WP1 (340): All about Culture
In the three projects of WRIT 340 this semester, I plan to focus on culture, so that readers can have a unique and comprehensive understanding of the essence, mechanisms, and influence of contemporary mainstream culture. The reason why culture is chosen as the core point is that in recent decades, with the assistance of the Internet, any information can be transmitted and shared instantaneously. Among them, culture is the most representative of people’s living patterns. At the same time, the easy dissemination and high penetration of information also allow authorities, such as government agencies and industry-leading companies, to subtly lead people’s values by manipulating culture. In other words, culture is people’s way of life, and the intervention of authority has deceived most Internet users and make them eventually become empty bodies without the ability to think independently.
What worries me even more is that, as the young generation who have enjoyed the Internet service since our birth, we often succumb to the dominance of mainstream culture and follow the trend, instead of reflecting on the relationship between ourselves, popular culture, and the Internet with an analytical perspective. Therefore, I hope to share this writing with young Internet users, to alert them that popular culture may only be a tool to help authority control people’s thinking. We should not simply believe in the content of cultural products (such as novels, music, movies, etc.), but use a cautious perspective to discern which ones are worthy of our thinking, absorbing, and internalizing in this era filled with all kinds of information.
As the first project in this series, this article hopes to clarify one of the most basic questions: What is culture? That is to explore the nature and composition of culture. First of all, culture is not fixed and rigid but an evolving way of living and the process of making meaning. According to the famous Welsh socialist writer Raymond Williams, culture is “a whole way of life” (1960: 14). More precisely, he believes that:
“[Culture] is a lived system of meanings and values — constitutive and constituting — which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming” (1978: 110).
In his words, Williams conveys that culture is a dynamic process constituted by a complex series of social relations and human interactions rather than a set of fixed objects. Culture does not merely reflect the tangible structure of society, but it is an activity in and of itself. Hence, not only culture is a vessel to create reality but also is reality itself, and thus cultural products are all capable of expressing humans as well as creating factuality around us.
For example, when black people first wrote rap music, the unique artistic style quickly became an exclusive characteristic of the black community, namely a relation between them and those who were not rappers. Meantime, it also created the reality that non-black people were not supposed to sing rap. To a larger extent, this reality signaled the deep separation and conflicts between races in not only music but also many other aspects decades ago. Nowadays, as more people are upholding equality and diversity, the rap culture becomes more inclusive. Anyone can rap, and their lyrics both reflect and create reality among the audiences. When Childish Gambino releases the phenomenal single This is America, he condemns the abysmal situation of gun violence while making the unfamiliar audiences say: “Oh, this is America”. From this example, we can understand how culture is changing over time, as well as its power of reflecting and creating a reality for us. However, what if such a strong tool is manipulated? How does it affect our understanding of society? We need a closer angle to analyze it.
Here, I employ the French theorist Roland Barthes’ reputed article “From Work to Text” to demonstrate that cultural products are constituted by signs that people parse for meaning:
“Confronting the work … there now occurs the demand for a new object, obtained by a shift or a reversal of previous categories. This object is the Text. … The difference is as follows: the work is a fragment of substance, it occupies a portion of the spaces of books (for example, in a library), the text is a methodological field. … The work is held in the hand, the text is held in language: it exists only when caught up in a discourse … the Text is experienced only in an activity, in a production” (1986: 70).
Particularly, Barthes argues the difference between work and text. He elaborates that although a “work” is traditionally considered good literature that is worth exemplifying, a “text” is an experience that is created through the interface of the writer, reader, and the reader’s social world. Through such an interface, meaning is produced where no individual has absolute authority. In this way, cultural works are not the authors’ shining products with fixed meanings but a “social space” generating different connotations for various audiences where they interpret the texts and develop meanings. However, at the same time, Barthes also expresses his concerns that most cultural products turned out to work for the ruling class where audiences are guided to reach certain interpretations and eventually devastate the plurality of “text”.
Personally, I strongly agree with Barthes’ pessimistic argument. Although the text interface gives individuals chances of free understanding, it does not prevent the authority* from producing “work”, which is the generation of mainstream culture. In most cases, the authority will directly or indirectly justify its own existence through cultural products and create content that audiences want to see under universal values, such as prosperity, justice, heroism, etc. In other words, although this interface provides the possibility of free-thinking, in most cases it creates opportunities for authority to influence people’s ideas. For example, I mentioned in the Post 8 of WRIT 150 that the 2015 Oscar-winning film American Sniper demonstrates an American sniper’s “war experience in Iraq in which local men, women, and children are depicted as evil war zealots”. In the soldiers’ subjective perspective, though women and children in the Middle East have innocent appearances, they carry bombs and need to be shotted.
*(Note: In this article, we will not discuss how authority is formed. Because there will always be a ruler in a long historical period, we assume that at least one authority with higher power exists.)
For American audiences, most of them are happy to see their motherland safeguarding peace for the world and eradicating terrorism, and will support the country more firmly after watching the movie. However, they did not realize that the elaborately decorated film’s crew was made up entirely of white people and that the United States’ claims of mass-destruction weapons in Iraq have yet to be confirmed. In this case, Oscar represents one of the authorities of the film industry, and its recognition of the film will undoubtedly make people more convinced of the content and message of the film. Therefore, our contemporary audiences and Internet users must realize that culture is often manipulated, and we need to analyze what we see with a reflective and critical perspective.
Later on, in 1996, Stuart Hall, one of the founders of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, echoes Barthes’ concern using Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony:
“I personally think cultural studies in the British context, in a certain period, learned from Gramsci: immense amounts about the nature of culture itself, about the enormously productive metaphor of hegemony, about the way in which one can think questions of class relations only by using the displaced notion of ensemble and blocs” (1996: 280).
Hall delivers that cultural hegemony as a form of leadership does not coerce people but using the authoritative state power to obtain people’s consent and control them. Or, in Barthes’ words, the hegemony has a dominant position in taking advantage of the “texts”. During such a process, people unconsciously acquiesce to a series of social norms and internalize the values of the dominant class in their daily lives. To better explain the idea, I will demonstrate how the misrepresentation of American Indian people in the documentary Reel Injun belies the historical facts of colonization.
In Reel Injun, director Kino Lorber demonstrates the aboriginal American Indian people’s gradual degradation in American movies. When silent movies were first created in the late 1800s, Native Americans were the major subject in “more than a hundred slients” (Lorber 2010: 12:10) and were portrayed as “not only a hero but a Hollywood star” (ibid: 19:04). Audiences could view the indigenous people’s perspectives and “their viewpoints” as they directed and acted in the movies (ibid: 19:31). However, their images became barbaric since the 1930s. During the Great Depression, anxious American people desperately desired new heroic images to conciliate themselves thus the indigenous people were then depicted as uncivilized and inferior. For example, The Stagecoach, “one of the most damaging movies for native people”, demonized the American Indian people as “backwards”, “vicious and bloodthirsty” (Lorber, 27:23). Over time, the situation keeps worsening: filmmakers use English to replace native languages, employ white actors painted in red as aboriginals, and apply simplified symbols and props to represents the American Indian people (ibid: 28:27).
Such an industrialized and unfair portrayal of American Indian people exacerbates racial stereotypes among global audiences, especially the “children who know nothing about native society”, as a way to uphold white supremacy and justify the cruel conquer of colonization (ibid: 30:00). Meantime, the films also portray white people as unstoppable and authentic American heroes, making audiences forget the fact that the aboriginal Americans were exactly the indigenous Indian people.
From the above analysis, we understand what is culture and its composition: culture is not a set of stably fixed objects but a dynamic process full of social interactions and interpretations. Unfortunately, since these interactions are all subjective social activities, the authority will use this potential space to guide people’s ideas at the interface between them and cultural products, thereby forming cultural hegemony and rationalizing its existence. Therefore, I need to alarm young Internet users once again, whether those middle-eastern people who are invaded by the “justified” U.S. military or the forgotten Native American Indians, they are the victims of us being blinded by mainstream culture. To prevent being swallowed by hegemony, we need to always maintain an attitude of scrutiny and reflection to face cultural products. Only when we are no longer deceived by the superficial phenomenon of the products, but use independent and sharp thinking to analyze them, hegemony will be slowly shattered.
In the follow-up WP2, I will use Tik-Tok to explain the influence of the medium itself on the information conveyed and why highly industrialized cultural reproductions make people become its objects rather than subjects. In the most complex WP3, I will combine the previous discussion to put forward the view that mainstream culture has become a cage, and will specifically clarify how this cage is constructed and what we can do to combat cultural interference and oppression.
[Word Count: 1619]
References
Barthes, Roland. 1986. “From Work to Text.” Pp. 56–68 in The Rustle of Language. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Hall, Stuart. 1996. “Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies.” Pp. 263–275 in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge.
Lorber, Kino. 2010. “Reel Injun, On the Trail of the Hollywood ‘Indian’”. PBS Television Broadcasting. Retrieved at: https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/reel-injun/
Williams, Raymond. 1960. Culture and Society 1780–1950. New York: Anchor Books.
Williams, Raymond. 1978. Marxism and Literature. Oxford University Press
Zikang, Hou. 2021. Post 8: American Sniper and Orientalism. Medium. Retrieve at: https://medium.com/writing-150-spring-2021/american-sniper-and-orientalism-74d1392f96d5
