Page 21 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

CULT_C01.qxd 10/25/08 16:29 Page 5

Popular culture 5

not simply in certain ideas about everyday life. Principally, what Althusser has in mind
is the way in which certain rituals and customs have the effect of binding us to the
social order: a social order that is marked by enormous inequalities of wealth, status
and power. Using this definition, we could describe the seaside holiday or the celebra-
tion of Christmas as examples of ideological practices. This would point to the way in
which they offer pleasure and release from the usual demands of the social order, but
that, ultimately, they return us to our places in the social order, refreshed and ready to
tolerate our exploitation and oppression until the next official break comes along. In
this sense, ideology works to reproduce the social conditions and social relations neces-
sary for the economic conditions and economic relations of capitalism to continue.
So far we have briefly examined different ways of defining culture and ideology.
What should be clear by now is that culture and ideology do cover much the same con-
ceptual landscape. The main difference between them is that ideology brings a polit-
ical dimension to the shared terrain. In addition, the introduction of the concept of
ideology suggests that relations of power and politics inescapably mark the culture/
ideology landscape; it suggests that the study of popular culture amounts to something
more than a simple discussion of entertainment and leisure.

Popular culture

There are various ways to define popular culture. This book is of course in part about
that very process, about the different ways in which various critical approaches have
attempted to fix the meaning of popular culture. Therefore, all I intend to do for the
remainder of this chapter is to sketch out six definitions of popular culture that in their
different, general ways, inform the study of popular culture. But first a few words about
the term ‘popular’. Williams (1983) suggests four current meanings: ‘well liked by
many people’; ‘inferior kinds of work’; ‘work deliberately setting out to win favour with
the people’; ‘culture actually made by the people for themselves’ (237). Clearly, then,
any definition of popular culture will bring into play a complex combination of the dif-
ferent meanings of the term ‘culture’ with the different meanings of the term ‘popular’.
The history of cultural theory’s engagement with popular culture is, therefore, a history
of the different ways in which the two terms have been connected by theoretical labour
within particular historical and social contexts.
An obvious starting point in any attempt to define popular culture is to say that
popular culture is simply culture that is widely favoured or well liked by many people.
And, undoubtedly, such a quantitative index would meet the approval of many people.
We could examine sales of books, sales of CDs and DVDs. We could also examine
attendance records at concerts, sporting events, and festivals. We could also scrutinize
market research figures on audience preferences for different television programmes.
Such counting would undoubtedly tell us a great deal. The difficulty might prove to be
that, paradoxically, it tells us too much. Unless we can agree on a figure over which