Page 179 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

MICHAEL REAL

way for its own insights. In the useful phrase of Ulf Hannerz in Chapter 3,
popular culture theory has been challenged to ‘destabilize privileged
assumptions’ in order to carve out and justify its own position.
One basic dimension of the struggle of popular culture theory has been
definitional. This definitional conflict has continued throughout more than a
century of evolution of cultural theory. Both cultural theory in general and
popular culture theory in particular have attempted to create rational understand-
ings of non-rational dimensions of social life. To do this, nineteenth-century
anthropology ‘discovered’ the life of ‘savages’ and attempted to find rational
and aesthetic coherence in that life. Generations of groundbreaking ethno-
graphies of preliterate societies found pragmatic and symbolic power in primi-
tive rituals, myths, kinship patterns, tribal behavior, and everyday practices.
This was ‘culture’ in the anthropological sense. Anthropology by the late nine-
teenth century had thus come to define culture as the systematic way of
constructing reality that a people acquires as a consequence of living in a group. 1
At the same time, however, ‘culture’ in the literate West was de fined and
studied in the aesthetic sense championed by Matthew Arnold as ‘the best that
has been known and said in the world’. The West was by many uncritically
assumed to be rational, other cultures irrational. Ethnographies were conducted
in non-technological societies in the service of the British Empire and other
European colonial powers, but the same kinds of studies of everyday culture
were much less common or respected when conducted within the imperial
countries and cultures themselves.
The definitional (and imperial) conflict forced popular culture theory to
distinguish at least four levels of culture, clarifying them with definitions that
were not solidified before the middle of the twentieth century. First, ‘elite’ or
high or serious culture was that produced by known artists within a con-
sciously esthetic context judged according to an accepted set of rules, norms,
2
and classics. This marks the British literary meaning of culture. Second, ‘folk’
culture or art, in contrast, is that expressed in face-to-face interactions within
traditional or tribal cultures and created through anonymous contributions
from within the group where close interaction between performer and com-
munity is the norm. This reflects the anthropological emphasis. Third, ‘mass’
culture emerged from sociological and critical theory by mid-century as those
large-scale expressions of culture that were created for a mass market and were
known for their standardization of product, commercial promotion, and mass
behavior. Mass culture theory was developed through a sociology of the masses,
beginning with Max Weber, and by the critical theory of the Frankfurt School
in the works of Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Marcuse, and others.
The fourth level of culture, ‘popular’ culture, was at times de fined as nar-
rowly identical with mass culture over and against elite and folk culture. Or,
popular culture has alternately been identified as a middle ground, romantically
situated between the localisms of folk culture and the grossness of mass culture,
a kind of moderately ambitious and widespread aesthetic expression that

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