Popular Culture!

Popular culture | John Storey

There are various ways to define popular culture.

I intend to sketch out six definitions of popular culture that in their different, general ways, inform the study of popular culture.

But first a few words about the term ‘popular’.

Williams suggests four current meanings:

‘well liked by many people’;

‘inferior kinds of work’;

‘work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people’;

‘culture actually made by the people for themselves’.

Clearly, then, any definition of popular culture will bring into play a complex combination of the different meanings of the term ‘culture’ with the different meanings of the term ‘popular’.

An obvious starting point in any attempt to define popular culture is to say that popular culture is simply culture that is widely favoured or well liked by many people.

We could examine sales of books, sales of CDs and DVDs. We could also examine attendance records at concerts, sporting events, and festivals. We could also scrutinize market research figures on audience preferences for different television programmes.

Such counting would undoubtedly tell us a great deal. The difficulty might prove to be that, paradoxically, it tells us too much. Unless we can agree on a figure over which something becomes popular culture, and below which it is just culture, we might find that widely favoured or well liked by many people included so much as to be virtually useless as a conceptual definition of popular culture.

Despite this problem, what is clear is that any definition of popular culture must include a quantitative dimension. The ‘popular’ of popular culture would seem to demand it.

A second way of defining popular culture is to suggest that it is the culture that is left over after we have decided what is high culture.

Popular culture, in this definition, is a residual category, there to accommodate texts and practices that fail to meet the required standards to qualify as high culture. In other words, it is a definition of popular culture as inferior culture.

What the culture/popular culture test might include is a range of value judgements on a particular text or practice.

For example, we might want to insist on formal complexity. In other words, to be real culture, it has to be difficult.

Being difficult thus ensures its exclusive status as high culture.

Its very difficulty literally excludes, an exclusion that guarantees the exclusivity of its audience.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues that cultural distinctions of this kind are often used to support class distinctions.

Taste is a deeply ideological category: it functions as a marker of ‘class’ (using the term in a double sense to mean both a social economic category and the suggestion of a particular level of quality).

For Bourdieu the consumption of culture is ‘predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences’.

This definition of popular culture is often supported by claims that popular culture is mass-produced commercial culture, whereas high culture is the result of an individual act of creation. The latter, therefore, deserves only a moral and aesthetic response; the former requires only a fleeting sociological inspection to unlock what little it has to offer.

A third way of defining popular culture is as ‘mass culture’. This draws heavily on the previous definition. The first point that those who refer to popular culture as mass culture want to establish is that popular culture is a hopelessly commercial culture. It is mass produced for mass consumption. Its audience is a mass of non-discriminating consumers. The culture itself is formulaic, manipulative (to the political right or left, depending on who is doing the analysis).

It is a culture that is consumed with brainnumbed and brain-numbing passivity.

Those working within the mass culture perspective usually have in mind a previous ‘golden age’ when cultural matters were very different. This usually takes one of two forms: a lost organic community or a lost folk culture. But as Fiske points out, ‘In capitalist societies there is no so-called authentic folk culture against which to measure the “inauthenticity” of mass culture, so bemoaning the loss of the authentic is a fruitless exercise in romantic nostalgia’. This also holds true for the ‘lost’ organic community. The Frankfurt School, locate the lost golden age, not in the past, but in the future.

For some cultural critics working within the mass culture paradigm, mass culture is not just an imposed and impoverished culture, it is in a clear identifiable sense an imported American culture: ‘If popular culture in its modern form was invented in any one place, it was . . . in the great cities of the United States, and above all in New York’. The claim that popular culture is American culture has a long history within the theoretical mapping of popular culture. It operates under the term ‘Americanization’. Its central theme is that British culture has declined under the homogenizing influence of American culture.

What is true is that in the 1950s (one of the key periods of Americanization), for many young people in Britain, American culture represented a force of liberation against the grey certainties of British everyday life.

There is what we might call a benign version of the mass culture perspective. The texts and practices of popular culture are seen as forms of public fantasy. Popular culture is understood as a collective dream world. As Richard Maltby (1989) claims, popular culture provides ‘escapism that is not an escape from or to anywhere, but an escape of our utopian selves’ (14). In this sense, cultural practices such as Christmas and the seaside holiday, it could be argued, function in much the same way as dreams: they articulate, in a disguised form, collective (but repressed) wishes and desires. This is a benign version of the mass culture critique because, as Maltby points out, ‘If it is the crime of popular culture that it has taken our dreams and packaged them and sold them back to us, it is also the achievement of popular culture that it has brought us more and more varied dreams than we could otherwise ever have known’.

Structuralism, although not usually placed within the mass culture perspective, and certainly not sharing its moralistic approach, nevertheless sees popular culture as a sort of ideological machine which more or less effortlessly reproduces the prevailing structures of power. Readers are seen as locked into specific ‘reading positions’. There is little space for reader activity or textual contradiction. Part of post-structuralism’s critique of structuralism is the opening up of a critical space in which such questions can be addressed. Chapter 6 will consider these issues in some detail.

A fourth definition contends that popular culture is the culture that originates from ‘the people’. It takes issue with any approach that suggests that it is something imposed on ‘the people’ from above. According to this definition, the term should only be used to indicate an ‘authentic’ culture of ‘the people’. This is popular culture as folk culture: a culture of the people for the people. As a definition of popular culture, it is ‘often equated with a highly romanticised concept of working-class culture construed as the major source of symbolic protest within contemporary capitalism’.

A fifth definition of popular culture, then, is one that draws on the political analysis of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, particularly on his development of the concept of hegemony. Gramsci (2009) uses the term ‘hegemony’ to refer to the way in which dominant groups in society, through a process of ‘intellectual and moral leadership, seek to win the consent of subordinate groups in society.

Raymond Williams (1980) suggests that we can identify different moments within a popular text or practice – what he calls ‘dominant’, ‘emergent’ and ‘residual’ – each pulling the text in a different direction. Thus a text is made up of a contradictory mix of different cultural forces. How these elements are articulated will depend in part on the social circumstances and historical conditions of production and consumption. Hall uses Williams’s insight to construct a theory of reading positions: ‘subordinate’, ‘dominant’, and ‘negotiated’. David Morley (1980) has modified the model to take into account discourse and subjectivity: seeing reading as always an interaction between the discourses of the text and the discourses of the reader.

A sixth definition of popular culture is one informed by recent thinking around the debate on postmodernism. All I want to do now is to draw attention to some of the basic points in the debate about the relationship between postmodernism and popular culture. The main point to insist on here is the claim that postmodern culture is a culture that no longer recognizes the distinction between high and popular culture. As we shall see, for some this is a reason to celebrate an end to an elitism constructed on arbitrary distinctions of culture; for others it is a reason to despair at the final victory of commerce over culture. An example of the supposed interpenetration of commerce and culture (the postmodern blurring of the distinction between ‘authentic’ and ‘commercial’ culture) can be found in the relationship between television commercials and pop music. For example, there is a growing list of artists who have had hit records as a result of their songs appearing in television commercials.

One of the questions this relationship raises is: ‘What is being sold: song or product?’ I suppose the obvious answer is both. Moreover, it is now possible to buy CDs that consist of the songs that have become successful, or have become successful again, as a result of being used in advertisements. There is a wonderful circularity to this: songs are used to sell products and the fact that they do this successfully is then used to sell the songs. For those with little sympathy for either postmodernism or the celebratory theorizing of some postmodernists, the real question is: ‘What is such a relationship doing to culture?’ Those on the political left might worry about its effect on the oppositional possibilities of popular culture. Those on the political right might worry about what it is doing to the status of real culture. This has resulted in a sustained debate in cultural studies. The significance of popular culture is central to this debate.

Finally, what all these definitions have in common is the insistence that whatever else popular culture is, it is definitely a culture that only emerged following industrialization and urbanization. As Williams (1963) argues in the ‘Foreword’ to Culture and Society, ‘The organising principle of this book is the discovery that the idea of culture, and the word itself in its general modern uses, came into English thinking in the period which we commonly describe as that of the Industrial Revolution’. It is a definition of culture and popular culture that depends on there being in place a capitalist market economy. This of course makes Britain the first country to produce popular culture defined in this historically restricted way.

There are other ways to define popular culture, which do not depend on this particular history or these particular circumstances, but they are definitions that fall outside the range of the cultural theorists and the cultural theory discussed in this book. The argument, which underpins this particular periodization of popular culture, is that the experience of industrialization and urbanization changed fundamentally the cultural relations within the landscape of popular culture. Before industrialization and urbanization, Britain had two cultures: a common culture which was shared, more or less, by all classes, and a separate elite culture produced and consumed by the dominant classes in society.  As a result of industrialization and urbanization, three things happened, which together had the effect of redrawing the cultural map. First of all, industrialization changed the relations between employees and employers. This involved a shift from a relationship based on mutual obligation to one based solely on the demands of what Thomas Carlyle calls the ‘cash nexus’. Second, urbanization produced a residential separation of classes. For the first time in British history there were whole sections of towns and cities inhabited only by working men and women. Third, the panic engendered by the French Revolution – the fear that it might be imported into Britain – encouraged successive governments to enact a variety of repressive measures aimed at defeating radicalism. Political radicalism and trade unionism were not destroyed, but driven underground to organize beyond the influence of middle-class interference and control.

These three factors combined to produce a cultural space outside of the paternalist considerations of the earlier common culture. The result was the production of a cultural space for the generation of a popular culture more or less outside the controlling influence of the dominant classes. How this space was filled was a subject of some controversy for the founding fathers of culturalism. Whatever we decide was its content, the anxieties engendered by the new cultural space were directly responsible for the emergence of the ‘culture and civilization’ approach to popular culture.