A Perspective Of Understanding American Popular Culture

One day, I found 118 of my 125 students wearing.

。

The other 7 people also had jeans, but it happened that they didn't wear it that day.

I wonder if there are any other cultural products, such as movies, TV programs, tape recorders, lipsticks and so on, which can be so popular. (T-shirts are also owned by many people but wear a lot less). Student groups may not be representative among all the population, but jeans are also popular among non students of the same age group, and are only slightly less popular among older groups.

So, starting a book about popular culture is a good way to start thinking about jeans.

Let's not consider the functional problems of jeans, because functionality and culture have almost nothing to do with culture, and culture is concerned with meaning, pleasure, identity, not effectiveness.

Of course, jeans are a very practical dress, it is comfortable, durable, and sometimes very cheap, and only need "low maintenance" (low&nbspmaintenence), but also have these characteristics.

The function of jeans is the premise of its popularity, but it can not explain why jeans are popular.

Moreover, it does not particularly explain the unique ability of jeans to cross almost every category of society that we can think of.

We can not define a person wearing jeans according to any important social category system, such as gender, class, race, age, nationality, religion, education, etc.

We can probably say that jeans have two main social centers, one is young people, the other is blue collar or working class, but these two centers should be regarded as semiotics rather than sociological.

That is to say, they are the center of meaning, rather than the center of social category.

So when a middle-aged business executive wore a pair of jeans to mow his outskirts on Sunday, he linked himself to his youthful vigor (a table which is obviously different from the middle age) and the miraculous dignity of labor. He believed that physical labor is more respectable in a sense than being powerful and powerful. This belief is deeply rooted in the American nation.

Their pioneers are only a few generations away from the present, and this belief is equally important and powerful among the powerful.

I asked the class students to answer briefly what the jeans mean to them, and their explanation was widely discussed at that time.

These discussions have reached a very consistent meaning network (these meanings revolve around a new center).

These groups of meanings are sometimes interrelated and sometimes contradictory, and they allow different students to reflect symbols in different ways.

To generate their own meaning in shared coordinates.

A group of communities that mean basically integration, negates social differences.

Jeans are regarded as informal, classless, male and female, and applicable to cities and villages; wearing jeans is a sign of freedom, that is, the restriction of behavior restrictions and identity constraints imposed by social categories.

Free is often used adjectives, usually with the meaning of "free to be myself".

The lack of social difference in jeans makes people free to be themselves.

Of course, the obvious paradox it points out is that the desire to be oneself leads to someone wearing the same clothes as others.

This is only a concrete example of the paradox of the deep structure of ideology in the United States (and the West). This ideology is the most widely accepted common value and the value of individualism.

To aspire to be oneself does not mean a desire to be completely different from others. Rather, it is eager to place personal differences in the common use of a commodity.

Later, we will see that although there are signs of social differences between jeans, these symbols do not contradict the integration of jeans when they contradict each other.

Another group focused on physical labor, ruggedness, activity and physicality.

These meanings also try to negate class differences.

The implied health of the body allows these middle-class students to link themselves to a set of meanings selected from physical labor (the dignity and productive capacity of physical labor, and, of course, not their subordinate status and exploitation).

Jeans can assume the specific class meaning of American work ethic.

Jeans are not only reflected in their physical characteristics and strong endurance, but also bear the meaning of naturalness and sexuality.

Naturally, it is an adjective. It is almost always used to express freedom.

Compared with the formality of other garments, the informal nature of jeans is a specific example or pformation form of the deep structural opposition between nature and culture, natural and artificial, rural and urban.

The body is our most natural part, so there is a loose sense of interest around the body characteristics of jeans, the vitality of young bodies and the natural nature.

This sense group can reflect strength, physical labor and men's sports performance, and also reflects women's sexuality.

Of course, such gender differences are not a fundamental problem, but these differences are the battleground for snatching the control of masculinity and femininity.

Many women are involved in the construction of the "masculinity", which is related to the physical characteristics of jeans, just as many men show more feminine implications.

These natural / artificial and physical / non physical meanings, together with other meanings, constitute a group of meaningful groups related to the western United States.

The relationship between jeans and cowboys and Western mythology is still unbreakable.

The significance of helping the West continue to be meaningful to these students in 1980s is not only a well-known implication, such as freedom, nature, rough and hard work (and leisure), the concept of progress and development, and the most important significance of American spirit.

Just as the development of the western frontier is a unique and clear stage in the history of the United States, jeans are also regarded as a unique and clear American dress, which may be the only contribution of the United States to the international fashion industry.

Although western mythology is easy to export to the United States, it is easy to be absorbed into the popular culture of other nations, but it still loses its American spirit.

Therefore, it allows the values of the United States to merge with other peoples' popular consciousness.

Similarly, jeans have actually been brought into the popular culture of the world. No matter what their local significance, they always leave traces of the American spirit.

For example, in Moscow, jeans can be regarded as the products of Western decadence by the authorities, but they can also be worn by young people as a kind of rebellion or as a sign against social obedience, even though they are American youth in the 60s.

The same meaning is different from that of young Americans nowadays.

If today's jeans want to express the opposite meaning and even show a gesture of social resistance, they need to be damaged in some way, such as tie dyeing, irregular bleaching, or deliberately breaking.

If the "intact" jeans contain the meaning shared by the contemporary United States, destroying them will become a way to keep themselves away from those values.

However, such a way of keeping distance is not a total rejection.

Those who wear jeans are still wearing jeans, not Buddhistderived&nbspRobs&nbspof orange&nbsppeople.

Wearing jeans is an example of the typical contradiction of popular culture, that is, the object of resistance is bound to appear in resistance.

In all kinds of society, power is distributed unevenly along the axis of class, gender, race and other categories that we use to understand social differences, and mass culture is profoundly contradictory in such a society.

Mass culture belongs to the culture of the governed and the disadvantaged, so it always bears traces of power relations. This is the imprint of dominating power and submission power. It is very important to our social system and social experience.

Similarly, it also reveals resistance or evasion of these forces: the mass culture is self contradictory.

At this point, we may as well discuss the two characteristics of the contradiction first. First, as I have already pointed out, this contradiction is expressed not only in the domination, but also in the submission, not only in power but also in resistance.

Therefore, breaking jeans refers to a set of dominant American values and a certain resistance to these values.

The second characteristic is that this contradiction has caused the richness and diversity of semiotics.

It enables the reader of the text or the wearer of the jeans to share the two characteristics of the contradiction at the same time, and endow these readers or wearers with the power to settle themselves in the two characteristics of the game in order to meet their specific cultural purport.

So the significance of jeans is not only related to the common community, but also to individualism, which is related to a single sex trait, and also to masculinity or femininity.

The richness of the semiotics of jeans means that they can not only have a single meaning but a variety of potential resources.

Of course, jeans manufacturers clearly know this and intend to seek business profits from it.

Their sales and advertising strategies deliberately aim at specific social groups, so that their products can clearly and concretely reflect more common implications at the sub culture level.

Therefore, a television commercial advertisement about Lewis (Levis) 501 has such a picture: three young people, obviously poor and from the dominated class and / or race, appear on the broken streets of the city.

It gives viewers the impression that they share the burden of hard life and the spirit of hard work.

The blue and gray picture is also reminiscent of the blue "blue" of blue jeans, the blue of blue collar life and the "blue" of "blues song", which, as a cultural form, conveys the suffering of those deprived of social rights.

The music in advertisements is a short song influenced by blues.

However, contrary to these pessimism, it is cowboy style, hard working but successful life, creating a personal freedom or personal space in a constrained environment, and finding a masculine identity and community in hard life.

The advertisement shows a clear impression of "elite capitalist ideology", and this capitalism tells us that a person can (or should) get out of a difficult environment and create personal success and identity.

The image of this pair of jeans seems to be different from the image of another advertisement. The latter is for the Lewis 505 series. A girl in jeans gaze at the sky and a group of swans fly slowly.

"The shape of the word.

The advertisement highlights the meaning of freedom and nature and links the sexuality of women.

In these two advertisements, freedom, nature and femininity are directly relative to poverty, city and masculinity, while Weiss jeans cross the opposite and bring the meaning of one side to the other.

In this way, the young people in the city can share freedom and nature from their jeans, as the young woman can bring the meaning of the city into urban life and believe that these meanings can easily be adapted to the urban environment.

All meanings will eventually intertwined with each other - no text or any advertisement can bear the full meaning of jeans alone, because this text / advertisement can only exist in the ambiguous cultural spaces between various texts, and these texts will precede those texts that rely on the text / advertisement and contribute to it.

In other words, text / advertisement exists only in the circulation between texts and society.

Although Lewis's 501 and 505 two series of advertisements have specified the intertextuality of jeans, they have different meanings, but they depend on this intertextuality.

Therefore, despite the surface differences, their deep symbol structure can be shared, so people wearing a certain kind of jeans will convey the meaning of another kind of jeans.

If jeans were once a common overalls, they would no longer be as old as they were.

Like all commodities, jeans are given various brand names and compete with each other to occupy a specific market share.

Manufacturers try to identify social differences, and then construct corresponding differences in their products, so social differences and product differences are mutual mapping (mapped).

Advertisements are used to give meaning to the differences of these products, so that those who live in the social structure targeted at advertisements realize that they are "being told" or even identify their social identities and values in the product.

501 and 505 series of different meanings (and corresponding market share), at least advertised, are also carefully created by the various differences of jeans themselves.

Immediately, those "designer&nbspjeans" tell the difference between market departments and society: they move away from those shared values, from nature, to culture and complexity.

Wearing "famous brand jeans" is a kind of separation behavior. It uses a kind of accent that can be positioned at the social level and speaks a common language.

It is a shift from the social level to the high consumption class. It is a complex state of pition to the metropolis and its mobility and nurture. It is the trend towards fashion and social particularity.

The comparison between ordinary jeans and "designer jeans" can be summed up as follows:

Jeans jeans

A classless high consumption class

Rural City

A common social dimension.

Unisexual females (very few are male).

Work and leisure

Traditional contemporary

Invariable and changeable.

Eastern Western China

Natural culture

From the left column to the right column, the pformation of jeans symbols is, in a sense, a way in which American Rural myth can be assimilated into contemporary urbanization and commercialized society. In this contemporary society, the pressure and homogenization force that tries to integrate our public life has contributed to the profound need for individuality and social difference.

So, the ads of "designer jeans" continue to emphasize how well they will fit you. The physical characteristics are not only symbols of nature, vigor and sex, but also a sign of individuality.

Our body is, after all, our main place, and the most obvious difference between ourselves.

...

Your figure.

Please wear blue jeans (Wrangler).

Blue brother jeans, the size you want, the figure you want.

Any body is suitable for "or" you have the right waistline, you already have it.

The right length? Here you are! "(Chicago [Chic] jeans).

Of course, with the rise of social strata, individualism is also rising.

So Zena jeans help the owners of the jeans (in the advertisement, she just took off her jeans to stay in our imagination), and met a sexy man who was keen on skiing, hating French movies and having a degree from Yale Law School.

Jeans are now entering such a world where class differences are equally important to the subtle social divisions within the class.

Gender differences are closely related to class differences.

How many "famous brand jeans" advertisements are targeted at women, which is important at one ten, because in our patriarchal society, women have been trained more than men to project their social identity, self-esteem and self-esteem in their physical appearance.

Under these obvious differences, there are more fundamental differences between the East and the west, between culture and nature.

The East is the earliest civilized area in the Americas (which means colonization by white people), and from this cultural point of view, the natural color gradually pushed to the West until the pioneers reached the coast of Darcy.

Until now, it is generally believed that the East is sophisticated and complex, that is, it belongs to culture, while the west is leisurely or desolate (that is closer to nature).

Although the development of the "Silicon Valley" provides a counter argument, I do not think this is enough to deny the cultural differences between the East and west sides of the United States.

Business and the public

There are many problems in the relationship between mass culture and the impact of business profits.

We can take a more detailed look at the examples of "breaking jeans" and start looking at some problems.

At the simplest level, it's not just a user consuming one.

The process is also an example of "reuse", that is, users do not regard jeans as a finished object that can be passively received, but as a cultural resource that can be used.

Many important theoretical issues are based on the difference between "users of cultural resources" and "commodity consumers".

Late Capitalism (and its market economy) is characterized by commodity type - late capitalism is full of commodities, and even if people want to avoid the tide of commodities, they will lose their jobs.

To understand the role of commodities and commodities in our society, there are several ways: in the economic field, commodities ensure the production and circulation of wealth, and they can be both basic necessities and unimportant luxuries. In addition, commodities can also include objects of immaterial nature, such as television programs, women's appearances or the names of celebrities.

Commodities can also perform two functions, "material" and "cultural".

The material function of jeans is to meet the needs of warmth, courtesy, comfort and so on.

Its cultural function is related to meaning and values: all commodities can be used by consumers to construct their own, social identity and the significance of social relations.

Describing a set of jeans or a TV program as a commodity is emphasizing its role in the circulation of wealth, and tends to weaken its separate but relevant role in the circulation of meaning. This key point will be elaborated in the second chapter.

The difference in emphasis (or emphasis on money or prominence) will lead to another difference, which arises from the consideration of balance of power in the process of exchange.

The research orientation of commodity consumers is concerned with the power of commodity producers.

The producer gains profits from manufacturing and sales, and the consumer is exploited because the price he / she pays is actually higher than the cost of raw materials, including the profits that the producer can get.

In the case of jeans, this form of exploitation often has another dimension, that is, consumers may just be a member of the working class, and their labor is exploited to create the same kind of profit (even if the goods produced by the worker are not the jeans he / she buys as consumers, this rule is still applicable).

When this research orientation starts to solve the problem of meaning, it relies on an ideology theory, which will once again handle the power of the owner of the mode of production.

Here, the theory will explain how jeans permeate the ideology of white capitalism deeply. No one wearing jeans can participate in and expand this ideology.

By wearing jeans, we adopted the main position of this ideology and become the conspirators of the ideology, thus giving it a material expression; we live in capitalism through capitalist commodities, and live in it, and we make capitalism "effective" and "dynamic".

Jeans producers and distributors do not intend to sell their capitalist ideology through their products: they are not wily propagandists.

Rather, the economic system that determines mass production and consumption is reproducing itself at the ideological level.

The system produces goods, and every commodity reproduces the ideology of the system: commodity is the material form of ideology.

The operation of this ideology has made the exploiters produce a false sense of social status. There are two reasons for their falsehood: firstly, because ideology has blinded them to the conflict of interests between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (they may have realized the difference between the two, but they have interpreted this difference as helping to achieve the ultimate social consensus, that is, a free pluralism, where social differences will eventually be seen as harmonious rather than conflicting), and secondly because ideology has led them to turn a blind eye to the common interests of their working groups, which hinder the development of the unity of the working class or the formation of class consciousness.

Economics operates in its own field, and ideology operates in the cultural field in order to Naturalness the capitalist system, just as if the capitalist system is the only possibility.

So pierced

How much resistance does this mean? There is indeed a mark of resistance in the economic field, because the natural breakage of jeans usually takes a long time before they look so old that they have to wear new jeans.

Although reducing consumers' purchase of goods is a bit of a stance against the high consumption society, more important resistance behaviors are in the cultural field, not in the economic field.

Here, a group of possible meanings is the meaning of "exhibition of poverty" - a sign of contradiction because the real poor do not turn poverty into a fashionable expression.

The intentional abandonment of wealth does not necessarily mean that it is economically obliged for those economically poor, because this "poverty" is the result of their own choice, though it may, in some cases, show sympathy for poverty.

Its main strength lies in "Negation", which is the revival of the resistance of jeans in 60s, because old jeans are a symbol of alternative and sometimes contradictory social values.

But more important than any other possible meaning of breaking jeans is the fact that this "crumbling" is the user's own production and choice, that is to say, it creates "excorporation" to the sub culture of the dominant person, and at least changes some of the powers contained in the commercialization process.

This is the refusal of commercialization and the approval of individual power, that is, everyone can create their own culture beyond the resources provided by the commodity system.

The "tear" or deformation of commodities is to affirm that people have the right and ability to pform commodities into their own culture. This "tear" or deformation does not depend on literal meaning.

The homosexual group tore or deformed Judy Galland (Judy&nbspGarland, the heroine of the wizard of oz), pforming the image of the typical American country girl and the next door girl into a symbol for the masquerade of this image. In fact, before the sexual liberation day, the costume ball permeated all the social experience of homosexuals.

"Co creation" is a process in which the dominant person can create his own culture from the resources and commodities provided by the domination of the system, which is the key to the mass culture, because in industrial society, the only source that can be relied upon by the dominator to create his own subculture is provided by the system that controls them.

Because there is no "real" folk culture, it can provide an alternative choice. Therefore, mass culture is necessarily an art of making use of ready to use things.

This means that researchers of popular culture need to study not only the cultural products formed by popular culture, but also the way people use them.

The latter tends to be more creative and diverse than the former.

The vitality of the dominant group (they constitute the masses of people in various passive social obligations) will be seen in the way they are used rather than the things used.

This causes producers to resort to the process of absorbing or accommodating.

Manufacturers quickly developed the popularity of broken (or old, faded) jeans, and they began to produce "factory made" jeans, or "wash and polish" or fade them in factories before selling them.

This process of openly adopting the symbol of resistance has absorbed these symbols into the dominating system, thus deliberately depriving each of the connotations of confrontation.

This study holds that the strategy of absorption deprives any antagonistic language created by the dominant group: it deprives them of the tools of speaking and confronting, and ultimately deprives the dominant group of the confrontation itself.

Absorption can also be understood as a way of accommodating a posture that allows dissidents to be allowed and controlled.

It bears the role of the safety valve and strengthens the dominant social order, because it allows the dissidents and the protesters enough freedom to make them relatively satisfactory, but not enough to threaten the stability of the system they protest, so it has the ability to deal with those confrontational forces.

So Macys's ad will say, "to convey the charm of fading..."

Old jeans from CK (Calvin&nbspKlein) sportswear.

"The break is just right," continued the text of the advertisement. "It looks like the brand new, which is the same as your old&nbspfavorites.

If you take collars with CK cool feeling, you will be fully relaxed.

The meaning of any possible confrontation is absorbed and tamed into harmless "old love".

The producer controls the signs of wear by ensuring that jeans are "broken" and then sells more products (white collar tops) to the masses (which they have been trying to steal) with the absorbed and mitigated adversarial language.

In such a way, the absorption theory tells us that the antagonistic symbols can be turned into the advantages that they can fight for, and the fashionable and ragged clothing has also become another commodity.

The shabby nature is far from confronting consumerism, and it has become a way to expand and enhance consumerism.

This interpretation of popular culture tells us only a part of the whole story; these explanations focus almost exclusively on the power of the dominant group to maintain its profit making system, so they assume, rather than doubt, the success of the strategy.

These explanations fail to recognize the social difference between the "real" worn jeans and the consumer of jeans, so they ignore the factors that still have resistance in the absorption process. These resists are enough to show that the victory of the domination has always been partial.

As a result, these explanations are quite confluent with the power of domination, because the dominator ignores and derogates the conflict and struggle brought about by the construction of mass culture within the capitalist society by neglecting the complexity and creativity of the governed in their daily life to deal with the commodity system and ideology.

Change can only come from the bottom: the interests of those who have power are at best maintained by maintaining the status quo.

Therefore, the motive force of social change can only come from the sense of social difference based on conflict of interests, rather than freestyle pluralism. In this pluralism, the difference should eventually be subordinated to a consensus, and the function of the consensus is to keep these differences intact.

Mass culture has always been a part of all kinds of power relations. It always shows signs of lasting struggle between dominance and domination, between power and various forms of resistance or evasion of power, between military strategy and guerrilla tactics.

It is not easy to estimate the power balance of the struggle.

In any sense, who can say who has won the guerrilla warfare? The main thrust of guerrilla warfare or popular culture is that it is invincible.

Although capitalism has a history of nearly two hundred years, the dominant sub culture has always existed and never compromised its final absorption. The masses of these subcultures have been planning a new way of "tearing jeans".

Although the patriarchal system has existed for so many centuries, women have launched and sustained a feminist movement, while other women have been fighting guerrilla warfare in patriarchal system in their daily lives, winning small and short-lived victories, making their enemies tremble, and win for themselves and sometimes occupy small (or small) sites.

Patriarchy gradually and reluctantly has to be changed to respond.

In every field, whether it is law, politics, industry or family, only when the system has suffered from the erosion and weakening of the daily life tactics, the structural pformation of the system itself will finally happen.

There are two important trends in recent popular culture studies.

Less creative is that although it celebrating popular culture, it does not put it in the power mode.

This has always been a consensual mode, which once viewed mass culture as a form of handling social differences from etiquette, and produced a final harmony from these differences.

This is the concept of democracy in elite humanism. It merely puts the cultural life of a nation state in the public rather than in the refined taste.

The other way is to put mass culture firmly in the power mode, but so strongly emphasize the power of domination, so that a real mass culture can not exist.

Instead, it is a kind of mass culture (mass&nbspculture), which is strongly imposed on the unauthorized and passive by the cultural industry, which benefits directly from the interests of the masses.

Mass culture produces a group of static and passive people, producing atomized individual coalescence. These individuals are separated from their social structure and are separated from their own class consciousness, and do not know their different social and cultural obligations, so they are totally powerless and helpless.

Recently, however, third trends have emerged.

Although it also regards the popular culture as a place of struggle, it acknowledges the power of the masses when it acknowledges the power of dominating power, and the public relies on such tactics to deal with, evade or resist these dominating forces.

It not only focuses on the absorption process, but explores the vitality and creativity of the masses. It is this vitality and creativity that make the leaders feel that absorption is a lasting necessity.

This trend does not focus on the ubiquitous and insidious practice of mainstream ideology. Instead, it attempts to understand how daily resistance and avoidance make the operation of mainstream ideology so laborious, and has to maintain itself and its values one after another and three.

This research orientation regards mass culture as a potential and actually progressive (though not radical) force, and this orientation is basically

Because it shows the possibility of social change and the motivation to drive this change in the vitality and vitality of the masses.