Page 178 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

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CULTURAL THEORY IN
POPULAR CULTURE AND

MEDIA SPECTACLES

Michael Real

Popular culture, that omnipresent manifestation of widespread representational
practices in contemporary life, has been problematic for cultural theory. The
distance between general cultural theory and popular culture theory creates an
opportunity here to debate issues in the development of cultural theory. An
intellectual history of such communication study – of which this analysis is a
small part – notes first the distance between the two and then questions why
rapprochement has been difficult.
From the one side, in popular culture studies, attempts to theorize popular
culture have frequently trailed off into narrow expressions of a singular concept
from literary or social theory. Baseball is examined as a quasi-literary narrative,
or intertextuality is traced in hip-hop music. From the other side, general
theories of culture may not highlight important dimensions of ‘the popular’. A
minor art clique is given the same weighting as (or greater weighting than) the
massive popular involvement in media sports. In many respects, general cultural
theory applies to popular culture only with important new distinctions and
extensions: ‘commercial’ forces in popular culture, for example, are more
obvious than in face-to-face folk cultural interaction. In this examination, I
attempt to draw out some of the lessons learned about culture from those
theories especially associated with popular culture.

Defining culture and ‘destabilizing
privileged assumptions’
Popular culture theory has fought an uphill struggle against many forces lined
up against it as the phenomena of popular and mass culture have evolved over
the past century and a half. In contrast to the assumption that true research and
theory serve to ‘build theory’ in a cumulative way, popular culture theory has
often first been forced to dethrone opposing assumptions in order to clear the

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