Page 25 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

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Popular culture 9

homogenizing influence of American culture. There are two things we can say with
some confidence about the United States and popular culture. First, as Andrew Ross
(1989) has pointed out, ‘popular culture has been socially and institutionally central
in America for longer and in a more significant way than in Europe’ (7). Second,
although the availability of American culture worldwide is undoubted, how what is
available is consumed is at the very least contradictory (see Chapter 9). What is true is
that in the 1950s (one of the key periods of Americanization), for many young people
in Britain, American culture represented a force of liberation against the grey certain-
ties of British everyday life. What is also clear is that the fear of Americanization is
closely related to a distrust (regardless of national origin) of emerging forms of popu-
lar culture. As with the mass culture perspective generally, there are political left and
political right versions of the argument. What are under threat are either the traditional
values of high culture, or the traditional way of life of a ‘tempted’ working class.
There is what we might call a benign version of the mass culture perspective. The
texts and practices of popular culture are seen as forms of public fantasy. Popular cul-
ture is understood as a collective dream world. As Richard Maltby (1989) claims, popu-
lar culture provides ‘escapism that is not an escape from or to anywhere, but an escape
of our utopian selves’ (14). In this sense, cultural practices such as Christmas and the
seaside holiday, it could be argued, function in much the same way as dreams: they
articulate, in a disguised form, collective (but repressed) wishes and desires. This is a
benign version of the mass culture critique because, as Maltby points out, ‘If it is the
crime of popular culture that it has taken our dreams and packaged them and sold
them back to us, it is also the achievement of popular culture that it has brought us
more and more varied dreams than we could otherwise ever have known’ (ibid.).
Structuralism, although not usually placed within the mass culture perspective, and
certainly not sharing its moralistic approach, nevertheless sees popular culture as a sort
of ideological machine which more or less effortlessly reproduces the prevailing struc-
tures of power. Readers are seen as locked into specific ‘reading positions’. There is little
space for reader activity or textual contradiction. Part of post-structuralism’s critique of
structuralism is the opening up of a critical space in which such questions can be
addressed. Chapter 6 will consider these issues in some detail.
A fourth definition contends that popular culture is the culture that originates from
‘the people’. It takes issue with any approach that suggests that it is something imposed
on ‘the people’ from above. According to this definition, the term should only be used
to indicate an ‘authentic’ culture of ‘the people’. This is popular culture as folk culture:
a culture of the people for the people. As a definition of popular culture, it is ‘often
equated with a highly romanticised concept of working-class culture construed as the
major source of symbolic protest within contemporary capitalism’ (Bennett, 1980: 27).
One problem with this approach is the question of who qualifies for inclusion in the
category ‘the people’. Another problem with it is that it evades the ‘commercial’ nature
of much of the resources from which popular culture is made. No matter how much
we might insist on this definition, the fact remains that people do not spontaneously
produce culture from raw materials of their own making. Whatever popular culture is,
what is certain is that its raw materials are those which are commercially provided. This