How do we define or reconcile ‘culture’ however, if it is at all necessary in terms of communication research discourse or in terms of communication of a text in either a micro or macro social perspective? This question is a dubious one and invites a sense of indeterminacy whether to define it in terms of ‘high and low’ culture, ‘suit and street’ culture, ‘orthodox and popular culture’ and so on. All such senses assure an empowered cultural system that involves a long-drawn social hierarchy and domination. One plausible solution is that if ideology is taken off from political and dominant social logic, cultural praxis in micro social format would then be visible. But this specially in a capitalist exploitative society seems to be more evangelical than analytically derived one. But that also seems to be quite aristocratic as it does not care about struggling texts of the audience of underdeveloped countries. Most fundamentally the term ‘culture’ is structurally oppositional to the idea or the study of nature. This is a psychological figuration or pattern that involves ‘tradition’ [comprising of some overriding major proclaimed texts coverting plenty of common narratives], social beliefs [an empowered fall out of ethno-religious and political grand narratives], individual identity, and own territorial feeling [often merged into ethno-religiocity and many other social appearances].
So culture, as often contrarily conceived nowadays, can never be a universal term nor is it having any long historical line-up. Noted cultural theorist Raymond Williams in his “Civilization and Culture” stated culture ‘as a general process of inner development was extended to include a descriptive sense of the means and works of such development...’. Thus Williams strongly proposed the semantic development or transformations of social means or practices into human psychology. Noted Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci while in his note analyzing culture as a middle term between the world of art on the one hand and society and politics on the other.
However toward a plausible definition of culture, in a determinate periphery, one might have to accept overlapping of number of texts regularly happening in political or social frames that might deviate such grand narrative as ‘culture’, otherwise the term can hardly be definable. This is equally true in global frame also, where ‘global culture’ is closely a non-existent phenomenon unless becoming highly dominant and backed by new corporate hegemony. Then only individual audience would consume only information of culture and not the inherent meaning of cultural content or message.
Thus we gradually move on to certain distinctions between ‘popular’ culture and ‘mass’ culture: ‘popular’ when one likes that and ‘mass’ when one does not. But both distinctive features involve a powerful social narrative that accepts any one of the two and wait to its audience while downsizing any deviant approach. Cultural studies thus transcends such binary outlines of cultural distinction, i.e., as mentioned earlier, high and low, popular and mass, suit and street etc. though it must not be misunderstood that it overlooks traditional points of struggle between classes and cultural identities. It more plausibly looks for the atrocities perpetrated over such depressed and low-ordered classes of people. In this course of cultural studies they closely followed Marxian political notion of class and Gramsci’s notion of cultural identification but extended their analysis up to an excorporated emancipation of the exploited class until communist revolution occurs, as cultural studies never denounces such possibilities of revolution.
Raymond Williams (1962) however has provided the most comprehensive definition of culture, as a particular way of life shaped by values, traditions, beliefs, material objects and territory. Culture is a complex and dynamic ecology of people, things, world views, activities, and settings that fundamentally endures but is also changed in routine communication and social interaction [Lull, 1998]. Noted American theorist James Lull has carefully added to this definition that culture is a context. It is how we talk and dress, the food we eat, and how we prepare and consume it, the gods we invent, and the ways we worship them, how we divide up time and space, how we dance, the values to which we socialize our children, and all the other details that make up everyday life. This definition indicates clearly as Lull pointed out also complying with British notion that no culture is inherently superior to any other and that cultural richness by no means derives from economic standing. Culture as everyday life is a steadfastly democratic idea.
The above definition doubtlessly stultifies the textual determinist definition approach of culture and speaks of a complete transtextual stance which also on the other hand negates directly any possibility of political influence on culture thus basically nullifies also democratic institutions, like economy, polity, society, cultural praxis. He also on the other hand, like poststructuralists, has identified that culture is in many ways structured owing to differences in social class. According to Lull, such structuration does not allow variety and scope of culture. His notion of contention with earlier theorists [possibly modernist theorists] is that they ‘have in fact wrestled with the complex connection between social structure and culture for years. In sociology and communication, some theorists have tried to explain why people of various social classes prefer different genres within cultural domains such as art and music’. He continued arguing, why does a young Bengalee prefer Band music while another prefers popular Hindi songs? Does this difference [of taste] show or reveal any connection between ‘class’ and ‘culture’? American Sociologist Herbert Gans has termed such phenomenon as “Taste Culture” that might refer to cultural strata in a social structure. This taste culture has a definite and direct relations with the social class position. Thus the people of upper socio-economic class prefer classical music than that of lower socio-economic class [Gans, 1974]. However French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu tried to derivate the problematic relationship between cultural taste and social class positions. In his words, ‘social space is made in social practice, and practice is not determined by social structure. What a person learns culturally is influenced by, but not limited to, the tastes and everyday activities of people who occupy the same social class’.
But the definition of culture still hardly depends on the inferences of different cultural observatories which deal only some preferred cultural genres. So intertextual analyses cannot reach the core of such truth rather invites a neo-liberal counter-structural [mostly mediated] domination. If culture is an assemblage of a number of socio-cultural texts, then these must be released from its base social structures. But this release does not mean sundering between social structure and cultural texts. The most appropriate definition of culture lets these two have mutual responsibility to each other and have developmental relationship also between them. Then only social domination over the structure as “culture” can be avoided.
Culture and power:
Thus if the imperative is to take institutional intervention in cultural activities in a social context into account, the question of power and hegemony would then definitely come forward to shape the edifice of culture. Institutional domination rather intervention can be identified in various ways, like, economic power, political power, coercive power [militarization] that would determine the rules of social space. Structural theorists are interested in these powers and their domination over the signs and texts. But American sociologists have identified another notion of power, i.e., symbolic power, that can be defined, as ‘the capacity to use symbolic forms...to intervene in and influence the course of action or events’[Lull, 1998]. This power also can be institutionalized as mass media organizations, corporate communicative orgnizations. Lull points out beautifully that, the ‘symbolic power and its correlate cultural power, deriving from the tactical undertakings of social actors constructing their everyday lives, are not exercized solely by social institutions. Symbolic and cultural power are far more accessible and usable than are economic, political and other institutional coercive attempts. They are central to daily life, helping us to create, cope with, adapt to, and transform environments structured by forces of economic, political and military authority’. Mass media are the main players exerting cultural power. Cultural power, according to Lull, is the ‘ability to define a situation culturally. By cultural power individual or groups produce meanings to construct ways of life’.
As I have already pointed out that such identifications basically represent a counter hegemony or power alternative to traditional institutional power structures. However Lull, even not being over obsessively concerned to such power analysis, at the same time, has established also the legitimacy of the symbolic or cultural power.
However both Marxian studies, cultural studies [poststructural studies], and American symbolic analyses have expressed their concern to the growth of power culture empowered by homogeneous institutional domination. Marxian studies in its classical version rather communist orientation have strongly expressed about political emancipation of exploited working class toward establishment of dictatorship of the proletariat. Cultural studies have shown a lot more concern about the exploitation of individuality and organized terror against socio-cultural texts perpetrated by traditional institutions. On the other hand American symbolic analysis is also based on the development of neo-liberal outlook of symbolic-cultural texts that are supposed to achieve independence from any traditionalist power structure, though it is equally very keen to recognize unleashing growth of technology and corporate neo-liberalism in the world.
Both cultural and symbolic power contents have the single source of origin in neo-liberal mediation wherefrom people get these elements as a further [second order] empowered homogenized concept and ensure their optimal use. In this context some amount of indigenous traditional outlook toward those contents influence the production of meaning for the time being. These traditional outlooks are very much territory-specific in its character. A young beautiful Indian lady may be very much fond of funky dress codes and may alongside prefer white ‘saree’ during Durga Puja festival. Gans’s ‘taste culture’ theory can hardly explain such phenomenon whereas Lull’s ‘hybridization of culture’ is just a mere observation and Foucault’s culture is just a ‘causal expression’ but none of them look for the dynamic transformational development of such cultural texts overlapping one over another, and a complete deterritorialization of ‘self’ or ‘culture’ toward absolute consumerism would then be prevalent perpetually. Individual then would be least interested to get meaning of those contents, they rather prefer to consume the information only what is being incessantly communicated to them.
Howsoever the notion of cultural power involves how people use the mediated symbols and become compulsively identified as members of some sub-cultural identities, like, popular culture, street culture, suit culture or elite culture, proletariat culture, and by some opinions mass culture.
Culture and Power # II: Popular culture versus mass culture:
People often not able to identifying the underlying power exercise, think ‘mass’ culture same as popular culture. James Lull while defining ‘popular’ has stated that popular, in this sense, does not signify widespread, mainstream, dominant, or commercially successful. Popular cultural texts come from people and are developed from people’s creations, nor is it given to them for temporary or permanent use. James Lull again has stated very loosely that, “this perspective tears away at distinctions between producers and consumers of cultural artifacts, between culture industries and contexts of reception. We all produce popular culture. Constructing popular culture is an exercise in cultural power”. No point is required to counter this statement but lot of concern still is left to the growth of culture industries and dominant commercial elements that affect individual creativity and dynamic ecology of natural cultural elements. Individual creativity often becomes badly influenced by such dominant elements that definitely affect the course of natural creation and popular culture, as the traditional popular folk cultural forms and identities are the worst sufferers from the culture industries. Nowadays traditional string puppeteers of Bengal set puppet costumes, make-ups, screenplays concommitant to the mediated agenda of Mumbai or Kolkata film [culture] industries, thus try hard or fight a lost battle before getting completely extincted.
Now whatever be the fate of popular cultural creations, the definition, what Lull has attempted to produce, would remain perfect in contrast to the ‘mass’ culture. Mass culture basically is a derivated or fall out of some cultural aspects that are formally recognized as a ‘mainstream’, commercially viable, widely mediated, not widely supported but less opposed, ‘national’, ‘central’, etc. If the government builds a bridge or a flyover, often these are dedicated to the nation and the bridge becomes ‘national’ and, at the same time, may be a symbol of pride, power, development that all feed to the ‘national cultural power’ where the population [comprising of all strata, including lower middle class, poor, destitutes, remote dwellers, share croppers, landless farmers, rural unemlpoyeds, highly exploited female workers, industrial workers, refugees, homeless, raped, unemployeds, retrenched, looted, thieves, murderers, convicted, beggers, vagabonds, evicted alongside rich, super rich, educated elites, upper middle class, educated middle class etc.] largely becomes an ‘atomized mass’ irrespective of the plurality of their cultural identities or even class identities to some extent.
Theoretically mass culture do not possess or deserve any better theoretical categorization, but is existent as a subcultural form in any organized cultural power where powerful institutions always intervene in social process more as educator manner than developer, thus available almost in all the phases of modern history so far noticed.
Culture and Power # III: Cultural power and mediation:
American sociologists including media analysts strongly believe that mass media contribute to the process of popular [mass-]-cultural production by distributing cultural resources to oppressed individuals and subordinate groups [Lull, p73]. This is nothing but a sheer fabricated media-idealism that aptly discards the truth. Moreover such contribution of media were seen, in ex-colonial countries, in the developmental paradigmatic phase where media were centrally controlled and regulated. But this phase so far the developing countries had experienced, were by and large incomplete and they also innately felt for the autonomy of media, independent of state controlling. Subsequently media-market expanded to a large extent but squeezed to the oppressed and also the earlier promise of distributing resources to them. Media market becomes largely monolithic in terms of profit maximization [political eonomy] sundering developing countries not only from its traditional roots but from the contemporarity of cultural praxis also.
Edward Said’s narrative on America’s most unpopular war in Vietnam is most worth mentioning here. America’s defeat in Vietnam in mid-sixties has become most so-called popular cultural resource that let the term commercially alive “America’s war in Vietnam”. In India also, with such so-called popular mediated resource as, ‘India is shining’, ‘India: the upcoming superpower’, ‘the superpower of 21st century’ — global media conglomerates, operating in India, along with Indigenous films and other discursive pratices, have invented a very powerful discourse on ‘new’ India that is commercially suited and placed on a highest elite positioning. While Said strongly advocated Foucault’s open ended thought of power, how is power exercised and what are its effects — that set a basic ideation to the notion that ‘what is power and where does it come from?’ In terms of global mediation these questions have a homogeneous turn toward conglomeration of media institutions that is the prime source of power in the 21st century world terrorizing people’s [Foucauldian] right to hold power in contrast to that of the ruling class and media institutions. This is cultural power as James Lull stated, and people have the only option to imitate those mediated symbols. So this cultural power is negative and would outcast people’s creative power and ‘right’ to be productive, and encourage instead only packaging so to consume mass produced media content, regardless of its specificity of meaning. Baudrillard’s conclusion here is worth reading: “media practices have rearranged our senses of place and time. Television is ‘real world’; television is dissolved into life; and life is dissolved into television. The fiction is ‘realized’ and the real becomes fictions. Simulation has replaced production [medium is the message]...alas, our individuality, always in the spotlight, is that and only that, in the spotlight. The spotlight functionalizes the human being. The social limits of the spotlight and playing to the spotlight are the individual. The social framework and its communicative action are the self. There is no freedom beyond this activity. We are proletariatized regardless of class, a function of the spectacle...”.
