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.

Globalization of Culture: Rise of Cosmetic Heterogeneity

Does global culture exist at all? To start with Fredric Jameson, If globalization of economic practice by and large means absolute liberalization of both developed and developing nations including US-allies, or if we demand for optimal and independent use of technologies, do then we have to accept Jameson’s notion of ‘superficial’, ‘depthless’, and outright ‘commercial’ mediated postmodern cultural forms? This is otherwise not at all trivial as Lull argues that he would rather prefer to ‘concentrate on more concrete developments by emphasizing how people interpret their changing worlds, make them meaningful, and advance their personal, social, and cultural interests’. But this may also look too much utopian when huge number of have-nots is to be considered. They are nowhere in a position to deal with, define, advance, their individual cultural interests. It is true even for the middle class people also throughout the globe. So let’s not talk only about their social or socio-cultural interests. Even a middle class Chinese wage earner [earning $200 p.m. in Chinese currency, her husband was earning at that time, in 2000, was nearing $300] Zhang Iazhu, one of my once close associates, was hardly in a position to build up a duplex house for their own when this is not really an impossible task for a middle class Indian wage earner of almost same dimension.

The most dreaded metanarrative of our time is ‘globalization’ which refers to a massive sense of somewhat ‘away cultural’ notion that promotes, according to Lull, the scope of current developments in communication and culture, but more than that in a specific contextual reality. Though Prof. Lull has given an enhanced outlook toward modern developments [mostly corporate developments], does not believe that we have become one people. He argues further, ‘it is true that potent homogenizing forces including military weaponry, advertising techniques, dominant languages, media formats, and fashion trends undeniably affect consciousness and culture in virtually every corner of the world...but these political, economic-cultural influences do not enter cultural contexts uniformly...’. But the main problem with this analysis is that for people of most developing nations this plurality is often considered as ‘homogenizing forces’ as the prime effects of ‘globalization’ over their natural cultural heterogeneity that may further be extended to the natural mixing of symbolic cultural elements. These even affect all interactions in ‘diverse local conditions’, what Lull has tried to save as an imperative to establish that we are not affected by such homogenizing forces. Furthermore such homogenizing global cultural forces have not accomplished their globalization journey but received sufficient on-going protest from alternative socialist forums in different parts of the world. So Lull’s notion that ‘we will not become one people’ seems to be quite different from the on-going anti-globalization movements.

However let’s now move into the nitty-gritty of the metanarrative ‘globalization’ specially ‘of culture’ and ‘communication’. Many theorists, like James Lull, Arjun Appadurai have time and again tried to establish a root natural heterogeneity of cultural praxis that let people not become so called ‘globalized’. They believe at the same time that such homogenizing forces may affect consciousness and culture but do not surprisingly recognize the invading motives of the globalizing forces. Anthony D. Smith has however defined the practicing heterogeneity of culture, ‘...if by culture is meant a collective mode of life, or a repertoire of beliefs, styles, values and symbols, then we can only speak of cultures, never just culture; for a collective mode of life, or a repertoire of beliefs, values etc., presupposes different modes and repertoires in a universe of modes and repertoires. Hence, the idea of a global culture is a practical impossibility...’

I am now interested in talking about the mediated global, commercial cultural forms and codes that evidently accompany the mediated cultural contents that Lull et.al. exclude from their globalizing list. A stark difference of outlook has therefore always been evident between neoliberal ‘cultural development’ theorists and anti-neoliberal and progressive social thoughts.

However noted American sociologist Arjun Appadurai has pointed out that cultural heterogeneity [the idea that culture takes many forms] is much more valid than any theory of encroaching cultural sameness [Lull, 1995]. He has however excluded any possibility of taking globalization as Americanization, or neoliberal postcommerciality whatever. He argues: ‘...global homogenization invariably subspeciate into an argument about Americanization, or an argument about commoditization, and very often these two arguments are very closely linked. What these arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from the various metropolises are brought into these societies, they tend to become indigenized in one way or another: this is true of music and housing styles as much as it is true of science and terrorism, spetacles and constitutions...’. But surprisingly such diaspora of cultural arguments and elements do not at all designate the contemporary form of globalization and quite motivated to subscribe a progressive historical outlook which was bitterly countered, derecognized earlier during war and even post war period of time. Excolonial countries were the worst sufferers of such colonizing motives of the West. They have never felt the necessity of using Asian societies and markets until the contemporary phase of globalization when they feel an extraordinary need of Asian market and social structures because of severe internal economic and social crisis. Noted corporate strategist Kenichi Ohmae has thus pointed out: ‘the capital markets in most of the developed countries are flush with excess cash for investment. Japan, e.g. has the equivalent of US$10 trillion stored away. Even where a country itself hovers close to bankruptcy, there is often a huge accumulation of money in pension funds and life insurance programmes. The problem is that suitable and suitably large - investment opportunities are not often available in the same geographies where this money sits. As a result the capital markets have developed a wide variety of mechanisms to transfer it across national borders. Today nearly 10% of US pension funds are invested in Asia. Ten years ago that degree of participation in Asian markets would have been unthinkable’.

What they have done is, therefore accepting a growth of cosmetic cultural heterogeneity in every ideal term but deliberately rule out the politics of signification and so the appropriate installation of plurality. So the question of indigenous cultural forms being affected is nowhere discussed in their texts. 

Scape theory:

Nevertheless while he is stressing upon the impossibilities of cultural homogenization and any kind of domination over any particular form of culture Arjun Appadurai has classified ‘heterogeneity’ of culture into five ‘scapes’ which according to him, can assure such impossibilities of homogenization of culture. These five scapes are: ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, ideoscapes, and mediascapes. 

Ethnoscapes refer to the deterritorializing migration of people from one part of the globe to another in various forms, as analyzed by John Tomlinson, like, tourists, immigrants, refugees, guestworkers, exile, and so on [Lull, 1995].

Technoscapes refer to the movement of corporate technologies from one place to another. Globalization of techno-capitalist development remains the prime consideration.

Financescapes refer to the undeterred movement of finance capital and industrial capital from any transnational source to any newly developing region, e.g., World Bank, International Monetary Fund, foreign development funds of some European states, like DFID of British government etc. 

Appadurai argues in this context that these scapes are quite disjunctive to each other and also unpredictable in nature but fail to understand the common unipolar and irreversible cultural factor ‘domination’ jointly perpetrated by the transnational corporates and group of nations led by the United States. Massive military aggressions in several nations, like, massacre in Indonesia, Mexico in late sixties; devastation in several West-Asian countries in two-three decades from early sixties; economic-cultural-military-industry axis domination in several Latin American states, like, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Costarica, Panama, Brazil, an other Boliverian states; allied participation in Gulf War in subsequent two stages [1990s and 2003-04] completely destroying Iraq and glorious remaining of the oldest Mesopotamian civilization, massacre in Afghanistan; promoting the civil wars actively in African states and former East-European nation states; and most recently nuclear deal with India follow so many earlier economic and cultural blockades since last forty years.

However by Mediascape, Appadurai argues about the transnational telecast of mass media technologies and mass produced images they constitute. Audience, according to Lull, here constructs narrative of the images produced and shown. This concept refers to when we see a Mexican film we construct an image of common Mexican lives. 

By Ideoscape Appadurai has expressed political images and in ideological domain, Lull has accommodated fundamental rights, freedom, responsibility, equality, discipline, democracy etc. which make up ideoscapes specified for different regions and habitations.

Thus by these five disjunctive ‘scapes’ Appadurai has emphasized on heterogeneity in diffusion of innovative and adoption of new ideas that overrule any form of hegemonic interaction, homogeneous ideation and influence. Mass media, as a special referent, communicate diverse and extended, polysemic contents that nowhere correspond to any homogeneity of message. So homogeneous constellation in cultural praxis is impossible.

On the other hand Stuart Hall while moving into the multiplicity of encoding and decoding of mediated message discards such automated outcome that human beings naturally conceive culture that is independent of any form of domination. Hall in this context while installing the same plurality of meaning of the message structures has stressed upon underlying struggle performed by the decoder of message. He conceived the message having close relation with the production function where lives the struggle for meaning and identity as well as the pertinence of domination. He quite substanively argues that polysemy must not be confused with plurality because in every social space classifications in cultural political orders are being imposed to constitute a ‘dominant cultural order’ that rules the dominant or preferred meaning for its audience. And this dominant cultural order however articulated by dominant social institutions.

Encoding-Decoding model:

Hall argues in this model that ‘broadcasting structures must yield encoded messages in the form of a meaningful discourse. The institutional-societal relations of production must pass under the discursive rules of language for its product to be realized. This initiates a further differentiated moment, in which the formal rules of discourse are in dominance. Before this message can have an ‘effect’, satisfy a need or to be put to a ‘use’ it must first be appropriated as meaningful discourse and be meaningfully decoded. It is this set of decoded meanings which have an effect, influence, entertain, instruct, or persuade with very complex perceptual, cognitive, emotional, ideological, or behavioural consequences’. Thus with this relational discourse structure creates a code and yields a text-message and also determines ‘effect’, ‘uses & gratifications’.

The model however reveals that meaning structure of encoding may not be same with that of decoding. They do not constitute ‘immediate identity’ and codes are not symmetrical, i.e., codes produced by the encoder-producer may not be symmetrical with the codes of decoder-receiver. So denotive meaning of a code largely depends on situational ideologies and therefore class struggle in language is almost inevitable that signs and codes enter into struggle over meanings. Hall argues in this context that literal or denotive meanings are not outside ideology and always perpetrate struggle. 

Cultivation theory revisited: Audience brought back from ‘hyperreactive’ allegation

As it has been already argued that polysemic nature of codes [verbal, visual, televisual etc.] basically reveal asymmetry between codes of encoder-producer and that of decoder-receiver and lack of equivalence between them. This functional proposition is successfully used to explain Gerbner’s notion of ‘television content’ where such lack of equivalence can be widely seen among the audience. Hall argues that ‘it might also transform our understanding of audience reception, reading and response as well’.

Cultivation analysis in Gerbner’s notion tells us the long term heavy viewing of televisual contents [preferred ones] leads to a substantive change in audience behaviour and ideology. But as Hall argues that televisual content or television programmes are not at all behavioural inputs. Interestingly he remarks that ‘though Gerbner has mentioned that representations of violence on TV are not violence in reality but the message or image of violence, but we continue doing research on the question of violence as if we are unable to comprehend this epistemological distinction’. Gerbner however condemns the audience for becoming hyperreactive to such projection of not violence but the image of violence.

Hall in this context has explained semiology of televisual signs and its atachment to the immediate cultural praxis. According to Hall, all televisual signs are more than a ‘sign’, are a combination of visual and aural ‘discourses’, thus become an Peirce’s iconic sign that even depend on the things represented. Thus studying visual signs or languages often leads to a deep confusion and controversy is the first outcome in the society. He argues further that visual language transforms [translates] three dimensional reality into a two dimensional plane ‘it cannot be the referent or concept it signifies. The dog in the film can bark but it cannot bite’. So the reality exists outside the language but constantly mediated in this language. So our knowledge [even that may be discursive] has been produced and assured in this way. Hall says that true and transparent representation of the ‘real’ is not our knowledge but how it is being articulated is going to be the thing we are interested in and this is the ‘code’. Thus code analysis is as important as to analyze our understanding to it and according to Hall, Peirce’s iconic signs are similar to the Sausseurean code [the particular cultural arrangement of signs]. In his words, ‘...naturalism and realism - the apparent fidelity of the representation to the thing or the concept represented - is the result, the effect, of a certain specific articulation of language on the real...’. So even continuous observation of the image or the mesage of violence [not the real] would cause a serious effect on audience psyche or behaviour.