Page 30 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Introduction 5

magnetic pole of the cultural field which other cultures may oppose
or seek to disentangle themselves from, but which they cannot
evade entirely. (Bennett et al. 1986: 18)
By the same token, the members of subordinate classes never
encounter or are oppressed by a dominant ideology in some pure
or class essentialist form; bourgeois ideology is encountered only
in the compromised forms it must take in order to provide some
accommodation for opposing class values. (ibid.: xv)

The binary partition is grounded in the highly problematic sub-
stantive entity of the ‘people’ as a unitary form or a specific historical
formation nurturing a definite socio-political aim. It fails for this reason
to perceive how and why the ‘people’ may break down into a bundle
of heterogeneous forms, let alone opposite practices. The ‘popular’ is
the outcome and not the source of a number of clashing interests. It
appears in history as a highly disparate cultural idiom because it is
brought about by antagonistic historical socio-cultural forces (Martín-
Barbero 1993: 5–147). Thus, an approach sometimes referred to as a
neo-Gramscian hegemony theory considers

[P]opular culture as a site of struggle between the forces of resistance
of subordinate groups in society, and the forces of incorporation of
dominant groups in society. Popular culture in this usage is not the
imposed culture of the mass culture theorists, nor is it an emerging
from below spontaneously oppositional culture …. Rather it is a ter-
rain of exchange between the two; a terrain marked by resistance
and incorporation. (Storey 1993: 13)

The turn to Gramsci and the benefits of the theory of hegemony for the
study of popular culture is prompted by Gramsci’s radicalism within
traditional Marxism, which lies in his resistance to an orthodox class-
based formulation and view of ideology (Turner 1990: 211–25). Gramsci
departs from Marxist tradition

[I]n arguing that the cultural and ideological relations between
ruling and subordinate classes in capitalist societies consist less in
the domination of the latter by the former than in the struggle for
hegemony—that is, for moral, cultural, intellectual and, thereby,
political leadership over the whole of the society—between the