Page 22 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

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6 Chapter 1 What is popular culture?

something becomes popular culture, and below which it is just culture, we might find
that widely favoured or well liked by many people included so much as to be virtually
useless as a conceptual definition of popular culture. Despite this problem, what is
clear is that any definition of popular culture must include a quantitative dimension.
The popular of popular culture would seem to demand it. What is also clear, however,
is that on its own, a quantitative index is not enough to provide an adequate definition
of popular culture. Such counting would almost certainly include ‘the officially sanc-
tioned “high culture” which in terms of book and record sales and audience ratings for
television dramatisations of the classics, can justifiably claim to be “popular” in this
sense’ (Bennett, 1980: 20–1).
A second way of defining popular culture is to suggest that it is the culture that is left
over after we have decided what is high culture. Popular culture, in this definition, is
a residual category, there to accommodate texts and practices that fail to meet the
required standards to qualify as high culture. In other words, it is a definition of popu-
lar culture as inferior culture. What the culture/popular culture test might include is a
range of value judgements on a particular text or practice. For example, we might want
to insist on formal complexity. In other words, to be real culture, it has to be difficult.
Being difficult thus ensures its exclusive status as high culture. Its very difficulty liter-
ally excludes, an exclusion that guarantees the exclusivity of its audience. The French
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues that cultural distinctions of this kind are often used
to support class distinctions. Taste is a deeply ideological category: it functions as
a marker of ‘class’ (using the term in a double sense to mean both a social economic
category and the suggestion of a particular level of quality). For Bourdieu (1984), the
consumption of culture is ‘predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a
social function of legitimating social differences’ (5). This will be discussed in more
detail in Chapters 9 and 10.
This definition of popular culture is often supported by claims that popular cul-
ture is mass-produced commercial culture, whereas high culture is the result of an
individual act of creation. The latter, therefore, deserves only a moral and aesthetic
response; the former requires only a fleeting sociological inspection to unlock what
little it has to offer. Whatever the method deployed, those who wish to make the case
for the division between high and popular culture generally insist that the division
between the two is absolutely clear. Moreover, not only is this division clear, it is trans-
historical – fixed for all time. This latter point is usually insisted on, especially if the
division is dependent on supposed essential textual qualities. There are many problems
with this certainty. For example, William Shakespeare is now seen as the epitome
of high culture, yet as late as the nineteenth century his work was very much a part of
popular theatre. The same point can also be made about Charles Dickens’s work.
1
Similarly, film noir can be seen to have crossed the border supposedly separating popu-
lar and high culture: in other words, what started as popular cinema is now the pre-
2
serve of academics and film clubs. One recent example of cultural traffic moving in the
other direction is Luciano Pavarotti’s recording of Puccini’s ‘Nessun Dorma’. Even the
most rigorous defenders of high culture would not want to exclude Pavarotti or Puccini
from its select enclave. But in 1990, Pavarotti managed to take ‘Nessun Dorma’ to