The ‘DEMOS’ in Popular
TYBA, 2020-2021
The origin of Popular Culture has been much debated by scholars. Pluralists construct mass culture as an expression of consensus while left wing populists see it as the ‘culture of the people’ (Traube, 1996). The two phrases, ‘expression of consensus’ and ‘culture of the people’ got me thinking and I was pushed to realise that popular culture goes beyond being a Swiftie or watching a Khan movie; it is, what we know in the ‘popular’ sense of the word, ‘democratic’ culture.
Whether it is folk or mass culture, immoral or all-encompassing, scholarly or trivial, what I observe in all of these is that it is ‘the culture of people’. Even this phrase can be debatable since culture is a product of the society and society is formed by people, ultimately leading to every culture belonging to the people. However, what makes pop culture stand out from the others is that it surmounts the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures and creates an identity of itself as anything that can be consumed by anybody in the world albeit the social barriers. An example being ‘Despacito’, a Spanish song that went on to become the highest watched video on YouTube. I don’t know Spanish but I certainly love grooving to the music of Despacito and making up my own gibberish lyrics. Once associated primarily with the working classes, commercial popular culture is now consumed at comparable rates by all social classes (Traube, 1996). In my opinion, what stays and rules, and what gets cancelled in pop culture depends upon the ‘choices’ that people make together thus making democracy, the biggest pop cultural artefact.
In the Indian context, democracy gets a rigid identity of a form of governance, however, it goes beyond that. The word ‘Democracy’ originates in Greek; it combines the words: ‘demos’ meaning a whole citizen living within a particular city-state and ‘kratos’ meaning power or rule ("Defining democracy", n.d.). The power of the people can be witnessed everywhere, not just in the government. We practice democracy in every aspect of life. Choosing a particular brand of product or watching a certain genre of film or representing an idea in a certain manner, our choices and our preferences control the ongoing flow of data around us. Popular culture caters to what’s ‘in trend’. A quick visit to the 2014 Indian General Assembly elections’ memories will remind everybody of ‘Acche din aane wale hai’ and how most of us grooved to its catchy music. The party that came into power used the popular appeal to reach out to people as the ‘new’ option after the country had witnessed the rule of the other party for 10 years. In this essay, I will try to explore the broader implications of democracy and how it is the foundational artefact of popular culture.
We will explore the deeper meaning of the rule of people later but right now, let’s focus on how popular culture is the unifying factor that surpasses physical and psychological boundaries. Democracy is called a unifying form of governance because, ‘We’ the people, form it. However, in the context of popular culture, it’s considered to be a bluff. It is not ‘scholarly’ enough to be worth being in a museum or of being called a classic. Finances, religion, politics, and so many other factors divide us, yet, those become the core of our ‘serious’ discussions. Why should we be so serious about what divides us and trivial about what brings us together? (Philippe, 2013). Alexandre O. Philipe, a Swiss film director, highlighted some important aspects of popular culture in his Ted Talk at Mile High. According to him, popular culture is a device of connection since it has the capacity to influence an entire generation, its technology and the art of that period. A pop song like ‘Gangnam Style’ took the world by storm with the fun hook step. So why does something that makes us smile be considered so trivial? This form of culture of the masses is more than just a collection of guilty pleasures. The functionality of pop culture is often disregarded. Had it not been for the collective will and preference of the people, why would a song like ‘Kolaveri Di’ become the top hit in a country which has been infected by linguistic conflict ever since its independence?
While democracy is a functionalist concept, its dysfunctionality, especially in the Indian context cannot be ignored. The rule of people has turned into the rule of some people within the governance system in India; so much that it has created a distinction between the ‘ruling’ and the ‘ruled’. The power of democracy has started benefitting only the limited people among the ruling class while hampering the interests of the larger masses. It’s also ironic how the portrayal of democracy in mainstream popular media has changed from what belongs to the masses to what exploits the masses. Since culture is also the learned and shared patterns of collective behaviour, I take a chance at stating that the mass understanding of democracy has changed from self-rule to ‘who cares who rules’. In the Bollywood movie ‘Nayak’, democratic politics is repetitively being addressed as ‘keechad’, meaning dirt. This popular artefact of the masses went from being ‘for and by’ of the masses to ‘inflicted’ upon the masses. Earlier monarchy was the ‘high culture’, later came democracy. Now, the representatives of democracy have become the elites among the masses. It’s a psychological simulation that has been created among the masses to pursue democracy as a rigid majoritarian discourse.
When I tried to identify the reason why the idea of democracy has been restricted to majority rule, I stumbled upon an interesting explanation by Peter Emerson in his Ted Talk at Vienna. May it be a show of hands in a classroom, or central elections of a state, the one option that gets 51% or more votes, wins, while everybody else loses. Emerson broke this down for an easier understanding of the difference between majority voting and preferential voting. The popular perception of Democracy today is via a reductionist approach. The following is my analysis of Emerson’s views. The concept of majority is similar to yes/no kind of close ended questions in a research. Furthermore, the concept of majority reduces the chances of people to express their opinions. The critical theory under the neo-Marxist school of thought has studied democracy by using the critical theory and trying to identify the 20th century approach of this form of people’s governance. When I traced the understanding of democracy in India today, I realised that the right to expression provides us with a pseudo-individualisation approach which gives us the agency to identify our individual position in the democratic structure while already having reduced our chances to the same ‘this or that’ choices available. Majority will not identify with the collective will (Emerson, 2017). If that is the case then why reduce multiple options to a two options choice like India’s national politics? Are things just left or right or can there be other ways too? The answer lies in understanding the deeper meaning of the term democracy. To be able to identify the popular opinion, it is necessary for people to express their diverse opinions. It is after analysing the preferences of people that we can collectively decide upon the democratically elected. Preferential voting is not ‘not voting out the other’ but by putting a preference. Only after identifying the average highest preference does it elect the winner, thus eradicating majoritarianism. If this was adopted as the international norm, there would be no further justification for majority rule anywhere (Emerson, 2017). The reductionist understanding of majority is divisive and does not always have to be the popular opinion, thereby leading to conflict.
Popular culture is where a struggle over identities is lost or won, a site where, in the progressive outcome, diverse oppressed groups divided from one another by culture as much as any other factor unite as “the people” against “the power bloc” (Traube, 1996). Democracy needs to be inclusive to provide a fair chance to all. Democracy is present everywhere; it’s a way of life and ‘representation’ is an essential element of the rule of the people. Moving on to the democratization of technology and the internet in particular, my study is based upon the inferences drawn by American- Canadian filmmaker, author and activist, Astra Taylor.
Taylor calls Democratic culture a contradiction of thoughts. Taylor studied Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s critique of dot-com neoliberalism and behavioural targeting and questioned what a democratized media space would look like. She termed it, ‘Canada Ideology’. Taylor focuses on co-operative web and puts forward some delicate but extremely important questions, relevant in a democratic online space. “Would English be the default language? Would there be more interest in programming algorithms and developing recommendation engines that promote and lift up local creativity and culture? Would there be the same obsession with scale acceleration and growth? Would there be more women programmers?...If there were more women programmers, how would our lives transform? Would an internet shaped with Canada ideology have a different conception of democracy at its core?” (Taylor, 2017). Democratization of the online space is an extremely necessary area since it is the soul of today’s life. Most pop cultural artefacts are criticized for stereotyping gender roles or capitalizing on the onus of dying smaller elements. Democracy provides a space for all to breathe in while not snatching away the oxygen of one another.
Taylor further talks about the competition within democracy which is a key cause of its regression. The view of the web is meritocratic and hence democratic as all of us have defaulted to the idea of ‘the winner takes it all’. May it be a social media influencer or a website, the fittest survives. According to Taylor, and I agree with her, the creative realm is one such space that is okay with inequality since not everybody is equally good at an art form. Theodor Adorno and the thinkers from the Frankfurt school of thought have not decided upon one definition of democratic culture as it is synonymous to the most popular. Astra Taylor expressed the need to offer an alternative definition of democratic vision in the creative realm. The creative realm is the soul of popular culture and the rule of the people in that space needs to be more inclusive and representative. Condemning the majoritarian and occasional view of democracy, Taylor emphasized upon the origins of the word ‘democracy’ as not the ‘power of the people’ but the Greek word ‘kratos’ as the ‘capacity to do things’. The emergence of democracy was not to rule but to use the maximum capacity of collaboration. Democratic culture is more about being a field from which cultural capacities emerge and are nurtured together. The online space today and the advertising industry is the artificial fertilizer that encourages the production of culture and acquaints people with each other. The undemocratic online space is more due to capitalization in my opinion which otherwise would become a more welcoming and nurturing space for all if democratized. Technology is a product of society. The internet space today is looked at as a commercially ridden one but it can surely change to a more cooperative space if we democratize it sufficiently and adequately.
Understanding the wider implications of democracy was helpful to understand how ‘popular culture’ still lives under the shadow of being comparatively unintellectual. In my opinion, the culture industry theory by Adorno or the theory of taste by Bourdieu could’ve and should’ve been more than just music, cinema, television or fashion. Limiting popular culture to mostly entertainment is reductionist. Popular culture has seeped into our lives to a far greater extent than we are aware of. More than just being something that appeals to the masses, pop culture represents our lives to a large extent. When I thought about pop culture, democracy was the first to enter my mind since it has constructed the cultural ethos around me. The idea of popular opinion, popular television shows, popular sport, popular art is nothing but the opinion of people on those very same things; and democracy is just that. An ideology that is by the people, for the people and of the people is exactly what shapes the larger popular culture.
Indian daily soaps are highly criticized for displaying stereotyped and regressive content; however, it is extremely important to note that most of the content displayed on television is an exaggerated reality. Television has had progressive and empowering serials during the 90s but the reason why they could exist is because of the social reality of that time. The post-independence period was a period of progress and modernization. With the introduction of LPG, India opened up to the world and aimed at matching its pace. However, post 2000, Ekta Kapoor’s ‘Saas-Bahu’ drama took the television by storm. Do you think it was only because of the high melodramatic content? In my opinion, people accepted the type of melodramatic and exaggerated representation due to the undertones of reality to it. The Indian society was not as progressive as it looked to be. In the simplest terms, pop culture adapts to the ‘demos’ and mirrors reality, thus creating a simulacrum of reality where what’s real and what’s made up is hard to figure out.
Bibliography
Defining democracy. Retrieved 18 September 2020, from https://www.moadoph.gov.au/democracy/defining-democracy/#
Emerson, P. (2017). So, What is Democracy Anyway? | Peter Emerson | TEDxVienna [Video]. Retrieved 17 September 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiCJhSuLdok.
Philippe, A. (2013). Why Pop Culture?: Alexandre O. Philippe at TEDxMileHigh [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_3UYncNwz4
Taylor, A. (2017). Democratic Culture: A Contradiction In Terms? by Astra Taylor [Video]. Retrieved 19 September 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBAcMilz6sY.
Traube, E. (1996). "The Popular" in American Culture [Ebook] (pp. 133,141). Annual Reviews. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2155821
Comments
Post a Comment