Rough DraftThe Rough Draft is the first step toward completing the Final Paper for this course. The work you already did on your Close Analysis is similar in style to the Rough Draft and Final Paper—t

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Chapter 1 What is popular culture? 2 of a people, a period or a group’ (ibid.). Using this definition,\ if we speak of the cultural development of Western Europe, we would have in mind not just i\ ntellectual and aesthetic factors, but the development of, for example, literacy, ho\ lidays, sport, religious festivals. Finally, Williams suggests that culture can be used\ to refer to ‘the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity’\ (ibid.). In other words, culture here means the texts and practices whose principal functi\ on is to signify, to produce or to be the occasion for the production of meaning. Culture in this third definition is synonymous with what structuralists and post-structurali\ sts call ‘signifying practices’ (see Chapter 6). Using this definition, we would proba\ bly think of examples such as poetry, the novel, ballet, opera and fine art. To speak of popular culture usually means to mobilize the second and third meanings of the word ‘\ culture’. The second meaning – culture as a particular way of life – would allow us to speak of such practices as the seaside holiday, the celebration of Christmas, and yout\ h subcultures, as examples of culture. These are usually referred to as lived cultures or practices. The third meaning – culture as signifying practices – would allow us to speak of soap opera, pop music, and comics as examples of culture. These are usually r\ eferred to as texts. Few people would imagine Williams’s first definition wh\ en thinking about popular culture. Ideology Before we turn to the different definitions of popular culture, there \ is another term we have to think about: ideology. Ideology is a crucial concept in the study of popular culture. Graeme Turner (2003) calls it ‘the most important conceptu\ al category in cultural studies’ (182). James Carey (1996) has even suggested that ‘British cultural studies could be described just as easily and perhaps more accurately as\ ideological studies’ (65). Like culture, ideology has many competing meanings. \ An understanding of this concept is often complicated by the fact that in much cultural a\ nalysis the concept is used interchangeably with culture itself, and especially popular culture. The fact that ideology has been used to refer to the same conceptual terrain\ as culture and popular culture makes it an important term in any understanding of the n\ ature of popular culture. What follows is a brief discussion of just five of th\ e many ways of understanding ideology. We will consider only those meanings that have a\ bearing on the study of popular culture. First, ideology can refer to a systematic body of ideas articulated by a\ particular group of people. For example, we could speak of ‘professional ideology’ \ to refer to the ideas that inform the practices of particular professional groups. We could al\ so speak of the ‘ideology of the Labour Party’. Here we would be referring to the \ collection of political, economic and social ideas that inform the aspirations and activities of \ the party. A second definition suggests a certain masking, distortion or concealm\ ent. Ideology is used here to indicate how some texts and practices present distorted images of reality. Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture : An Introduction, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ohiostate-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5220275.

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Ideology 3 They produce what is sometimes called ‘false consciousness’. Such \ distortions, it is argued, work in the interests of the powerful against the interests of t\ he powerless.

Using this definition, we might speak of capitalist ideology. What wou\ ld be intimated by this usage would be the way in which ideology conceals the reality of\ domination from those in power: the dominant class do not see themselves as exploit\ ers or oppres- sors. And, perhaps more importantly, the way in which ideology conceals \ the reality of subordination from those who are powerless: the subordinate classes do not see themselves as oppressed or exploited. This definition derives from cer\ tain assumptions about the circumstances of the production of texts and practices. It is \ argued that they are the superstructural ‘reflections’ or ‘expressions’ of \ the power relations of ‘the eco- nomic structure of society’. This is one of the fundamental assumptions of classical Marxism. Here is Karl Marx’s (1976a) famous formulation:

In the social production of their existence men enter into definite, n\ ecessary relations, which are independent of their will, namely, relations of pro\ duction corresponding to a determinate stage of development of their material fo\ rces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes th\ e economic structure of society, the real foundation on which there arises a legal \ and political superstructure and to which there correspond definite forms of social \ conscious- ness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, pol\ itical and intellectual life process in general (3).

What Marx is suggesting is that the way a society organizes the means of\ its material production will have a determining effect on the type of culture that so\ ciety produces or makes possible. The cultural products of this so-called base/superstr\ ucture relation- ship are deemed ideological to the extent that, as a result of this rela\ tionship, they implicitly or explicitly support the interests of dominant groups who, s\ ocially, politically, economically and culturally, benefit from this particular economic org\ anization of society. In Chapter 4, we shall consider this formulation in more detail\ . We can also use ideology in this general sense to refer to power relations \ outside those of class. For instance, feminists speak of the power of patriarcha\ l ideology, and how it operates to conceal, mask and distort gender relations in our\ society (see Chapter 8). In Chapter 9 we shall examine the ideology of racism. A third definition of ideology (closely related to, and in some ways \ dependent on, the second definition) uses the term to refer to ‘ideological form\ s’ (Marx, 1976a: 5).

This usage is intended to draw attention to the way in which texts (television fiction, pop songs, novels, feature films, etc.) always present a particular image of the world.

This definition depends on a notion of society as conflictual rather\ than consensual, structured around inequality, exploitation and oppression. Texts are sai\ d to take sides, consciously or unconsciously, in this conflict. The German playwright \ Bertolt Brecht (1978) summarizes the point: ‘Good or bad, a play always includes a\ n image of the world. . . . There is no play and no theatrical performance which does not in some wa\ y affect the dispositions and conceptions of the audience. Art is never wi\ thout conse- quences’ (150–1). Brecht’s point can be generalized to apply \ to all texts. Another way Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture : An Introduction, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ohiostate-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5220275.

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Chapter 1 What is popular culture? 4 of saying this would be simply to argue that all texts are ultimately po\ litical. That is, they offer competing ideological significations of the way the world i\ s or should be.

Popular culture is thus, as Hall (2009a) claims, a site where ‘coll\ ective social under- standings are created’: a terrain on which ‘the politics of signifi\ cation’ are played out in attempts to win people to particular ways of seeing the world (122–3\ ).A fourth definition of ideology is one associated with the early work \ of the French cultural theorist Roland Barthes (discussed in more detail in Chapter 6\ ). Barthes argues that ideology (or ‘myth’ as Barthes himself calls it) operates m\ ainly at the level of connotations, the secondary, often unconscious, meanings that texts and \ practices carry, or can be made to carry. For example, a Conservative Party politi\ cal broadcast transmitted in 1990 ended with the word ‘socialism’ being transpos\ ed into red prison bars. What was being suggested is that the socialism of the Labour Party is synonymous with social, economic and political imprisonment. The broadcast was attempting to fix the connotations of the word ‘socialism’. Moreover, it hoped to lo\ cate socialism in a binary relationship in which it connoted unfreedom, whilst conservatism \ connoted freedom. For Barthes, this would be a classic example of the operations \ of ideology, the attempt to make universal and legitimate what is in fact partial and particular; an attempt to pass off that which is cultural (i.e. humanly made) as some\ thing which is natural (i.e. just existing). Similarly, it could be argued that in British society white, masculine, heterosexual, middle class, are unmarked in the sense that they are the ‘normal’, the ‘natural’, the ‘universal’, from which o\ ther ways of being are an inferior variation on an original. This is made clear in such formulations as a f\ emale pop singer, a black journalist, a working-class writer, a gay comedian. In each inst\ ance the first term is used to qualify the second as a deviation from the ‘universal\ ’ categories of pop singer, journalist, writer and comedian. A fifth definition is one that was very influential in the 1970s a\ nd early 1980s. It is the definition of ideology developed by the French Marxist philosop\ her Louis Althusser. We shall discuss Althusser in more detail in Chapter 4. Here I will simply outline some key points about one of his definitions of ideology. Alth\ usser’s main contention is to see ideology not simply as a body of ideas, but as a ma\ terial practice.

What he means by this is that ideology is encountered in the practices o\ f everyday life and not simply in certain ideas about everyday life. Principally, what A\ lthusser has in mind is the way in which certain rituals and customs have the effect of \ binding us to the social order: a social order that is marked by enormous inequalities\ of wealth, status and power. Using this definition, we could describe the seaside holiday or the celebration of Christmas as examples of ideological practices. This would point to the way in which they offer pleasure and release from the usual demands of t\ he social order, but, ultimately, return us to our places in the social order, refreshed \ and ready to tolerate our exploitation and oppression until the next official break comes al\ ong. In this sense, ideology works to reproduce the social conditions and social relations n\ ecessary for the economic conditions and economic relations of capitalism to continue. So far we have briefly examined different ways of defining culture a\ nd ideology.

What should be clear by now is that culture and ideology do cover much t\ he same conceptual landscape. The main difference between them is that ideology \ brings a Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture : An Introduction, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ohiostate-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5220275.

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Popular culture 5 political dimension to the shared terrain. In addition, the introduction\ of the concept of ideology suggests that relations of power and politics inescapably ma\ rk the culture/ ideology landscape; it suggests that the study of popular culture amount\ s to something more than a simple discussion of entertainment and leisure. Popular culture There are various ways to define popular culture. This book is of cour\ se in part about that very process, about the different ways in which various critical ap\ proaches have attempted to fix the meaning of popular culture. Therefore, all I inte\ nd to do for the remainder of this chapter is to sketch out six definitions of popular \ culture that, in their different, general ways, inform the study of popular culture. But firs\ t a few words about the term ‘popular’. Williams (1983) suggests four current meanin\ gs: ‘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’\ (237). Clearly, then, any definition of popular culture will bring into play a complex combi\ nation of the different meanings of the term ‘culture’ with the different meanings of the term ‘popular’.

The history of cultural theory’s engagement with popular culture is, \ therefore, a history of the different ways in which the two terms have been connected by theo\ retical labour within particular historical and social contexts.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.

And, undoubtedly, such a quantitative index would meet the approval of m\ any 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 televisi\ on programmes.

Such counting would undoubtedly tell us a great deal. The difficulty m\ ight prove to be that, paradoxically, it tells us too much. Unless we can agree on a fi\ gure over which something becomes popular culture, and below which it is just culture, w\ e 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. What is also clear, however, is that on its own, a quantitative index is not enough to provide an adequate definition of popular culture. Such counting would almost certainly include ‘the officially sanctioned “high cultur\ e” which in terms of book and record sales and audience ratings for television dramatisations\ of the classics, can justifiably claim to be “popular” in this sense’ (Bennet\ t, 1980: 20–1). 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 thi\ s definition, is a residual category, there to accommodate texts and practices that fail to meet the Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture : An Introduction, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ohiostate-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5220275.

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Chapter 1 What is popular culture? 6required 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 ki\ nd 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 Bour\ dieu (1984), the consumption of culture is ‘predisposed, consciously and deliberately \ or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences’ (5). This will \ be discussed in more detail in Chapters 7, 10, and 12. This definition of popular culture is often supported by claims that p\ opular culture is mass-produced commercial culture, whereas high culture is the result \ of an individual act of creation. The latter, therefore, deserves a moral and aesthetic r\ esponse; the former requires only a fleeting sociological inspection to unlock what little it has to offer.

Whatever the method deployed, those who wish to make the case for the di\ vision between high and popular culture generally insist that the division between the two is absolutely clear. Moreover, not only is this division clear, it is trans\ -historical – fixed for all time. This latter point is usually insisted on, especially if the division is dependent on supposed essential textual qualities. There are many problems with this certainty. For example, William Shakespeare is now seen as the epitome of high culture, yet as late as the nineteenth c\ entury his work was very much a part of popular theatre. 1 The same point can also be made about Charles Dickens’s work. Similarly, film noir can be seen to have crossed th\ e border supposedly separating popular and high culture: in other words, what started as pop\ ular cinema is now the preserve of academics and film clubs. 2 One recent example of cultural traffic moving in the other direction is Luciano Pavarotti’s recording of Puc\ cini’s ‘Nessun Dorma’. Even the most rigorous defenders of high culture would not wa\ nt to exclude Pavarotti or Puccini from its select enclave. But in 1990, Pavarotti man\ aged to take ‘Nessun Dorma’ to number one in the British charts. Such commercia\ l success on any quantitative analysis would make the composer, the performer and the ari\ a popular culture. 3 In fact, one student I know actually complained about the way in which \ the aria had been supposedly devalued by its commercial success. He claimed \ that he now found it embarrassing to play the aria for fear that someone should thin\ k his musical taste was simply the result of the aria being ‘The Official BBC Gra\ ndstand World Cup Theme’. Other students laughed and mocked. But his complaint highligh\ ts something very significant about the high/popular divide: the elitist investment\ that some put in its continuation. On 30 July 1991, Pavarotti gave a free concert in London’s Hyde Park.\ About 250,000 people were expected, but because of heavy rain, the number of t\ hose who actually attended was around 100,000. Two things about the event are of \ interest to a student of popular culture. The first is the enormous popularity of th\ e event. We could Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture : An Introduction, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ohiostate-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5220275.

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Popular culture 7 connect this with the fact that Pavarotti’s previous two albums (Essential Pavarotti 1 and Essential Pavarotti 2) had both topped the British album charts. His obvious popularity would appear to call into question any clear division between high and p\ opular culture.

Second, the extent of his popularity would appear to threaten the class \ exclusivity of a high/popular divide. It is therefore interesting to note the way in whic\ h the event was reported in the media. All the British tabloids carried news of the even\ t on their front pages. The Daily Mirror, for instance, had five pages devoted to the concert. What the tabloid coverage reveals is a clear attempt to define the event for po\ pular culture. The Sun quoted a woman who said, ‘I can’t afford to go to posh opera hous\ es with toffs and fork out £100 a seat.’ The Daily Mirror ran an editorial in which it claimed that Pavarotti’s performance ‘wasn’t for the rich’ but ‘for the thousands . . . who could never normally afford a night with an operatic star’. When the event was re\ ported on television news programmes the following lunchtime, the tabloid coverage was includ\ ed as part of the general meaning of the event. Both the BBC’s One O’clock News and ITV’s 12.30 News referred to the way in which the tabloids had covered the concert, and,\ moreover, the extent to which they had covered the concert. The old certainties of the cultu\ ral landscape suddenly seemed in doubt. However, there was some attempt made\ to reintroduce the old certainties: ‘some critics said that a park is no\ place for opera’ (One O’clock News); ‘some opera enthusiasts might think it all a bit vulgar’ (12.30 News).

Although such comments invoked the spectre of high-culture exclusivity, \ they seemed strangely at a loss to offer any purchase on the event. The apparently o\ bvious cultural division between high and popular culture no longer seemed so obvious. I\ t suddenly seemed that the cultural had been replaced by the economic, revealing a \ division between ‘the rich’ and ‘the thousands’. It was the event’\ s very popularity that forced the television news to confront, and ultimately to find wanting, old cultural certainties.

This can be partly illustrated by returning to the contradictory meaning\ of the term ‘popular’. 4 On the one hand, something is said to be good because it is popular. An\ example of this usage would be: it was a popular performance. Yet, on th\ e other hand, something is said to be bad for the very same reason. Consider the binar\ y oppositions in Table 1.1. This demonstrates quite clearly the way in which popular a\ nd popular culture carries within its definitional field connotations of inferi\ ority; a second-best culture for those unable to understand, let alone appreciate, real cultu\ re – what Matthew Arnold refers to as ‘the best that has been thought and said \ in the world’ (see Chapter 2). Hall (2009b) argues that what is important here is not th\ e fact that popular forms move up and down the ‘cultural escalator’; more significan\ t are ‘the forces and relations which sustain the distinction, the difference . . . [the] institutions and institu- tional processes . . . required to sustain each and to continually mark the difference Table 1.1 Popular culture as ‘inferior’ culture. Popular press Quality press Popular cinema Art cinema Popular entertainment ArtStorey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture : An Introduction, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ohiostate-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5220275.

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Chapter 1 What is popular culture? 8 between them’ (514). This is principally the work of the education \ system and its promotion of a selective tradition (see Chapter 3). A third way of defining p opular c ulture i s a s ‘ mass c ulture’. T his d raws h eavily o n the previous definition. The mass culture perspective will be discussed in some detail in Chapter 2; therefore all I want to do here is to suggest the basic terms\ of this definition.

The first point that those who refer to popular culture as mass cultur\ e want to establish is that popular culture is a hopelessly commercial culture. It is mass-p\ roduced for mass consumption. Its audience is a mass of non-discriminating consumers. The\ culture itself is formulaic, manipulative (to the political right or left, depe\ nding on who is doing the analysis). It is a culture that is consumed with brain-numbed\ and brain- numbing passivity. But as John Fiske (1989a) points out, ‘between 8\ 0 and 90 per cent of new products fail despite extensive advertising . . . many films fail to recover even their promotional costs at the box office’ (31). Simon Frith (19\ 83: 147) also points out that about 80 per cent of singles and albums lose money. Such statistics\ should clearly call into question the notion of consumption as an automatic and passive\ activity (see Chapters 8 and 12). Those working within the mass culture perspective usually have in mind a\ previous ‘golden age’ when cultural matters were very different. This usual\ ly takes one of two forms: a lost organic community or a lost folk culture. But as Fiske (1\ 989a) 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 los\ s of the authentic is a fruitless exercise in romantic nostalgia’ (27). This also holds true for the ‘lost’ organic community. The Frankfurt School, as we shall see in Chapter 4, locate th\ e 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 iden\ tifiable 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’ \ (Maltby, 1989: 11; my italics). The claim that popular culture is Amer\ ican culture has a long history within the theoretical mapping of popular culture. It ope\ rates under the term ‘Americanization’. Its central theme is that British culture \ has declined under the homogenizing influence of American culture. There are two things we ca\ n say with some confidence about the United States and popular culture. First, as Andrew Ross (1989) has pointed out, ‘popular culture has been socially and inst\ itutionally central in America for longer and in a more significant way than in Europe’\ (7). Second, although the availability of American culture worldwide is undoubted, ho\ w what is available is consumed is at the very least contradictory (see Chapter 10). What is true is that in the 1950s (one of the key periods of Americanization), for man\ y young people in Britain, American culture represented a force of liberation against t\ he grey certainties of British everyday life. What is also clear is that the fear of America\ nization is closely related to a distrust (regardless of national origin) of emerging form\ s of popular culture. As with the mass culture perspective generally, there are political left and political right versions of the argument. What are under threat are either the traditional values of high culture, or the traditional way of life of a ‘tempted’\ working class. Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture : An Introduction, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ohiostate-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5220275.

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Popular culture 9 There is what we might call a benign version of the mass culture perspec\ tive. The texts and practices of popular culture are seen as forms of public fanta\ sy. Popular culture is understood as a collective dream world. As Richard Maltby (1\ 989) claims, popular culture provides ‘escapism that is not an escape from or to a\ nywhere, 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 w\ ay as dreams:

they articulate, in a disguised form, collective (but repressed) wishe\ s and desires. This is a benign version of the mass culture critique because, as Maltby poin\ ts out, ‘If it is the crime of popular culture that it has taken our dreams and packaged t\ hem and sold them back to us, it is also the achievement of popular culture that it h\ as brought us more and more varied dreams than we could otherwise ever have known’ \ (ibid.). Structuralism, although not usually placed within the mass culture persp\ ective, and certainly not sharing its moralistic approach, nevertheless sees popular\ culture as a sort of ideological machine that more or less effortlessly reproduces the prevai\ ling 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-structu\ ralism’s critique of structuralism is the opening up of a critical space in which such questi\ ons 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 te\ rm should be used only 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 cul\ ture, it is ‘often equated with a highly romanticised concept of working-class culture cons\ trued as the major source of symbolic protest within contemporary capitalism’ (Bennett, 1980: 27).

One problem with this approach is the question of who qualifies for in\ clusion in the category ‘the people’. Another problem with it is that it evades the ‘commercial’ nature of much of the resources from which popular culture is made. No matter h\ ow much we might insist on this definition, the fact remains that people do no\ t spontaneously produce culture from raw materials of their own making. Whatever popular culture is, what is certain is that its raw materials are those that are commerciall\ y provided. This approach tends to avoid the full implications of this fact. Critical ana\ lysis of pop and rock music is particularly replete with this kind of analysis of popular\ culture. At a conference I once attended, a contribution from the floor suggested th\ at Levi’s jeans would never be able to use a song from the Jam to sell its products. The fact that they had already used a song by the Clash would not shake this conviction. What u\ nderpinned this claim was a clear sense of cultural difference – television commercials for Levi’s jeans are mass culture; the music of the Jam is popular culture define\ d as an opposi- tional culture of ‘the people’. The only way the two could meet would be through the Jam ‘selling out’. As this was not going to happen, Levi’s jean\ s would never use a song by the Jam to sell its products. But this had already happened to the Cl\ ash, a band with equally sound political credentials. This circular exchange came to a st\ op. The cultural studies use of the concept of hegemony would, at the very least, have fu\ elled further discussion (see Chapter 4). Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture : An Introduction, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ohiostate-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5220275.

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Chapter 1 What is popular culture? 10 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 mo\ ral leadership’ (75), seek to win the consent of subordinate groups in society. This w\ ill be discussed in some detail in Chapter 4. What I want to do here is to offer a genera\ l outline of how cultural theorists have taken Gramsci’s political concept and used it\ to explain the nature and politics of popular culture. Those using this approach see po\ pular culture as a site of struggle between the ‘resistance’ of subordinate grou\ ps and the forces of ‘incorporation’ operating in the interests of dominant groups. Pop\ ular culture in this usage is not the imposed culture of the mass culture theorists, nor is i\ t an emerging from below, spontaneously oppositional culture of ‘the people’ –\ it is a terrain of exchange and negotiation between the two: a terrain, as already stated, \ marked by resistance and incorporation. The texts and practices of popular culture\ move within what Gramsci (1971) calls a ‘compromise equilibrium’ (161) –\ a balance that is mostly weighted in the interests of the powerful. The process is historical (l\ abelled popular culture one moment, and another kind of culture the next), but it is al\ so synchronic (moving between resistance and incorporation at any given historical mo\ ment). For instance, the seaside holiday began as an aristocratic event and within \ a hundred years it had become an example of popular culture. Film noir started as despised popular cinema and within thirty years had become art cinema. In general terms, \ those looking at popular culture from the perspective of hegemony theory tend to see it as a terrain of ideological struggle between dominant and subordinate classes, dominant and sub- ordinate cultures. As Bennett (2009) explains, The field of popular culture is structured by the attempt of the rulin\ g class to win hegemony and by forms of opposition to this endeavour. As such, it consi\ sts not simply of an imposed mass culture that is coincident with dominant ideol\ ogy, nor simply of spontaneously oppositional cultures, but is rather an area of negotiation between the two within which – in different particular types of popul\ ar culture – dominant, subordinate and oppositional cultural and ideological values a\ nd elements are ‘mixed’ in different permutations (96).

The compromise equilibrium of hegemony can also be employed to analyse d\ ifferent types of conflict within and across popular culture. Bennett highlight\ s class conflict, but hegemony theory can also be used to explore and explain conflicts involving eth- nicity, ‘race’, gender, generation, sexuality, disability, etc. –\ all are at different moments engaged in forms of cultural struggle against the homogenizing forces of incorporation of the official or dominant culture. The key concept in this use of he\ gemony theory, especially in post-Marxist cultural studies (see Chapter 4), is the co\ ncept of ‘articulation’ (the word being employed in its double sense to mean both to express an\ d to make a temporary connection). Popular culture is marked by what Chantal Mouffe\ (1981) calls ‘a process of disarticulation–articulation’ (231). The \ Conservative Party political broadcast, discussed earlier, reveals this process in action. What was b\ eing attempted Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture : An Introduction, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ohiostate-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5220275.

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Popular culture 11was the disarticulation of socialism as a political movement concerned w\ ith economic, social and political emancipation, in favour of its articulation as a political movement co ncer ned to impose restraints on individual freedom. Also, as we shall see in Chapter 8, feminism has always recognized the importance of cultural struggle within the con- tested landscape of popular culture. Feminist presses have published sci\ ence fiction, detective fiction and romance fiction. Such cultural interventions represent an attempt to articulate popular genres for feminist politics. It is also possible, us\ ing hegemony theory, to locate the struggle between resistance and incorporation as taking place\ within and across individual popular texts and practices. Raymond Willia\ ms (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 cir\ cumstances and historical conditions of production and consumption. Hall (1980a) uses Williams’s insight to construct a theory of reading positions: ‘subordinate’, ‘dom\ inant’ and ‘negotiated’.

David Morley (1980) has modified the model to take into account discou\ rse and subjectivity: seeing reading as always an interaction between the discourses of the text and the discourses of the reader (see Storey, 2010a). There is another aspect of popular culture that is suggested by hegemony\ theory. This is the claim that theories of popular culture are really theories about \ the constitution of ‘the people’. Hall (2009b), for instance, argues that popular\ culture is a contested site for political constructions of ‘the people’ and their relatio\ n to ‘the power bloc’ (see Chapter 4):

‘the people’ refers neither to everyone nor to a single group with\ in society but to a variety of social groups which, although differing from one another in other respects (their class position or the particular struggles in which they are most immediately engaged), are distinguished from the economically, politica\ lly and culturally powerful groups within society and are hence potentially capa\ ble of being united – of being organised into ‘the people versus the powe\ r bloc’ – if their separate struggles are connected (Bennett, 1986: 20).

This is of course to make popular culture a profoundly political concept\ . Popular culture is a site where the construction of everyday life may be\ examined.

The point of doing this is not only academic – that is, as an attempt to understand a process or practice – it is also political, to examine the power re\ lations that constitute this form of everyday life and thus reveal the configurations of interests its construction serves (Turner, 2003: 6). In Chapter 12, I will consider John Fiske’s ‘semiotic’ use of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Fiske argues, as does Paul Willis from a slightly different pe\ rspective (also discussed in Chapter 12), that popular culture is what people make from the products of the culture industries – mass culture is the repertoire, popular c\ ulture is what people Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture : An Introduction, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ohiostate-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5220275.

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Chapter 1 What is popular culture? 12 actively make from it, actually do with the commodities and commodifie\ d practices they consume.A sixth definition of popular culture is one informed by recent thinking\ around the debate on postmodernism. This will be the subject of Chapter 10. 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 li\ st of artists who have had hit records as a result of their songs appearing in televis\ ion 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 bu\ y CDs that consist of the songs that have become successful, or have become success\ ful 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 oppo- sitional 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. This, and other questions, will be explored in Chapter 10. The chapter will also address, from the perspective of the student of popular culture, the question: ‘What is\ postmodernism?’ 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 industrial- ization and urbanization. As Williams (1963) argues in the Foreword to\ Culture and Society, ‘The organising principle of this book is the discovery that the id\ ea of culture, and the word itself in its general modern uses, came into English thinki\ ng in the period which we commonly describe as that of the Industrial Revolution’ (11\ ). 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 pop\ ular culture defined in this historically restricted way. There are other ways to d\ efine 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 partic\ ular periodiza- tion of popular culture, is that the experience of industrialization and urb\ anization changed fundamentally the cultural relations within the landscape of pop\ ular culture.

Before industrialization and urbanization, Britain had two cultures: a c\ ommon culture that was shared, more or less, by all classes, and a separate elite cult\ ure produced and consumed by a section of the dominant classes in society (see Burke, 19\ 94; Storey, Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture : An Introduction, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ohiostate-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5220275.

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13 Popular culture as other 2003). As a result of industrialization and urbanization, three things \ happened, which together had the effect of redrawing the cultural map. First of all, ind\ ustrialization changed the relations between employees and employers. This involved a s\ hift from a relationship based on mutual obligation to one based solely on the deman\ ds of what Thomas Carlyle calls the ‘cash nexus’ (quoted in Morris, 1979: 22\ ). Second, urbaniza- tion 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 fea\ r that it might be imported into Britain – encouraged successive governments to enact\ a variety of repressive measures aimed at defeating radicalism. Political radicali\ sm and trade unionism were not destroyed, but driven underground to organize beyond t\ he influence of middle-class interference and control. These three factors combined t\ o 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 (see Chapter 3). Whatever we decide was its content, the anxieties engendere\ d by the new cultural space were directly responsible for the emergence of the ‘culture and civilization’ approach to popular culture (see Chapter 2). Popular culture as other What should be clear by now is that the term ‘popular culture’ is not as definitionally obvious as we might have first thought. A great deal of the difficulty arises from the absent other which always haunts any definition we might use. It is never enough t\ o speak of popular culture; we have always to acknowledge that with which \ it is being contrasted. And whichever of popular culture’s others we employ – \ mass culture, high culture, working-class culture, folk culture, etc. – it will carry into the definition of popular culture a specific theoretical and political inflection. ‘\ There is’, as Bennett (1982a) indicates, ‘no single or “correct” way of resolving t\ hese problems; only a series of different solutions which have different implications and effects’\ (86). The main purpose of this book is to chart the many problems encountered, and the \ many solu- tions suggested, in cultural theory’s complex engagement with popular\ culture. As we shall discover, there is a lot of ground between Arnold’s view of pop\ ular culture as ‘anarchy’ and Dick Hebdige’s (1988) claim that, ‘In the We\ st popular culture is no longer marginal, still less subterranean. Most of the time and for most \ people it simply is culture.’ Or, as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (1987) notes, ‘popular\ cultural forms have moved so far towards centre stage in British cultural life that the separate existence of a distinctive popular culture in an oppositional relation to high cul\ ture is now in question’ (80). This of course makes an understanding of the range \ of ways of theorizing popular culture all the more important. Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture : An Introduction, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ohiostate-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5220275.

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Chapter 1 What is popular culture? 14 This book, then, is about the theorizing that has brought us to our present state of thinking on popular culture. It is about how the changing terrain of pop\ ular culture has been explored and mapped by different cultural theorists and differe\ nt theoretical approaches. It is upon their shoulders that we stand when we think critically about popular culture. The aim of this book is to introduce readers to the dif\ ferent ways in which popular culture has been analysed and the different popular cultures tha\ t have been articulated as a result of the process of analysis. For it must be remem\ bered that popular culture is not a historically fixed set of popular texts and practices\ , nor is it a historically fixed conceptual category. The object under theoretical scrutiny is both historically variable, and always in part constructed by the very act of theoretical \ engagement. This is further complicated by the fact that different theoretical perspectiv\ es have tended to focus on particular areas of the popular cultural landscape. The most common division is between the study of texts (popular fiction, television, pop music, etc.) and lived cultures or practices (seaside holidays, youth subcultures, the celebra\ tion of Christmas, etc.). The aim of this book, therefore, is to provide readers with a map of the terrain to enable them to begin their own explorations, to begin their own mapping \ of the main theoretical and political debates that have characterized the study of p\ opular culture.

The contextuality of meaning At the beginning of this chapter, in the initial discussion of the diffi\ culties involved in defining popular culture, I said ‘The main argument that I suspect \ readers will take from this book is that popular culture is in effect an empty conceptual category, one that can be filled in a wide variety of often conflicting ways, depending\ on the context of use’. As the claim suggests, context is always crucial to an understa\ nding of what some- thing means. But what is a context? The word context comes into English in the late fifteenth century. It derives from the Latin words contextus, meaning to join together, and contexere, meaning to weave together. Knowing its origins helps us to understand \ its current use. First, contexts are the other texts that make a particular text fully meaningful. These other texts join together with the text in question to produce meaning. If, in the course of a conversation, you use the word ‘it’, your meaning will only b\ ecome clear if you provide a context that indicates to what it refers. When a student tells me, ‘It is a diffi - cult book’, it only becomes fully meaningful if she explains that she\ is talking about Karl Marx’s Capital – it and Capital join together to make her meaning clear. However, we should not think of contexts as only texts being joined with other te\ xts. When we try to make sense of a text we always bring to it a set of presuppositio\ ns, which provide a framework for our analysis. These assumptions help construct a specifi\ c context for our understanding of the text – these are woven together around the text to be analysed.

For example, to understand Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) in terms of the ‘New Woman’ we have to situate the book in the historical context of its fi\ rst publication. Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture : An Introduction, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ohiostate-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5220275.

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The contextuality of meaning 15 Establishing this context allows us to read the novel in a very particul\ ar way. However, if we use psychoanalysis or feminism to interpret the novel, it is this \ mode of analysis that produces the context for our understanding of the novel. In these e\ xamples Dracula is articulated (i.e. made to mean) in relation to other texts supplie\ d by a par- ticular historical or theoretical perspective. In other words, the novel\ will seem very different if the context of our analysis is the theoretical presuppositi\ ons of feminism or psychoanalysis or our assumptions about the historical moment of the boo\ k’s first publication. In these ways, then, contexts are both the co-texts of a text (the texts we join to a particular text) and the inter-texts brought to the text by a\ reader (the texts we weave around a particular text in order to fully understand it). The first is an extension of the text in question and the second is something that helps to constr\ uct a new understanding of the text. For example, Marx’s Capital is a co-text that completes the meaning of what the student is telling me, whereas feminism is a body of\ inter-texts that can be used as a frame for producing a particular understanding of \ Dracula.Another way of saying everything I have said about texts and contexts is simply to say texts do not have intrinsic meanings; meaning is something that a text acquires in a particular context. In other words, there is no ‘text in itself ’ untroubled by context and reader activity: texts are always read and understood in relation to oth\ er texts. But a context is only ever a temporary fixing of meaning, as contexts change\ meaning changes. We might use the word ‘it’ many times during the course o\ f a day and on each occasion what it refers to – what it is joined with – might be dif\ ferent. The student who told me, ‘It is a difficult book’ would change the meaning of ‘\ it’ by telling me she was talking about Marxism and Literature by Raymond Williams or Pierre Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production. In each case ‘it’ will mean something quite different. Take, for example, the Union Jack, the national flag of the UK. It can signi\ fy different things in a variety of contexts. Flying over a colonial outpost it may signify either imperialism or a civilizing mission; over the casket of a dead soldier it may signif\ y honour and bravery or a pointless loss of life; as worn by Mods and post-Mods and t\ hose associated with BritPop it signifies ‘cool Britannia’; displayed at a polit\ ical rally it usually signifies right-wing politics; worn over the shoulders of a British athlete after winning an Olympic medal it signifies national sporting achievement; burned in an\ other country it signifies opposition to British foreign policy. The meaning of the \ flag is always con- textual – its meaning changes as it is situated in different contexts\ . The texts that establish contexts can be anything that enables and const\ rains mean- ing. For example, watching television is rarely like reading a book. Whe\ reas we tend to read in silence as we concentrate on the words on the page, eating, drin\ king, chatting, playing with children, tidying up, and a whole range of other activities\ , often accom- pany watching television. This is the context for most television viewin\ g and unless we take it seriously we will not understand what we call ‘watching television’. We should not of course think of a context as something stable and fixed, waitin\ g passively for the inclusion of a particular text. Just as a context enables and constrains\ the meaning of a text, a text constrains and enables the meaning of a context – it is an active and inter - active relationship. For example, feminism’s encounter with Dracula changed the meaning of the novel, but working on the novel changes what counts as fe\ minism. Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture : An Introduction, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ohiostate-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5220275.

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Chapter 1 What is popular culture? 16Similarly, situating Dracula in its original historical moment of emergence changes how we see this particular historical period. And watching television changes how we eat, drink, chat, play with children or tidy up. A door can be both an exit and an entrance; although the materiality of the door remains the same, what it signifies depends on the context in which we view it. To conclude this brief discussion of contextuality, we understand things\ in contexts; we also create contexts by our modes of understanding, and contexts chan\ ge as a con- sequence of our inclusion of a particular text. Possible contexts for a \ text are almost endless. The chapters that follow will offer many examples of contextual\ analysis.

Notes 1. For an excellent discussion of Shakespeare as popular culture in ninetee\ nth-century America, see Lawrence Levine (1988).

2.

Slavoj yizek (1992) identifies the retroactive evaluation that fixed film \ noir’s current status: ‘It started to exist only when it was discovered by French cr\ itics in the ’50s (it is no accident that even in English, the term used to designate this genre is French:

film noir). What was, in America itself, a series of low-budget B-productions of\ little critical prestige, was miraculously transformed, through the interventio\ n of the French gaze, into a sublime object of art, a kind of film pendant to philosop\ hical existen- tialism. Directors who had in America the status of skilled craftsmen, a\ t best, became auteurs, each of them staging in his films a unique tragic vision of the universe’ (112).

3.

For a discussion of opera in popular culture, see Storey, 2002a, 2003, 2\ 006 and 2010a.

4.

See Storey, 2003 and 2005.

Further reading Storey, John (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader , 4th edn, Harlow:P earson Education, 2009. This is the companion volume to the previous edition of this b ook. A fully updated 5th edition containing further readings is due for publication in 2 018. An interactive website is also available (www.routledge.com/cw/storey), which c ontains helpful student resources and a glossary of terms for each chapter. Agger, Ben, Cultural Studies as Cultural Theory, London: Falmer Press, 1992. As the title implies, this is a book about cultural studies written from a perspectiv\ e sympathetic to the Frankfurt School. It offers some useful commentary on popular cul\ ture, especially Chapter 2: ‘Popular culture as serious business’.

Allen, Robert C. (ed.), Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, London: Routledge, 1992.

Although this collection is specifically focused on television, it con\ tains some excellent essays of general interest to the student of popular culture. Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture : An Introduction, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ohiostate-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5220275.

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Further reading 17 Bennett, Tony, Colin Mercer and Janet Woollacott (eds), Popular Culture and Social Relations, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986. An interesting collection of essays, covering both theory and analysis.

Brooker, Peter, A Concise Glossary of Cultural Theory, London: Edward Arnold, 1999. A brilliant glossary of the key terms in cultural theory.

Day, Gary (ed.), Readings in Popular Culture, London: Macmillan, 1990. A mixed collec- tion of essays, some interesting and useful, others too unsure about how\ seriously to take popular culture.

Du Gay, Paul, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay and Keith Negus, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, London: Sage, 1997. An excellent introduc- tion to some of the key issues in cultural studies. Certainly worth read\ ing for the explanation of ‘the circuit of culture’.

Fiske, John, Reading the Popular, London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. A collection of essays analysing different examples of popular culture.

Fiske, John, Understanding Popular Culture, London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. A clear presentation of his particular approach to the study of popular culture.\ Goodall, Peter, High Culture, Popular Culture: The Long Debate, St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1995. The book traces the debate between high and popular culture\ , with particular, but not exclusive, reference to the Australian experien\ ce, from the eighteenth century to the present day.

Milner, Andrew, Contemporary Cultural Studies, 2nd edn, London: UCL Press, 1994. A useful introduction to contemporary cultural theory.

Mukerji, Chandra and Michael Schudson (eds), Rethinking Popular Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. A collection of essays, with an informed and interesting introduction. The book is helpfully divided into sections on\ different approaches to popular culture: historical, anthropological, sociological\ and cultural.

Naremore, James and Patrick Brantlinger, Modernity and Mass Culture, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991. A useful and interesti\ ng collection of essays on cultural theory and popular culture.

Storey, John, Inventing Popular Culture, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. An historical account of the concept of popular culture.

Storey, John, Culture and Power in Cultural Studies: The Politics of Signification, Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Extends many of the arguments in this \ book into more detailed areas of research.

S torey, John (ed.), T he Making o f English popular Culture, A bingdon: Routledge, 2016. A n Strinati, Dominic, An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture, London: Routledge, 1995. A clear and comprehensive introduction to theories of popular cult\ ure.

Tolson, Andrew, Mediations: Text and Discourse in Media Studies, London: Edward Arnold, 1996. An excellent introduction to the study of popular media cu\ lture.

Turner, Graeme, British Cultural Studies, 3rd edn, London: Routledge, 2003. Still the best introduction to British cultural studies.

Walton, David, Introducing Cultural Studies: Learning Through Practice, London: Sage, 2008. Another excellent introduction to cultural studies: useful, informative \ and funny. excellent collection of essays on the historical development of English popular culture.

Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture : An Introduction, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ohiostate-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5220275.

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