Task 2

Quickly read Adorno's (1941) article 'On Popular Music' (links below). In no more than a few paragraphs, summarise his ideas on pop music, concentrating on key points such as 'standardisation', 'psuedo-individualisation' etc.

Post a link to a YouTube pop video that, in your opinion, epitomises Adorno's sentiments. Explain why, trying to emphasise the links to the wider 'culture industry' in general.

‘A fully concentrated and conscious experience of art is possible only to those whose lives do not put such a strain on them that in their spare time they want relief from both boredom and effort simultaneously.’ (Adorno, On Popular Music, p.80). Popular music and serious music have different audiences, and this is based on culture. Popular music attracts a popular culture audience for its simple ‘pre-digested’ rhythm, whereas in serious music ‘every detail derives its musical sense from the concrete totality of the piece’ (p.74).
     Standardisation is the fundamental characteristic of popular music ‘structural standardization aims at standard reactions’ (p.73). This in itself has two parts, stylisation and pseudo-individualisation. Stylisation is the repetitive structure of popular music and if an aspect of any musical piece can be defined, it is deemed as ‘stylised’ to Adorno’s ears. The second aspect of standardisation, pseudo-individualisation, comes into play alongside this. As an audience, we yearn to be individuals and if we believe that we are just one sheep in a mass flock, it makes the object of our desired less reputable. ‘Concentration and control in our culture hide themselves in their very manifestation. Unhidden they would provoke resistance,’ (p.78) Pseudo-individualisation makes the audience believe they are being an individual and want to engage with popular music. Pseudo-individualisation works in popular music by ‘making them forget that what they listen to is already listened to for them, or ‘pre-digested’.’ (p.79).
     The popular culture audience wishes to escape the dejected custom of their everyday lives, they have a mechanised labour lifestyle and fears of unemployement, war and redundancies create personal stress. This brings me back to my first point, where only individuals who are not stressed and need to release from the pressures of life can ‘understand’ serious music. The popular culture masses need this ‘pre-digested’ music to distract them. ‘They crave a stimulant. Popular music comes to offer it.’ (p.81).

Popular Culture seminar

Communication Theory

 Yeah, I hated this lecture.

















Lasswell's maxim
'who says what to whom in what channel with what effect.'

Two models apply to 7 theories

1. Transmission - (informational) examines the process of sending and recieving messages. The limitations of this model is that communication signs can be perceived differently by different people.
2. Constitutive - process of production and reproduction of shared meaning.

1. Cybernetic (transmission)

Useful for researching effective communication, however it is a linear model. There are 3 potential communication problems...

1. Technical - accuracy, compatibility of systems.
2. Semantic - precision of language
3. Effectiveness - does the message affect the behaviour how we want

Systems therory and BARB (Broadcasters Audience Research Board)... I have no idea what these are or how they apply to this to cybernetic as I don't even know what cybernetic is.

2. Semiotics (constitutive)

There are 3 basic concepts of semiotics

1. Semantics - what a sign stands for
2. Syntactics - the relationship between signs
3. pragmatics - the practical use and effects of signs

Syntactics shown clearly through road signs.

3. Phenomenological Tradition (constitutive)

The process of knowing through direct experience. Communication seen as an extension of the nervous system. It starts with an awareness of the body. Unlike the semiotic tradition, where interpretation is separate from reality, in the phenomenological tradition we are interested in what is real for the person. Apparently the reason we use A4 and how the layout works is down to the similarities with our face.

Facial expressions.

4. Rhetoric

Often used in propoganda, but also bypublic speakers to communicate more effectively. A more theatrical and performative approach to communcation is adopted. Rhetoric lacks good empirical evidence that its persuasive techniques actually work as intended.

RMS Lusitania was sunk and 1,200 people dies, 100 being American. America took this loss of life and used one part of this disater to create recritment posters using rhetoric.

'Enlist' poster created from the Lusitania disaster by Fred Spears.

5. Sociopsychological Tradition

The study of the individual as a social being. 3 main areas are...

1. Behavioural
2. Cognitive
3. Biological

Psychological communication - Communication as the act of sending a message to a receiver, and assessing the feelings and thoughts of the receiver upon interpreting the message and how these will effect an understanding of the message.

Gestalt psychology - the structure, configuration or layout can have a profound effect on the meaning of information. For example...

PSYCHOTHERAPIST

PSYCHO THE RAPIST

Colenso BBDO advertising campaign for 'Prison Break'

6. Sociocultural Tradition

Cultural identity through putting yourself in groups... catholic, student, yorkshire etc.

Social constructionism - investigates how human knowledge is constructed through social interaction and argues that the nature of the world is less important than the language used to name and discuss it.

Sociolinguistics - the study of language and culture.

Sociocultural groups.

7. Critical Communication
Useful to use when examining the ways the media produce encoded messages, the ways audiences decode those messages, and the power base apparent in these processes.
Feminist studies - examines, critiques and challenges the assumptions about experiences of gender that pervade all.
Postcolonial theory - the study of all cultures affected by the imperial process.

The Gaze

Psychoanalysis
Is the analysis of the options and controls we choose in life, such as why do we choose one thing over another.

Laura Mulvey
Writer informed by both feminism and psycholanalysis. She wrote 'Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema'. She believes that Hollywood film is sexist as it represents 'the gaze' as powerful and male. She also states that heroes are typically male and drive the plot and women exist in films as sexual objects to be looked at.

Freudian Theories of Psychoanalysis

1. Scopophilia - Is the pleasure of looking at others bodies as objects. An instinctual desire to look emerges in childhood.
2. Narcisstic identification - Spectators identify with the male hero in narrative film. 
3. The Mirror Stage (Jacques Lacan) - The projected image of the 'ideal ego' is freflected, where in reality our own body is less perfect than the one we see reflected. 

The Mirror Stage.

Cinema thrives on contradiction

• Scopohilia - I want to HAVE her.
• Narcissistic identification - I want to BE him.

The pleasere in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. ‘By means of identification with him, [male actor] through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too.'

Cinematic contradiction of scopophilia and narcissistic identification.












Suture
Spectators look through the eyes of actors and we are able to follow their gaze without feeling guilty. This suture can be broken when the audience is aware of their own surroundings and are bought into the action, such as in Peep Show when the audience is constantly playing many roles. With this suture broken, the audience can feel guilt.

Suture is broken in Peep Show.


















Forms of gaze

• Spectators gaze - you looking at me.
• Intra-diegetic gaze - you loking at me, and you looking at others.
• Extra-diegetic gaze - direct address to the viewer. Avoided in cinema, but common in advertising and TV newsreaders.

I found this advertisement where scopophilia and narcissistic identifiication are used to sell the perfume. The audience want to have her, and want to be him.

Critical positions on the media and popular culture

Unfortunately I missed this lecture so have copied some notes from another student and looked through the presentation.

Task 1

Choose an example of one aspect of contemporary culture that is, in your opinion, panoptic. Write an explanation of this, in approximately 200-300 words, employing key Foucauldian language, such as 'Docile Bodies' or 'self-regulation', and using not less than 5 quotes from the text 'Panopticism' in Thomas, J. (2000) 'Reading Images', NY, Palgrave McMillan.

Facebook is a huge part of contemporay culture and to a certain extent is Panoptic. The power Facebook holds can only exist when someone decides to join (currently there are over 500 million active users) and enter into this relationship as binary opposites. Users become ‘perfectly individualised and constantly visable.’ (Foucault in Reading Images, (2000), p.64), sharing photos, views, friends and events to anyone who wishes to view them.
     In this current social example, it is much different to the original Panopticons where inmates were locked in a physical cell. In this society, users have willingly accepted and sign-up to Facebook knowledgeable ‘he knows himself to be observed’ (p.65). 

     Users accept the role of the disciplined. The discipliner, Facebook, is not a single person, but a machine and even though it is owned by someone, the ‘invisable machine’ disciplines users and dis-allows them to communicate certain things which is believed to be inappropriate. ‘A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation.’ (p.66). As the users page can be viewed by anyone it implores further another Foucauldian term, docile bodies. These ‘docile bodies’ are self-monitoring, self-correcting and obedient as they know they are being constantly observed.
     ‘Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine’ (p.66). As I have explored, Facebook allows users to be the disciplined, but interestingly, users can also become the discipliner of others. There are ‘report’ buttons which allow us to regulate fellow users. Not only do people self-regulate, but those who do not are caught by the ‘docile bodies’ created by the machine, and are disciplined by the removal of their inappropriate content or are banned.
     Facebook is simply the face for all social networking site I have used to explore the Panoptic relationship between discipliner and disciplined in this contemporary culture. There are many more, however, it is clear to see that there is not only panopticism present, but it has evolved and become more powerful. 

Panopticism seminar

Panopticism - Surveillance and Society

Notes 1&2.

Notes 3&4.

















Michel Foucault
(1926-1984) theory is based around a disciplinary society.

Michel Foucault.
















Madness & Civilisation
The Great Confinement in the late 1600's saw 'Houses of Correction' hold the unemployed, mad and vagabonds... anyone who was deemed useless to society. Inside these 'Houses of Correction' the inmates were put to work to give them 'moral fibre' and taught how to be 'normal' out of the public view. However, all these criminals and lazy folk inside one place cause trouble. Corruption boomed and segregation has to be used through asylems.

The Birth of the Asylem.




















Discipline
Houses of correction used physical control. Asylems used mental control. Through the emergence of forms of knowledge such as biology, psychiatry and medicine, Foucault aimed to show how these forms of knowledge and rationalising institutions like the prison, the asylum, the hospital, the school, now affect human beings in such a way that they alter our consciousness and that they internalise our responsibility. Discipline is a technology to keep someone under surveillance and control his behaviour.

Panopticon BuildingJeremy Bentham designed in 1791 (before Foucault). It was a prison where the cells were on the outer section surrounding a centre of which there was an observation tower. Every prisoner was isolated (a form of mental control) and this model was the exact opposite to the houses of correction. The Panopticon internalises in the individual the state that he is always being watched. In this model, people do not step out of line because of fear, the prisoner self regulates their own behaviour. This can lead to the redundancy for an actual observer, as all occupants are self regulating, there is no need for further regulation. Fear is the greatest factor. 'Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. ' (Foucault, 1975).

Jeremy Bethams blue print for a Panopticon.

Self Regaulation.
























Panopticism
This models allows scrutiny of subjects and was suggested to be applied to schools among others. Now it is deemed as inhumane due to the sense of psychological torture endured by the self regulator but we can see its presence in many places even today. Modern Bars, where we are seen easily by all staff, Google street view, The Office and CCTV are all examples of panopticism in modern society.

Image removed from Google Street View. We are bring watched everywhere.












Power, relationship and the body
 'Power relations have an immediate hold upon it [the body]; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs’ (Foucault 1975). This disciplinary society produces what Foucault calls docile bodies, self monitoring, self correcting, obedient bodies. A good example of a docile body is people working out showing everyone else. They are obedient. Another perfect example is a soldier. Power is a relationship and relies on there being the capacity for power to be resisted.