Popular Culture as Postmodern Culture: I Shop Therefore I Am

The Film Run Lola Run: Life on a crossroad

Popular culture is being widely defined in recent years in terms of postmodernity incidentally by the urban civil identities of many ambitious third world nations precisely Indian social centres. With the adventurous growth of global mediation the gross definition of popular ‘social’ culture has evidently been fragmented into certain inter-temporal but globalist symbolic cultural artifacts as newer codifications of life patterns. The postmodernity of culture in a certain periphery is therefore guided by an imposition of those symbolic globalist cultural artifacts on the locally operative cultural space. Postmodernity can thus be worked out as a post-theoretical condition that overrules traditional cultural contours i.e. ruling culture, deviant culture, oppositional culture and even grossly the popular culture. It also transcends all kinds of traditional social and cultural identity demarcations, like authentic culture, suite culture, street culture, commercial culture etc. But alongside the known elements of regional popular culture one must have a clear idea about what is postmodernism or postmodernity and its association with the popular or contemporary culture.

Immediately after the second world war lots of research works were organized in the United States that challenged all moots of traditional modernist development of society, literature, and of course the popular culture. Number of theorists has worked so far on postmodernism and postmodern culture, notably Fredric Jameson, Jean Francois Lyotard et.al. towards a definable, notional release of individual identity from all possible social and political dominations.

Defining Postmodernity

However Jean Francois Lyotard in his “The condition of postmodernity” (1979, translated in English, 1984) has defined postmodern condition as, ‘a crisis in the status of knowledge in western societies’ that overrule all metanarrative apparatus of legitimation, rejecting all totalizing frameworks from telling universalist stories (metanarratives), Marxism, Liberalism, Christianity etc. [Storey, 2001]. Postmodernism according to Lyotard thus rejects all such metanarratives used to dominate, homogenize other voices, opinions, discourses, and other forms of plurality in the name of universal principles. In postmodern condition, heterogeneity or plurality thus rules over the universality and homogeneity of narratives i.e. values, ‘ism’s, ‘logy’s etc.

The annulations of metanarratives as grand narratives in postmodernity however reveals something more than what is commonly understood in terms of the fragmentation of grand narrative. Postmodernity unlike the French Poststructurality here prescribes a plausible post-semiotic outcome of every such critique of the modernist references. This is the most problematic and viscid area of the understanding of postmodernity anywhere other than literary creations. Postmodernity cannot rest in a poststructural indeterminacy but needs a postcommercial or hyperreal space to render the mediated form of the signified of a text.

Lyotard argues that all aspects of modern societies depend on such metanarratives as grand narratives. The basic tenets of postmodernity therefore reveals that every attempt to create an “order” always calls for an alternative creation of a “disorder,” of an equal dimension, but a “grand narrative” shadows such constructive disorders. Postmodernism while rejecting such metanarratives as grand narratives, welcomes thus “micro-narratives,” micro-stories that explain individual praxis, events, rather than Universalist or globalist concepts. Postmodern “micro-narratives” are always situational, provisional, contingent, and temporary, making no claim to universality, truth, reason, or stability (Sarup).

In terms of ‘post-codification’ postmodernity can be quite well differentiated from ‘cultural studies’ though both deal with individuality and its cultural developments. Individuality, in cultural studies, largely takes the form of a counter-hegemonic to the modernist institutional legacy of domination but does not ignore the possibility of political unification of the mass. Their counter-hegemony though rejects structural metanarratives or grand narratives, involves a greater installation of plurality in popular cultural praxis. 

But postmodernity on the other hand not only rejects Universalist metanarratives but gives also a plausible and at the same time quite utopian end of a ‘disorder’ wherein reality, according to them, may occasionally exist. The counter hegemonic individual does not prefer postmodern ‘disorderly chaos’ that needs support of hyperreal ‘postconsumerism’ to establish itself. Cultural studies inherits ‘ideology’ independent of any political metanarrative, say, ‘base and superstructure’ but indeed political and further directs people to organize struggle.

Genealogy of postmodernity

While tracing out the genealogy of postmodernist thought one must rediscover and redefine the course of historicism that tells us outright development of modernism along with massive optimistic development of science and of course social science. ‘Modernist thought had its successful origins and developments in the European Enlightenment period. This era was sharply demarcated by a celebration of the liberating potentials of the social sciences, the materialistic gains of capitalism, new forms of rational thought, due process safeguards, abstract rights applicable to all, and the individual it was a time of great optimism (Milovanovic, 1992a, 1994a; Dews, 1987; Sarup, 1989; Lyotard, 1984; Baker, 1993).

Postmodernists are fundamentally opposed to such modernist thought. Sensitized by the insights of some of the classical thinkers, ranging from Marx, to Weber, to Durkheim, Freud, and the critical thought of the Frankfurt School, postmodernist thought emerged with a new intensity in the late 1980s and early 1990s. “Let us wage a war on totality” stated one of its key exponents (Lyotard, 1984: 82). Most of the key concepts of modernist thought were critically examined and found to be wanting. Entrenched bureaucratic powers, monopolies, the manipulative advertisement industry, dominant and totalizing discourses, and the ideology of the legal apparatus were seen as exerting repressive powers. In fact, the notion of the individual free, self-determining, reflective, and the center of activity was seen as an ideological construction, nowhere more apparent than in the notion of the juridical subject, the so-called reasonable man in law. Rather than the notion of the individual, the centered subject, the postmodernists were to advocate the notion of the decentered subject’ (Dragan Milovanovic).

Baudrillard on postmodernity

According to one of the most vibrant theorists of poststructurality, Jean Baudrillard, postmodernity is not simply a culture of sign, rather it is a culture of ‘simulacrum’, i.e., introspective identical copy that transcending the original text determinacy, on what Walter Benjamin has reiterated that, mechanical reproduction has destroyed the ‘aura’ of the work of art. Baudrillard’s notion was the long drawn distinctions between original and the copy has now been virtually destroyed, and so the geo-social space and the relative metanarratives. This, according to Baudrillard, is the simulation process. Basically, as simulation is expressed, all the recorded contents, like film, music, are nothing but a copy without the original. John Storey has added that a film is a construction made from editing together film footage shots in different times and spaces. Baudrillard’s simulation is the hyperreal regeneration of a reality text in absense of its original identity and hyperrealism is the characteristic mode of postmodernity, where in its realm the distinction between simulation and the ‘real’ implodes in which real and imaginary gradually collapse into each other (Storey, 2001). Also in this way French poststructuralism merged into the conditions postmodernity. What is still important here is to note that, according to Baudrillard, simulation is getting more and more real than the real. It can perform even better than what the real does. This is also where media operate so powerfully, because it leads people to simulate the real more importantly than the event. So even been badly defeated in Vietnam war in Sixties, American film industry could still manage to let the simulation alive in favour of US Army in number of Hollywood productions over years.

Baudrillard then made simulation analyses forward to rediscover ‘Disneyland’ that justified postmodern culture quite effectively but left a great utopian space activated also. In his words, ‘...Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the society in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real’.

Another one of the most influencial analysts of postmodernity, Fredric Jameson, in his Postmodernism and Consumer Society, has pointed out postmodernity as a condition where the erosion occurred in the older distinctions between high culture and mass culture or popular culture. Thus postmodernity transcends the traditional vested interest that has been preserved in the realm of high culture. According to Jameson in the realm of moderity [high modernity] popular culture has been brutally influenced institutionally toward high cultural praxis. Postmodernism according to Jameson, breaks any particularity or form of popular culture. It thus releases all popularly emerged texts from traditional or conventional motivation and pressure. Jameson argues these cultural texts as a ‘periodizing concept’ and is dominant in the neo-liberal economic and cultural paradigm what he has termed ‘postmodernism: the cultural logic of late capitalism’ that connotes neo-liberal transnational development of capitalism in the contemporary age of globalization. In this context Ernest Mandel’s trial of three stages of development of capitalism is to be considered: ‘market capitalism’, ‘monopoly capitalism’, ‘late or multinational or transnational capitalism’. Jameson while referring these stages of capitalist development into his cultural schema ‘Realism’, ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’, argues that capitalism in its last category puts forward the purest form of capital into the uncommodified areas (Storey, 2001).

The question of historical transformation toward postmodernity:

Now to reach the core of such transformation of historical periods either from market to transnational orientation of capitalist development or from cultural ‘realism’ to ‘postmodernism’ a plausible alternative schema is needed other than typical historical metanarratives. Here in this context postmodernism differs sharply from cultural studies. Even though traditionally empowered historical metanarratives are being rejected by both postmodernism and cultural studies, there is a major difference between these rejections. For Raymond Williams the transformation of historical periods does not entail complete structural destruction of previous cultural codes and installation of a new one. It simply may cause a paradigmatic shift of ‘relative cultural codes’ that may involve a massive transformation of ruling of popular culture what we can denote different phases of dominant codes. Jameson in this context argues that postmodern condition is basically ‘the cultural dominant’ of late or transnational or neo-liberal [economic] capitalism that along with the free movement of capital delimiting newer cultural boundaries across national borders, calls for emancipation of cultural texts welcomes indeterminacy which is independent of its traditional signification process. But what is still worth mentioning about Jameson’s notion in this context is that postmodern dominant culture belongs to the western capitalist societies which have achieved hierarchy in both economic and popular cultural praxis, otherwise postmodernism and postmodern culture has also been characterized in many ways, such as, ‘Pastiche culture’, ‘culture of quotations’, culture of flatness or depthlessness, superficial in most literate sense, i.e. free from meaning etc. However, according to Jameson, postmodernity or postmodern culture is hopelessly a commercial culture typically promotes consumerist capitalism.

Media effect and cultural studies: From Culture Industry to Global Postmodern

With the coming out of the notion of culture industry, in mid forties, under ultra-nationalist and high-capitalist control, media evolved a massive mass culture for the atomized subordinated audience producing mass-mediated cultural artifacts within the nationalist context of industrial production [Kellner, 1997]. So the produced and mediated commodities manifested identical features as the other ‘produced’ of mass production did. These were: commodification of the produced, standardization or homogenization and enmassification of the produced. The culture-industry, as Kellner accords, had the specific function of providing ideological legitimation of the existing capitalist societies and of integrating individuals into the framework of the capitalist system. Thus culture industry, in Frankfurt discourse of study, produces a consumer society that stabilizes the contemporary capitalist system, formulates new strategies for political change, political emancipation that becomes social norms imposed on common working class. This development thus however transcends the traditional or classical Marxist notion of existence of working class as prime instrument of future revolution. 

So a direct effect of mass media on the common individual and working class existed all through the development of mass mediation communication technology in the last century. Herbert Marcuse [1941] in his article “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology” argued that technology posits a “mode of organizing and perpetuating social relationships, a manifestation of prevalent thought and behaviour patterns, an instrument for control and domination.”

The notion behind such argumentation of media dominance by the Frankfurt cultural theorists was based on some on-hand life time experiences. In Nazi Germany they experienced absolutist collaboration of centralized media and vertical dominance of the state machinery toward controlling media and mediation promoting monolithic mass cultural instruments to produce a homogenized Fascist culture. On the other hand while in exile in the United States they started believing that the so called American ‘popular culture’ in the name of ‘liberal-pluralism’ was also very much motivated toward the interest of the state capitalist jingoism and governed by the transnational industrial corporations.

The governmentality of such popular culture reflects another scale of mass production and ensures mass consumption through certain commercial value-systems, belief-system that serves American Capitalism as a whole. Individuated space in both systems [in German Mass Society and American Popular Society], what they called ‘Fordism’ [mass production-mass consumption to ensure homogeneity of capital, i.e. mass desire, mass taste, mass behaviour (Kellner, 1997)], were never allowed to blossom beyond overshadow of the techno-capitalist system. Individual thought and desire were brutally suppressed in the Fordist consumer society.

What however was thought of Fordist mass production and mass consumption trap by the Frankfurt theorists was criticized by later theorists like Walter Benjamin et. al. and theorists of British cultural Studies only in terms of the hypothesis of taking the ‘mass’ quite atomized and crippled. Emerging in the Post-Fordist era [roughly the post second world war period] they thought on the one hand, that culture industry also could articulate important roles of individuals and on the other hand ‘atomized mass’ as working class could also be believed as an instrument of social and political metamorphosis against the onslaught of mass culture of the culture industry.

In this course of development of cultural studies ‘Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ of Birmingham University started working on class, gender, ethnicity, nationality and media culture while exploring revitalizing elements in the ‘working class’ through extensive study on effects of television, radio, newspapers, film, advertisements on individual audience in terms of cultural texts and they also emphasized on plurality of individual audience and politics of ideology and signification of the text. Thus in this regard the notion of British Cultural Studies appeared highly political and they could reach the core of mass-cultural domination and the core of consumer society. Theorists like Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall opposed in this context the mass cultural theoretical notions of configuring media effect that takes individual audience as ‘heavy viewers’ and ‘active audience’ beyond its natural plurality and spontaneity, believing that such preconception or predomination certainly devours the individuated space in public spheres. So they started theorizing social mediation praxis and processes.

But notwithstanding all oppositions regarding the revival question of working class in the growing consumer society, both schools of thought were unanimous on the notion of integration of the working class beyond its individual class-cultural identity and the decline of its revolutionary consciousness in the capitalist consumer society. Birmingham theorists, specially Stuart Hall here formulated the notion of the ‘politics of signification’ where they recognized any form of alternative voices against the massive institutionalization of thought and hegemony of the dominant cultural ideology. In this way of rediscovering the working class ideology cultural theorists [French, British and German] resurfaced the capitalist integrated consumerist media politics and created an alternative space for common audience to combat monolithic media effect on them. Noted theorist Douglas Kellner supplemented beautifully the Frankfurt notion of cultural studies, in his words, that ‘...mass culture and communication were instrumental in generating the modes of thought and behaviour appropriate to a highly organized and massified social order...mass consumption and culture were indispensable to producing a consumer society based on homogeneous needs and desires for the mass produced and a mass society based on social organization and homogeneity. It is culturally the era of highly controlled network radio and television, insipid top forty pop music, glossy Hollywood jingoistic films, national magazines and other mass-produced cultural artifacts’.

Basically ‘media effect’ analysis is highly a political discourse in terms of its theoretical binarity between capitalist mass culture toward an integration or homogeneity of consumer society and the notion of individuality in pluralist cultural possibilities. Media effect in consumerist societal configuration takes individuals as mass and considers them quite proactive toward mediated contents, i.e. heavy viewers of media and prone to the consumerist effect of mediation. This notion of understanding media effect devours the individuated space i.e. political space that let individuals be the natural victim of mass culture, ends up with the mass consumption of obscenity, titillation, pornography and violence. Thus through consumerist media effect analysis one can only consummate to the extent of consumption of mediated content.

Politics of the Active Audience Research:

Following the cultural nuances about the effect of mass cultural domination over the mass among two theoretical schools [Frankfurt and early British Cultural Studies] were almost of a unanimous opinion of domination of mass culture which makes audience atomized. But on the other hand, as argued above, Benjamin, Hall (et.al.) thought of rejuvenating the audience psyche by counter generation of media use.

But other than such political and cultural research groups [Frankfurt and Birmingham groups] some communication theorists propounded a new theoretical discourse to judge media effect with statistical figuration. Communication researchers J.G. Blumler and Michael Gurevitch have classified the above two discourses of media effect research in a temporal order like Marxist media research and political communication research. While discarding the Marxist notion on the one hand, they have made certain further time-spatial subcultural grouping of the media effect research discourse. ‘Research into political communication effects has undergone at least two major shifts of direction since its inception. In an initial phase, which lasted from approximately the turn of the twentieth century to the outbreak of the Second World War, the mass media were attributed with considerable power to shape opinion and belief. In the second period, from...the 1940s to the early 1960s, they were believed to be largely impotent to initiate opinion and attitude change, although they could relay certain forms of information and reinforce existing beliefs...’ (Blumler & Gurevitch, The Political Effects of Mass Communication; Culture, Society and Media, pp240).

There was, however, a third category of researchers like, McQuail, P. Lazarsfeld, H. Gaudet et. al. who found the ‘audience’ very much proactive to any media content to gratify their temporal needs. According to James Lull, instead of asking “What media do to its audience” this ‘uses and gratifications group’ pounded upon the notion “what do people do with the media”. This notion however according to them signifies the active audience.

This brand of argument as ‘media effect’ has resulted in a natural political polarization not only in media research but also in ideological discourse around the world. The active audience notion virtually tried to move away from the political media research discourse and gave the ‘transcorporate commercial mediation’ a global space to operate. Moreover the active audience research stands against all earlier quantitative ‘effect research’ with a notion that statistical figurations can hardly establish human behavioural pattern or metamorphosis. James Lull asks in this context, ‘how can we determine the particular impact of mass media compared to other environmental influences when analyzing human consciousness and behaviour?’

Extending however Blumler’s notion, Joseph Klapper (1960) meanwhile has derived that media can reinforce human behaviour than changing it, putting Wilbur Schramm’s notion of uncertain media effect forward that media can influence some of its audience, in some time about some things (Lull 1995). Transcending all earlier empirical media effect notions that focused only on negative outcomes, active audience researchers considered audience members are not at all passive receivers of media content or victims of media (Lull, 1995). They have explained that individual audience play always active role to use their media to gratify their individual needs. But uses & gratifications researchers too set on empirical statistical figurations to measure the extent of gratification. James Lull in his analysis concerns, ‘what’s more uses & gratifications researchers - like the effects researchers before them - theorize audience activity in behaviourist terms. Adapting quantitatively based methodologies and theories from psychology and sociology, ultimately these researchers also regard audience members essentially as rats in a maze or beans in a jar. Human emotion, cognition and behaviour are once again reduced to statistical data’ [Lull, 1995].

Therefore it can well be accomplished that as a whole of the discourse of mass communication research, the politics remains in older binary opposition between Marxist tradition of communication research on the one side and the techno-capitalist empirical research of human behavioural order on the other, along with an internal debate over the legitimacy of statistical figuration to measure human behavioural order. So the politics of active audience research reaches out to a highly ideological morphology that seeks out emancipation of the audience.

Changing discourse in social outcomes of mediation:

Effect theorists have time and again identified social transformation through various case studies that show the pivotal role of media in the metamorphosis. But they all seem to have stopped their rediscovery journey while reaching in so called globalization era. They have all confined themselves in a binary oppositional lane where state power and awaiting new media development live in a sufficiently coexistent space. Therefore globalizing change in media and society, for them, has become an awaited destination. This is nowhere difficult to identify how state powers intercept freedom of media, from Fascist governments to the ex-colonial national governments of the third world nations etc. But it also seems to be sufficiently pertinent to identify or rediscover the postmodern transcorporate media domination over fragmented subcultural groups of audience. Basically institutions ranging from the central state power to global corporate power manifest an isomorphic outcome to create a mass society either centrally or in some social pockets, even if Lull’s conceptual generalization of diversity is taken into account.

From mission and revolution to outright consumption:

On the other hand cultural studies which earlier had considered media culture as a critical element to the techno-capitalist culture industry and prescribed setting an alternative goal toward revolutionizing people, from mid seventies to the present, transformed from its socialist revolutionary outlook to a postcommercial postmodernist trend of identity and gradually became less and less critical to capitalist media culture and the contemporary postcommodified culture. Like uses & gratifications approach the ball has been thrown to audience’s court in terms of reception of mediated content, consumption and satisfaction or gratification, thus turning around from earlier notions like how media texts are being produced in media industries. Kellner argues in this context, ‘from this perspective the proliferating media culture, postmodern architecture, shopping malls, and the culture of the postmodern spectacle became the promoters and palaces of a new stage of technocapitalism, the latest stage capital, encompassing a postmodern image and consumer culture...’

Therefore as Kellner rightly argues that the new rise of global technocapitalism and finance-capitalism promotes the new turn of postmodern cultural studies. This ideological shift is a new revisionism (McGuigan, 1992, Kellner, The Farnkfurt School and British Cultural Studies: A Missed Articulation) in cultural studies which even ignores the Derridean space of intercontextuality or the protest against space domination. This does not produce or generate individuated cultural space but set a new cultural populism which alternately produces the same but oppositional degree of mass culture for mass production, treats audience an individual creature. Although this turn in cultural studies seems to devour the space of any grand narrative of domination, historical teleology, pseudo-liberation (both capitalist and socialist) but at the same time confronts with the Marxist derivatives by which the notion of capitalist domination over an individual and social audience could have been identified. This would then be the political articulation of struggle of an individual and a society to organize a revolution.

Politics of margin in global postmodern:

As argued earlier, the nuances between British cultural studies and other forms of western cultural studies were largely going beyond any modernist historical narratives toward either a political revolutionary narrative of struggle or a multicultural consumerist fragmentation of narratives. Although both thoughts arguing the same reduction of narratives from any social time and space, the latter multiculturalist fragmentation realizes new control of over determined capital and new order of technologies that offers audience the sense of a new ordained space for receiving mediated texts. So a new margin beyond the traditional political space is drawn to over-determine the human exposure and use of media. This new margin beyond the traditional social margins attempts to restore the cannon of western civilization, as Kellner exemplifies as Thatcher and Reagan eras, Bush (Junior) to Barack Obama era of rejuvenation of American nationality etc. But for the rest of the world it involves pluralizing of culture (Kellner 1997), opening of traditional political margins, what Hall supposed that to be away from western cultural domination, but nowadays totally controlled, regulated by transnational corporations and media conglomerates, the new cultural arbitrators, new missionaries of techno-cultural capitalism reduced to a newer trend or grandnarrative of the new world order. Thus culture industries in the global postmodern era has reached its culminating point while a handful number of media conglomerates through ruthless merger and acquisitions controls the information order and entertainment industries of the world. Kellner argues that ‘...the globalization of media culture is an imposition of the lowest denominator homogeneity of global culture on a national and local culture, in which CNN, BBC, NBC, the Murdock channels and so on impose the most banal uniformity and homogeneity on media culture throughout the world...’. So a new order of monocultural margin controlled by the media conglomerates has been imposed on the political struggles of various subcultural and political groupings.