Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel the Popular Arts Summary

Hall and Whannel's book is a landmark in the history of media education in the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland. But something'due south missing from the republished edition: it'south education!

Three quarters of The Pop Arts

Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel's book The Popular Arts is a landmark text in the history of media education in the United kingdom. First published in 1964, it was reprinted several times during the ensuing decade. The book is discussed extensively in most accounts of media education, perhaps most notably in Len Masterman'due south Teaching the Media (1985) – which also contains a hilariously snooty review of the original by David Holbrook.

The Pop Arts began life as a book for teachers. In the year it was published, Hall had moved from his office as editor of the New Left Review to take up a position at the Centre for Gimmicky Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. Whannel was head of the Educational activity Department at the British Film Institute, where he had worked since 1957. However, both men had a background in teaching in secondary modern schools. (For overseas readers, secondary mod schools were for less academic children, who had failed the selective examination at the historic period of xi.) This experience is one Hall and Whannel draw as a 'sobering' one for any teacher – 'a time at which he is fabricated acutely aware of the conflict betwixt the norms and expectations of formal didactics and the complexities of the real earth which children and immature people inhabit'.

As the volume's introduction describes, the authors partly abased their attempt to write a 'practical handbook' for teachers, in favour of something that was 'aimed more widely – to the teacher and the educationist, of grade, simply also to the general reader who is concerned nigh these problems in an "educational" sense, using the term in its broadest context'. By far the almost substantial section of the book is entitled 'Topics for Study', and consists of a set of chapters on specific media, including romantic fiction, advertizing, crime movies, westerns, and and then on. While at that place is an interesting chapter on youth civilisation, there's fiddling attempt hither to consider any educational implications.

I commencement read the volume in the mid-1970s, while I was doing my initial teacher grooming course. Although information technology was already dated by and so, it seemed to provide a bridge between the broad arguments of the pioneers of Cultural Studies (such as Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, who are both key points of reference in the volume) and the possibilities for classroom exercise. I had been looking in vain for an affordable second-hand copy when I saw an announcement that the book was due to be included in the wider plan of re-publication of Hall'southward work that has followed his death in 2014. However, when the book arrived, I was dismayed to notice that a large clamper of it had been excised – specifically, the whole concluding section of effectually lxxx pages, which described the book's broader implications for teachers and went on to provide some detailed proposals for classroom projects. There's a passing reference to this in the new preface (by Richard Dyer), just it'south not mentioned on the book jacket or in any of the publicity fabric. A quarter of the volume is simply missing.

I don't know whether this was a determination on the part of the serial editors – Catherine Hall and Beak Schwarz – or the publisher – Knuckles University Press. It may exist that they felt this more explicitly educational material was too time-bound to be of much use; although ane could say the same thing almost much of what remains in the volume (for example, there's a detailed chapter nigh the state of the British film manufacture in 1963 that has little more historical interest). For me, I'chiliad afraid it reflects the continuing marginalisation – and indeed erasure – of education within the field of Cultural Studies more broadly. The kind of educational activism represented by Hall and Whannel (or indeed by Hoggart and Williams before them) – teaching about pop culture to disadvantaged, working-class young people – hasn't been on the radar for Cultural Studies academics for a very long time, despite their political pretensions.

Hall (R) in NLR days

Paddy Whannel

Of course, The Popular Arts is a volume of its fourth dimension – and an interesting fourth dimension it was. I've been writing about this period recently, looking at how writers, picture show-makers and political commentators responded to the rise of youth civilization, as the fifties slid into the sixties: yous tin can discover my essay here. The book appeared only before many of the significant changes of the 1960s (although at that place'south a revealing boosted note about the Beatles appended to the chapter on youth civilisation). This was a point at which prevailing cultural hierarchies were simply offset to pause downwardly, not simply in consumer civilization and media but also in high art and literature. In outlining the context, the authors refer to the growing academic interest in media and communication (Raymond Williams's Advice came out in 1961), but also to what they call 'the then-called "teenage" revolution'. Educationally, this was also an interesting menstruum of alter, with a range of conferences, official reports and other publications that wrestled with the claiming of the emerging popular culture of the time. (Some of this is apparent in the first affiliate of The Popular Arts, although the give-and-take that came later in the volume has been excised.)

Essentially, Hall and Whannel are looking for a form of cultural analysis that moves on from the literary approach of the critic F.R. Leavis, and the sweeping rejection of popular culture that went with it. The Popular Arts appeared xxx years afterward Leavis and Denys Thompson's before landmark text, Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness (1933) – itself besides a book aimed primarily at teachers. All the same, the Leavisite approach remained influential, especially among English language teachers (and some would say information technology all the same does…). For Hall and Whannel, educational activity reluctant working-grade kids in the 1950s, information technology seemed not just elitist but also largely ineffective. In their opening capacity, they gently point out the problems with this approach, non least its tendency towards ill-informed generalizations nigh popular culture. They suggest that this defensive approach doesn't piece of work in the classroom – although neither, they argue, does an 'opportunist' strategy, in which the teacher 'embraces the leisure interests of his pupils in the hope of leading them to college things'. They besides brand some persuasive observations nigh the limitations of popular arguments about media 'effects', an approach that has remained influential in media education.

Yet, as subsequent commentators have observed, The Popular Arts largely remains trapped within the basic assumptions of Leavisism. Its fundamental preoccupation is not with the political dimensions of popular civilization (which might appear surprising to those who are familiar with Hall's later work), just with questions of cultural value. The educational task, they argue, is to provide a 'training in discrimination', that would enable young people to differentiate between good and bad. Still unlike the Leavisite arroyo, this wasn't a blanket rejection of popular forms, but rather a matter of discrimination within: 'the struggle between what is skilful and worthwhile and what is shoddy and debased,' they write, 'is non a struggle against the modernistic forms of advice, but a conflict within these media.'

A key part of the authors' argument is that this requires detailed analysis rather than mere 'generalities'. In the capacity that make up the core of the volume, they largely deliver on this: at that place are in-depth accounts of examples as diverse as Coronation Street, Billie Holiday, Andrej Wajda's film A Generation, shampoo advertisements and John Ford'due south westerns – and a great bargain more besides. The bodily method of assay is rarely explicit (there's certainly no semiotics to be found hither), although there is a valuable focus on the visual dimensions of these texts. Information technology's hard to read the authors' observations on the Western, or their analysis of advertisement, without thinking of the academic piece of work that was to follow: this was indeed 1 of the earliest publications to take popular culture seriously (or at least some elements of it). Some of it – especially the accounts of romance and relationships and of the popular press – still seems fresh and innovative.

However, throughout each of the areas they discuss, the authors' master aim is to differentiate between work that they regard as being of loftier quality and work that is not. In the process, 'discrimination inside' seems merely to replicate existing hierarchies. The line between art and trash is non then much abolished as shifted, in lodge to suit some limited examples of truly 'popular' art (which they are keen to distinguish from 'mass' art, 'churned out by the mass production system'). In full general, the authors like film – especially European art films, and the work of Hollywood auteurs – but they don't have much time for television receiver; they enthuse about jazz, but they don't much like pop music; and they certainly seem to think that all advertising, all teenage magazines and nigh pop literature is just trash. Inside this, most of the judgments seem to replicate predictable distinctions. Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming are bad, Raymond Chandler is good; La Grande Illusion is good, Bridge Over the River Kwai is bad; Dixon of Dock Greenish and Coronation Street are bad, although Z-Cars and Steptoe and Son are given qualified approval; and and then it goes on.

Their analysis of the emerging commercial youth culture is typical in this respect. Information technology's here that the analysis moves beyond the text itself, and starts to take account of the user or the audition (although why that wouldn't be the case with some of the other media they talk over isn't wholly articulate). This chapter provides a nuanced, sociological account of the changing youth market at the time; yet the question of value inevitably returns. At that place are some popular songs that are 'worth listening to', they say, only in general jazz is 'an infinitely richer kind of music, both aesthetically and emotionally'. 'The worst thing which we could say of pop music,' they conclude, 'is not that it is vulgar, or morally wicked, just, more simply, that much of information technology is non very good.' Nearly readers would probably agree with this – but they would be very unlikely to agree which popular music is 'worth listening to' and which isn't. As with Leavis, the criteria for these judgments aren't really made explicit, except in very general terms: a bang-up deal of material is dismissed as (for example) shallow, conventional, cheap, bland, crude, and vulgar, nevertheless these assertions are made as though they were self-evident. There seem to exist a smashing many disquisitional criteria in operation, which are not ever practical consistently; and they are used to compare some extremely diverse examples taken from very different contexts.

Of course, I'm not implying that judgments of value are illegitimate or old-fashioned. Certainly, some of the tone and the preoccupations of The Popular Arts do seem oddly antiquated. Hall and Whannel frequently invoke Leavisite ideas about 'humane values', 'moral seriousness' and 'quality of life' that now seem pompous and grandiose. Yet the upshot of cultural value cannot and should not just be swept bated by a kind of postmodern populism. I would hold with Hall and Whannel's broader argument that young people demand to be exposed to a range of cultural experiences, not just those that are nigh heavily promoted in the commercial marketplace. I might even agree that education needs to encourage 'a widening of sensibility and emotional range', as they put it. Just ultimately, I don't share the view that elevating students' taste is either a worthwhile or a particularly viable aim. We need to understand how judgments of taste and value are formed and sustained, and the social functions they serve – and then we demand a sociological analysis of the whole process – but getting students to agree with united states on what's crap and what's not seems to me to exist fairly pointless.

I'k non sure that The Popular Arts withal has much to say to united states on these matters today, although it has a definite historical interest, and it is certainly worth a expect. Nevertheless, those of the states who are interested in pedagogy will demand to proceed searching for the original text…

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Source: https://davidbuckingham.net/2018/08/22/educating-popular-taste-revisiting-the-popular-arts/

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