Chapter 11 – The materiality of popular culture
This chapter will examine popular culture as material culture. However we define it, a great deal of popular culture takes material form. Even a few random examples should make this point: mobile phones, clothes, wedding rings, greetings cards, toys, bicycles, CDs (discs and players), DVDs (discs and players), cars, games consoles, televisions, radios, sporting equipment, computers, computer tablets (including the iPad), magazines, books, cinemas, football grounds, nightclubs and pubs. Youth subcultures are an obvious example of the visibility of materiality in popular culture. How we know a youth subculture is always through the materiality of what it consumes. There is always a drug of choice, a particular dress code, social spaces that are occupied, a particular music providing an aural landscape. It is the combination of these different forms of materiality that make a youth subculture visible to the wider society. But this is not just the case with youth subcultures; most people’s lives are filled with material objects. We interact with material objects in many ways: we produce and consume them, we exchange them, we talk about them and admire them, and we use them to say things about ourselves. I type these words on my computer and you read them in the book you hold in your hands. These different forms of materiality have enabled our communication. If I know you I might send you an email from my laptop and you might respond with a text message from your mobile phone. We may then travel by bus, train or taxi to a pub and have a few bottles of beer or share a bottle or two of wine. In these different ways our encounter is enabled and constrained by the materiality that surrounds us.
Before you read
<Insert Icon 1 here> Culture – especially the way it works – is founded on material objects whose materiality is responsible for the formation of cultural meaning and social practices. Before you read Chapter 11, which speaks of the cultural meaning of material objects and their related materialisms and materialities, watch a video explaining the idea of cultural materialism [link]. What specific relationship between objects and cultural practice does it describe?
Preliminary questions
Chapter 11 focuses primarily on the materiality of popular culture. Materiality is all around us and it is unsurprising, therefore, that it is used to mark or signal our identities. Sometimes, changes in the material form of an object transform cultural practice – such as, for instance, with new media technologies and dating. You may like to consider other examples. In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, the focus is on how the materiality of popular culture should be defined. Think how its function and interrelationship with people and networks and meaning might occur today.
- How does the global context (or globality as a mode) impact the cultural materiality of the texts of culture?
- How is the contextuality of materiality key to understanding cultural and social phenomena (regarding their meanings)?
- How the materiality of cultural texts transforms local contexts in global circulation?
- What happens to the meaning of cultural objects/texts (practices, roles, traditions, or cultural items) in today’s cultural practice?
- How do we use material objects for identity formation?
After you read: Important ideas
Having got to grips with the complex points and ideas underlying materiality and popular culture, let us now test your understanding of those points and ideas with Quizzes 11.1 and 11.2.
Quiz 11.1
Choose between true or false (one answer only)
Quiz 11.2
Match the answer to the statements (choose one)
Important names
Chapter 11 points to important theorists preoccupied with materiality and cultural contexts. See who they were with regard to their prominent ideas and their work.
Bruno Latour
Daniel Miller
Levi R. Bryant
Arthur Asa Berger
Paul Graves-Brown
Jean Baudrillard
Complementary materials
This podcast from Destroyed Nonchalance contextualizes action-network theory [link]. How does it problematize it? How does this problematization relate to what has been said about it in Chapter 11?
Further considerations
Think about the Western contemporary cultural practice of ‘ear stretching’. What does it mean to you? Do ‘flesh tunnels’ and flesh plugs have materiality in the same way as traditionally worn earrings? Does the signification change if worn by celebrities or music artists (for instance, Dougie Poynter from the British band, McFly or American rapper, Travie McCoy)? What about other body modification practices such as tattooing or piercing?