Popular Culture As Art And Knowledge

This volume settles the debate between analytic and continental philosophy. It turns to art, more specifically popular culture, to demonstrate the validity of continental philosophy. Drawing on the philosophy of Georg Hegel (perhaps the most important of continental philosophers), James Kreines holds that reason in the world metaphysically exists. Reasons of the world are reasons of the Hegelian Absolute. Thus, similar to the fact that gravity is curves in the space-time continuum along which matter moves – reasons are the grooves in the Absolute along which human decision-making occurs. Art allows us to conceptualize, understand, speculate about the grooves (reasons) of the Absolute. Two key points can be drawn from Kreines’s position: first, normative values are embedded in reality. Thus, in complete contradistinction to analytic philosophy, there is no bifurcation between the empirical and the normative – to exist is to have normative value. Secondly, the role of social science is to cogitate, explore, identify the reasons of the world that shape social, political norms. Such an approach would decisively move the social sciences away from an emphasis on statistically significant patterns of human behavior (e.g., voting studies) and toward an approach that seeks to analyze the reasons of the world that motivate/shape social and political decisions. Art (particularly popular culture) becomes an important source in identifying the way that people reason about the world and how they perceive political elites reasoning in the world. To adjudicate between continental and analytic philosophy this book on relies on the broadcast iterations of Star Trek, as well as Nazi cinema. With regard to contemporary American politics, in addition to Star Trek, it draws on the television series Game of Thrones, Veep, House of Cards, and The Man in the High Castle. Popular culture is germane to philosophy and contemporary politics because television/movie creators frequently try to attract viewers by conveying authentic philosophical and political motifs. Conversely, viewers seek out authentic movies and television shows. This is in contrast to opinion surveys (for instance), as the formation of the data begins with the surveyor seeking to directly solicit an opinion – however impromptu or shallow.

This book critically approaches contemporary meanings of materiality and discuses ways in which we understand, experience, and engage with objects through popular culture in our private, social and professional lives. Appropriating Arjun Appadurai’s famous phrase: "the social life of things", with which he inspired scholars to take material culture more seriously and, as a result, treat it as an important and revealing area of cultural studies, the book explores the relationship between material culture and popular practices, and points to the impact they have exerted on our co-existence with material worlds in the conditions of late modernity.

The present volume deals with popular culture from an interdisciplinary perspective. Popular culture, as an important part of the public sphere, has attracted the interest of social scientists for many decades; however, most studies tend to rely on the anthropological perspective or, less commonly, on the sociological perspective. This edited volume breaks down disciplinary barriers to bring together a plethora of methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of popular culture. Moreover, the volume will foster dialogue between international scholars conducting research on the topic.

Is popular culture merely a process of creating, marketing, and consuming a final product, or is it an expression of the artist's surroundings and an attempt to alter them? Noted Argentine/Mexican anthropologist Néstor García Canclini addresses these questions and more in Transforming Modernity, a translation of Las culturas populares en el capitalismo. Based on fieldwork among the Purépecha of Michoacán, Mexico, some of the most talented artisans of the New World, the book is not so much a work of ethnography as of philosophy—a cultural critique of modernism. García Canclini delineates three interpretations of popular culture: spontaneous creation, which posits that artistic expression is the realization of beauty and knowledge; "memory for sale," which holds that original products are created for sale in the imposed capitalist system; and the tourist outlook, whereby collectibles are created to justify development and to provide insight into what capitalism has achieved. Transforming Modernity argues strongly for popular culture as an instrument of understanding, reproducing, and transforming the social system in order to elaborate and construct class hegemony and to reflect the unequal appropriation and distribution of cultural capital. With its wide scope, this book should appeal to readers within and well beyond anthropology—those interested in cultural theory, social thought, and Mesoamerican culture.

Discussing popular culture is one of the keys for understanding arts and more broadly culture. This is something which seems to be shared by the scholars who have contributed to this book. Their essays on popular culture and/or the aesthetics of popular culture serve as a platform for discussing cultural, ethical and political issues. Popular culture and its philosophical reflection also help to unlock themes in law, children's literature, everyday aesthetics, high-cultural heritage, the internet, and material culture. In the Interviews section editors discuss some of the roots of these issues with two thinkers who represent the cream of the discussion. With Richard Shusterman, we delve into his theory of popular culture, and with Gianni Vattimo, the popular goes hand in hand with a discussion that more broadly touches on culture and the arts.

This handbook explores the ways biomedicine and pop culture interact while simultaneously introducing the reader with the tools and ideas behind this new field of enquiry. From comic books to health professionals, from the arts to genetics, from sci-fi to medical education, from TV series to ethics, it offers different entry points to an exciting and central aspect of contemporary culture: how and what we learn about (and from) scientific knowledge and its representation in pop culture. Divided into three sections the handbook surveys the basics, the micro-, and the macroaspects of this interaction between specialized knowledge and cultural production: After the introduction of basic concepts of and approaches to the topic from a variety of disciplines, the respective theories and methods are applied in specific case studies. The final section is concerned with larger social and historical trends of the use of biomedical knowledge in popular culture. Presenting over twenty-five original articles from international scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds, this handbook introduces the topic of pop culture and biomedicine to both new and mature researchers alike. The articles, all complete with a rich source of further references, are aimed at being a sincere entry point to researchers and academic educators interested in this somewhat unexplored field of culture and biomedicine.

This revised edition of a now classic text includes a new introduction by Henry Jenkins, explaining ‘Why Fiske Still Matters’ for today’s students, followed by a discussion between former Fiske students Kevin Glynn, Jonathan Gray, and Pamela Wilson on the theme of ‘Reading Fiske and Understanding the Popular’. Both underline the continuing relevance of this foundational text in the study of popular culture. What is popular culture? How does it differ from mass culture? And what do popular "texts" reveal about class, race, and gender dynamics in a society? John Fiske answers these and a host of other questions in Understanding Popular Culture. When it was first written, Understanding Popular Culture took a groundbreaking approach to studying such cultural artifacts as jeans, shopping malls, tabloid newspapers, and TV game shows, which remains relevant today. Fiske differentiates between mass culture – the cultural "products" put out by an industrialized, capitalist society – and popular culture – the ways in which people use, abuse, and subvert these products to create their own meanings and messages. Rather than focusing on mass culture’s attempts to dominate and homogenize, he prefers to look at (and revel in) popular culture’s evasions and manipulations of these attempts. Designed as a companion to Reading the Popular, Understanding Popular Culture presents a radically different theory of what it means for culture to be popular: that it is, literally, of the people. It is not imposed on them, it is created by them, and its pleasures and meanings reflect popular tastes and concerns – and a rejection of those fostered by mass culture. With wit, clarity, and insight, Professor Fiske debunks the myth of the mindless mass audience, and demonstrates that, in myriad ways, popular culture thrives because that audience is more aware than anyone guesses.

In countries around the world, the rise of class divisions and unbridled capitalism are changing the conventional definitions of art and esthetics. Historically, the philanthropy of the elite has played a leading role in supporting, funding, and distributing artistic works. While such measures may be pure in intent, many worry that private funding may be gentrifying the arts and creating a situation in which art will only be valued for its prestige or, worse, its price tag. This collection of essays examines the current movement to democratize the arts and make the world of artistic endeavor open and accessible to all. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.