Assorted Notes: Week 2
- “Culture” and “Nature” being the two most confusing terms (Raymond Williams)
- Culture being:
- “intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development”
- “a particular way of life, people/period/groups”
- “the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity”
- Clifford Geertz: “(Culture) is simply the ensemble of stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves”
- Williams and “popular”:
- well liked by many people
- inferior kinds of works (don’t know if I missed more of this..)
- work deliberately setting out to win favor with the people”
- “production and destruction”
- made by people for themselves
- Storey (and various problematics) on popular culture:
- culture that is well liked by many people
- what is left after what is decided as “high culture”
- the culture which originates from “the people”
- Gramsci and hegemony – struggle between dominant and marginalized cultures
- postmodernism – no distinction between “high” and “low” culture (relativism)
- Common denominator: “popular culture is a culture that only emerged following industrialization and ubranization”
- “Splendid Messiness”
History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashise:
- one note in relation to Otsuka: the focus on water, especially represented in a dreamlike manner
- Further viewing: Emiko Omori – Rabbit in the Moon (the psychological phenomenon of looking at something and it appears to be something else)
- Further reading: Alison Landsberg – Prosthetic Memory (collective trauma)
- Collective trauma and Otsuka: “I want to be sick by myself”, said the girl. “That’s impossible,” said her mother.