upon ‘emotional realism’ and that those who saw the text as ‘unreal’ at denotation level saw it as ‘recognizable and real’ at connotation level. Most of her solicited responses had some reference to ideology. She saw fantasy pleasure as not denying reality but playing with it, using it to vent a real melodrama.

Worship’s analysis of women’s magazines included herself as a closet reader. She saw the experience as dialectic of attraction and rejection. Magazines must cater to two audiences, the woman and the advertiser. Marketing leads women to identify themselves through consumption. She also spoke of the unity that readers feel when engaged in reading this text, the unity of women regardless of and oblivious to racial and class inequalities.

The same text can be read  (or not read) in many different ways and provide many levels of meaning.

Postmodernism

            Storey gives a brief history of the term ‘postmodernism’ and explains how it relates to popular culture. The true birth of postmodernism, as it is known today, took place in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s and began as a generational revolt against modernism’s constraints of culture into necessary categories. The term refers most generally to a breakdown in the distinction between high culture and pop (mass) culture, the end of the Arnoldian metanarrative of binary opposition. Postmodernism looks at the value of culture in a different way. Cultural texts, rather than having an inherent value, are the site of value construction. Hal Foster sees postmodernism as being divided into two types; one providing resistance as it seeks to deconstruct modernism and the status quo, and the other a reaction to modernism as it is rejected in favor of postmodernism. The historical context of postmodern pop culture and its use as a means for hegemonic control is examined. Postmodernism seeks the source of meaning and its relationship to power and authority.

            Storey uses the three arguments of Lyotard, Baudrillard and Jameson to demonstrate the current range in postmodern theory. Lyotard launched the current circulation of the term ‘postmodern’ with his book, The Postmodern Condition, in 1979. He said that postmodern “signals the collapse of all universalist metanarratives”. Lyotard also speaks of how practitioners assume responsibility for legitimizing their own practice.            Nostalgia assumes its full meaning when the real is no longer real; simulation and representation are reality, not a proxy for it. Baudrillard said that in the west we’ve shifted from the production of things to the production of information. It is no longer possible to separate ideology and culture from economy or production because cultural artifacts have become a significant part of economy. He introduces the ideas of simulation and hyperrealism, saying that the simulations we consume as culture are perceived as more real than reality itself. Most thought provoking is an analysis of Disneyland as a concealing agent to mask the very reality of this concentrated America. Wow!

            Jameson, an American Marxist cultural theorist, introduces a sociocultural hierarchy in which cultural stages mimic the stages of capitalism. He says that the postmodern cultural text has lost its critical distance and acts as a map for the masses to navigate late capitalism, with only the critic able to offer resistance. As a society with ‘historical amnesia’ we rely on nostalgia culture that recreates myth with symbolic aesthetic history that we now view as real history (such as an Indian being judged by how an Indian should look when compared to movie and painting).

            Storey provides a postmodern glance at two examples of pop culture; pop music and TV. With pop music Storey says we must look not just at the postmodern text but the consumption and use of the text. He sees TV as quintessentially postmodern and the “domain of simulations”. There is no modernist version to compare it to. What is value itself and who has the right to judge? Typically it is whoever is in cultural power; they use their arbitrary taste and agenda to legitimize social difference.