Page 231 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

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A paradigm crisis in cultural studies? 215

the glow of its absolute moral and aesthetic value; students assume the role of passive
consumers of an already constituted knowledge – fixed, formulated and administered
by the professorial guardians of the flame. The refusal to privilege aesthetic judgement
is not in my opinion a crisis, but a welcome recognition that there are other, sometimes
far more interesting, questions to be asked (see Chapter 9). What is aesthetically ‘good’
and what is aesthetically ‘bad’ changes and changes again in context after context.
Moreover, what is ‘good’ aesthetically may be ‘bad’ in terms of politics; what is ‘bad’
aesthetically may be ‘good’ politically. Rather than being trapped by a hopeless quest
for abstract certainty, it is much more productive to recognize that it is only in
grounded contexts that these questions can be really answered. But more than this, cul-
tural studies should be little concerned with making speculative value judgements
about the inherent qualities of commodities and focus its time instead on what people
do with them, make from them, etc., in the constraining and enabling structures of
everyday life. These are what I mean by more interesting questions. Those who insist
on a return to absolute standards are saying little more than that it is too confusing
now: I want back my easy and unquestioned authority to tell ordinary people what it
is worth and how it is done.

That ordinary people use the symbolic resources available to them under present
conditions for meaningful activity is both manifest and endlessly elaborated upon
by new revisionism. Thus emancipatory projects to liberate people from their alleged
entrapment, whether they know they are entrapped or not, are called into question
by this fundamental insight. Economic exploitation, racism, gender and sexual
oppression, to name but a few, exist, but the exploited, estranged and oppressed
cope, and, furthermore, if such writers as John Fiske and Paul Willis are to be believed,
they cope very well indeed, making valid sense of the world and obtaining grateful
pleasure from what they receive. Apparently, there is so much action in the micro-
politics of everyday life that the Utopian promises of a better future, which were
once so enticing for critics of popular culture, have lost all credibility (171).

Most of this is simply untrue. Even Fiske (his prime example) does not celebrate an
achieved utopia, but the active struggle of men and women to make sense of and make
space in a world structured around exploitation and oppression. McGuigan seems to
be saying that pleasure (and its identification and celebration) is in some fundamental
sense counter-revolutionary. The duty and historical destiny of ordinary men and
women is to suffer and be still, until moral leftists reveal what is to be enjoyed on the
glorious morning of the long day after the Revolution. Feminists unwilling to lie back
and think about the economic base exposed the rhetorical vacuousness of this kind of
thinking long ago. It simply is not the case that claims that audiences produce mean-
ing are in some profound sense a denial of the need for political change. We can celeb-
rate symbolic resistance without abandoning our commitment to radical politics.
This is in effect the core of Ang’s point (see Chapter 7). Presented in this way, political
economy seems to amount to little more than another (sometimes sophisticated) ver-
sion of the ‘ideology of mass culture’.