Page 35 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

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Notes

1. Storey (1993: 6–19) sketches out ‘six definitions which in their different,
general way inform the study of popular culture’, an ‘empty conceptual
category, one which can be filled in a variety of often conflicting ways
depending on the context of use’.
2. Stuart Hall (1981: 231–35) suggests three definitions of popular culture:
(a) according to a capitalist common sense, ‘certain things are said to be
“popular” because masses of people listen to them, buy them, read them,
consume them, and seem to enjoy them’; the ‘popular’ is here opposed to
the ‘culture of the people’, qualitatively constructed as free from manipu-
lation, passivity and vulgarity, the consumers of commercially produced
cultural goods being perceived as dupes; (b) a descriptive definition calls
popular ‘all those things that the people do or have done’; but ‘the people’
can historically be anybody, and their definition so vague and incoherent as
to become irrelevant with regard to the task of an adequate construction of
the popular and (c) ‘what is an essential to the definition of popular culture
is the relations which define “popular culture” in a continuing tension
(relationship, influence and antagonism) to the dominant culture.’ According
to Schwarz (1989: 254–55), we cannot anymore simply describe ‘popular’
in a relation to an antagonism to a high or elite culture, as the formerly
determining force of the latter is largely eroded by the great commodification
of popular culture. Its place is taken, across classes, by mainstream pop
music, TV soaps, blockbuster movies, etc. High culture is no longer able to
secure universal respect. The dominant culture is rather an island within
commodity culture.
3. John Fiske (1989a: 23, 43–44, 49; 1989b), for instance, defines the category
of popular culture in advanced capitalist societies as the culture that ‘is
formed always in reaction to, and never as part of, the forces of domination.’
It represents ‘the interests of the people’; people being by definition those
who do not subscribe to ‘capitalist, consumerist, sexist, racist values’, among
whom incorrect values and perverse pleasures may be widely internalized:
‘They are not, however, popular pleasures, but hegemonic ones’; they come
from the ruling class. About the return of the repressed in media studies
and the critical stand of Hall, see Turner (1990: 68–76, 197–210).
4. A homogeneous model of power at work here opposes the ‘imperializing’
to the ‘localizing’, repression to resistance (Fiske 1993: 204), a model
structured with binary antagonisms: bourgeoisie/proletariat, hegemony/
resistance, top-down/bottom-up, social disorder/order.
5. According to Bennett et al. (1986: xiii–xiv), both the structuralist and
culturalist paradigms in cultural studies do wrongly ‘regard the sphere of
cultural and ideological practices as being governed by a dominant ideol-
ogy, essentially and monolithically bourgeois in its characteristics, which …