Page 17 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

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1 What is popular

culture?

Before we consider in detail the different ways in which popular culture has been
defined and analysed, I want to outline some of the general features of the debate that
the study of popular culture has generated. It is not my intention to pre-empt the
specific findings and arguments that will be presented in the following chapters. Here
I simply wish to map out the general conceptual landscape of popular culture. This is,
in many ways, a daunting task. As Tony Bennett (1980) points out, ‘as it stands, the
concept of popular culture is virtually useless, a melting pot of confused and contra-
dictory meanings capable of misdirecting inquiry up any number of theoretical blind
alleys’ (18). Part of the difficulty stems from the implied otherness that is always absent/
present when we use the term ‘popular culture’. As we shall see in the chapters which
follow, popular culture is always defined, implicitly or explicitly, in contrast to other
conceptual categories: folk culture, mass culture, dominant culture, working-class cul-
ture, etc. A full definition must always take this into account. Moreover, as we shall also
see, whichever conceptual category is deployed as popular culture’s absent other, it will
always powerfully affect the connotations brought into play when we use the term
‘popular culture’.
Therefore, to study popular culture we must first confront the difficulty posed by the
term itself. That is, ‘depending on how it is used, quite different areas of inquiry and
forms of theoretical definition and analytical focus are suggested’ (20). The main argu-
ment 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 conflict-
ing ways, depending on the context of use.

Culture

In order to define popular culture we first need to define the term ‘culture’. Raymond
Williams (1983) calls culture ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the
English language’ (87). Williams suggests three broad definitions. First, culture can be
used to refer to ‘a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development’
(90). We could, for example, speak about the cultural development of Western Europe