tensões em bd pós-cultural
« segundo ciclo »
voltamos ao Eric o Vermelho para uma história da cultura em estilo Recuperamos o "Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction" (*) Na feitura feição deste filme não se magoaram autores como Jean-François Lyotard, Paul Willis, Iain Chambers, Nicholas Garnham, Susan Sontag & Leslie Fiedler, Jenkins, Laclau & Mouffe, Raymond Williams, John Fiske, Peter Golding & Graham Murdock, Jim McGuigan, Hall Stuart e muitos outros. Google, we-good? do John Storey para resenha nas politicas do popular. Segue-se crash course com mashup ao mashup do qual podem adivinhar o nosso enunciado de interesses em licenciaturas de bd que desejaríamos popular entre quem também se aborrece com a interpretação (e autoridade) de textos e das suas relações de poder com o aparato técnico de reprodução, acesso e apropriação como nós.
Sigam-nos na lógica e preencham o que saltamos nesta.
I
Começamos da igualdade da bd a outras áreas de saber no render da velha guarda, academia, cultura e $$$ (*) Tentávamos há dois anos arrancar de A-to-tha-G pareceres nestes mesmos temas., o seu "scientific discourse and knowledge" em baixa e contradições em 3 actos:
John Storey in "Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction" 1993
- 1) Those whose power stems primarily from cultural rather than economic power are engaged in a constant struggle within the cultural field to raise the social value of the specific competences involved in part by constantly trying to raise the scarcity of those competences.
- 2) Postmodernism can be read as the symptom of the disruptive ingression of popular culture, its aesthetics and intimate possibilities, into a previously privileged domain. Theory and academic discourses are confronted by the wider, unsystemized, popular networks of cultural production and knowledge. The intellectual’s privilege to explain and distribute knowledge is threatened.
- 3) The legitimating force of science’s status as a metanarrative has waned considerably. It has lost its way – its ‘goal is no longer truth, but performativity as a means to an end — and as such it will be increasingly shaped by the demands of power. No longer will it respond to the question, ‘Is it true?’ It will hear only, ‘What use is it?’ ‘How much is it worth?’ and ‘Is it saleable?’. Postmodern pedagogy would teach how to use knowledge as a form of cultural and economic capital without recourse to concern or anxiety about whether what is taught is true or false.
...e voltaremos ao atrás à frente, a sua dimensão politic-ó-cultural transformada economia e vice-versa do nosso interesse — porque... Baudrillard (*) "There has been a historical shift from a society based on the production of things to one based on the production of information [&] it is no longer possible to separate the economic or productive realm from the realms of ideology or culture, since cultural artefacts, images, representations, even feelings and psychic structures have become part of the world of the economic". Já para longos cites sobre os dizeres de Fredric Jameson à mistura sugerimos regressarem ao "Capitalismo Realista" do Mark Fisher, mas encontram-lhe aqui as aproximações necessárias: "postmodernism is a hopelessly commercial culture: culture is no longer ideological, disguising the economic activities of capitalist society; it is itself an economic activity, perhaps the most important economic activity of all". Que, por sua vez, devolve à ideologia? Round-an'-round we go! — mas antes outros valores notados pelos Pierre Bourdieu deste mundo, "how arbitrary tastes and arbitrary ways of living are continually transmuted into legitimate taste and the only legitimate way of life" e como a apropriação dos comics pela academia poderá tentar aqui a sua conformidade institucional — é uma questão de estilo por linhas mais aprazíveis e tudo muito natural, parece.
Culture with a capital C has the purpose, or at least the consequence, of reinforcing and legitimizing class power as cultural and aesthetic difference. The making of cultural distinctions secures and legitimates forms of power and control rooted in economic inequalities. The cultural tastes of dominant groups are given institutional form, and then, with deft ideological sleight of hand, their taste for this institutionalized culture (i.e. their own) is held up as evidence of their cultural, and, ultimately, their social, superiority. The effect of such cultural distinction is to produce and reproduce social distinction, social separation and social hierarchy. It becomes a means of establishing differences between dominated and dominant groups in society.
Distinction is generated by learned patterns of consumption that are internalized as ‘natural’ preferences and interpreted and mobilized as evidence of ‘natural’ competences, which are, ultimately, used to justify forms of social domination. Without the required cultural capital to decipher the ‘code’ of art we are made socially vulnerable to the condescension of those who have the required cultural capital. What is cultural (i.e. acquired) is presented as natural (i.e. innate), and is, in turn, used to justify what are social relations. In this way, ‘art and cultural consumption are predisposed ... to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences’.
Only a supposedly instinctively gifted minority armed against the mediocrity of the masses can attain genuine ‘appreciation’ [and] the most intolerable thing for those who regard themselves as the possessors of legitimate culture is the sacrilegious reuniting of tastes which taste dictates shall be separated.
John Storey in "Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction" 1993
Sabem que nos é impossível não comentar neste ponto o arsty-farsy ao serviço da máquina. Em abstracto:
At the pinnacle of the hierarchy of taste is the ‘pure’ aesthetic gaze – a historical invention – with its emphasis on form over function. The ‘pure’ aesthetic or cultured gaze emerges with the emergence of the cultural field, and becomes institutionalized in the art museum. Once inside the museum art loses all prior functions (except that of being art) and becomes pure form: these works tacitly demand attention to form rather than function, technique rather than theme. The ‘popular aesthetic’ reverses this emphasis, subordinating form to function. Accordingly, popular culture is about performance, high culture is about contemplation; high culture is about representation, popular culture is about what is represented.
John Storey in "Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction" 1993
Se já perceberam onde vamos, aos mais atrasados da turma o último teaser antes de fechar sumário:
The aesthetic appreciation of ‘art’ has undergone an ‘internal hyperinstitutionalization’ [and] the ideology of natural taste owes its plausibility and its efficacy to the fact that it naturalises real differences, converting differences in the mode of acquisition of culture into differences of nature. Part of this process is the denial of the necessary relationship between aesthetics and ‘education’: the production and reproduction of the necessary ‘knowledge’ on which aesthetic appreciation is founded. In denial of such a relationship, aesthetic appreciation is presented as something innate, rather than something learned: this as a question of non-access to knowledge & this manufactures a situation in which people who make culture in their everyday lives see themselves as uncultured.
John Storey in "Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction" 1993
Falamos obviamente de "certain relationships of power in matters of pedagogy":
...in which ‘students are scornfully driven back or cleverly coaxed back to the meaning “accepted” by their teachers’ (what we might call ‘textual determinism’: the view that the value of something is inherent in the thing itself [a fiction obviously not based on the productivity of the reader, but on the social institution that overdetermines his relation with the text]). This position can lead to a way of working in which certain texts and practices are prejudged to be beneath the legitimate concerns of the academic gaze [and] students assume the role of passive consumers of an already constituted knowledge – fixed, formulated and administered by the professorial guardians of the flame. Against this way of thinking, I would contend that what really matters is not the object of study, but how the object is studied.
John Storey in "Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction" 1993
Nós também o contentamos assim, o segway ao próximo ponto a fazer.
II
Entregue às artes, talvez algumas linhas de design técnico, humanidades certamente, sociais esperançosamente, da relação aos media só lhe calha porque os estudos culturais não o podem evitar, e superestruturas de poder passarão adquiridas porque ninguém quererá questionar aquilo que é apenas natural. O enquadramento do objecto determinará o que dele importa (fazer) e outra vez regressamos ao pós-moderno para arranque de problema.
Postmodernism has problematized the question of why some texts are canonized, while others disappear without trace: that is, why only certain texts supposedly ‘pass the test of time’.
We can insist that the texts which are valued and become part of the ‘selective tradition’ are those which are sufficiently polysemic to sustain multiple and continuous readings. The problem with this approach is that it seems to ignore questions of power. It fails to pose the question: ‘Who is doing the valuing, in what context(s) and with what effects of power?’ in which only certain people have the power and cultural authority to ensure the canonical reproduction of texts and practices. The selective tradition is ‘governed by many kinds of special interests, including class interests’. Put simply, a text will survive its moment of production if it is selected to meet the needs and desires of people with cultural power.
John Storey in "Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction" 1993
Do poder cultural pelo valor do texto, contra o valor do texto no texto o valor que parte do texto? No excerto deste texto:
A text is never really the issuing source of value, but always the site where the construction of value – variable values – can take place. Even when the selected texts remain the same, how and why they are valued certainly changes. So much so that they are hardly the same texts from one historical moment to the next.
John Storey in "Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction" 1993
Essa flexibilidade as armas de cerco com que as hordas conseguirão — se o tentarem — resgatar a bd pela bd: rasteira e descartável, afinal a sua fraqueza e força. O (as)salto à sua apropriação pelo "increasing sound of a plurality of voices from the margins, with their insistence on difference, on cultural diversity, and the claims of heterogeneity over homogeneity" a resistência necessária às hierarquias que a tentarão estratificar até à impotência contemplativa.
A entravar o fossilizar de cânones acresce que a bd possui aquela outra natureza particular que lhe exige artifícios e cambalhotas quando algum museu a tenta pendurar à parede. Diz-nos o Paulo:
Value is never intrinsic to a text or practice, a universal quality of its form; it is always inscribed in the act of consumption (how a commodity is appropriated, ‘used’ and made into culture).
Paul Willis
O Miguel reforça:
Consumption does not manifest itself through its own products, but rather through its ways of using the products imposed by a dominant economic order.
Michel de Certeau
Se um diz "mercadoria" outro "produto", ambos disseram "consumo". Começa aqui o nosso "deft ideological sleight of hand" 😊 com cheirinho aos salsichas de Frankfurt, relações de poder e banda desenhada com R grande de revolução. Martelaremos essa tecla na próxima ocasião porém a ponte faz-se aqui, novamente por ideologia estética mas agora cruzada ao mercado (da cultura):
What is aesthetically ‘good’ and what is aesthetically ‘bad’ changes and changes again in context after context. [[Moreover, what is ‘good’ aesthetically may be ‘bad’ in terms of politics; what is ‘bad’ aesthetically may be ‘good’ politically.]] Cultural studies (*) "Those who insist on a return to absolute standards are saying little more than that it is too confusing now: I want back my easy and unquestioned authority to tell ordinary people what it is worth and how it is done." should be little concerned with making speculative value judgements about the inherent qualities of commodities and focus its time instead on what people do with them, make from them, etc., in the constraining and enabling structures of everyday life.
John Storey in "Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction" 1993
...o nosso último segway, mas o mais longo e por isso espaço apenas à intro.
III
Insistimos na apropriação e insistimos em problematizar igualmente a sua produção e distribuição. BD, academia, mercados e $$$, os media e a internet, neo-hegemonismo digital e outras: demasiado extenso e ocupa-nos o próximo artigo, desejando que a outros "que podem tentar educar os teens ao maior canal de comunicação global" lhes tome igualmente boa parte do seu ano.
The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.
Joan Robinson in "Economic Philosophy" 1962
Há estudos que o provam. Próximo: seguimos o guito.
- academia
- progresso
Just 4 kicks 'cuz u know, we-a-suck:
Progress is slow partly from mere intellectual inertia. In a subject where there is no agreed procedure for knocking out errors, doctrines have a long life. A professor teaches what he was taught, and his pupils, with a proper respect and reverence for teachers, set up a resistance against his critics for no other reason than that it was he whose pupils they were.
Joan Robinson in "Economic Philosophy" 1962