Page 27 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

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Popular culture 11

The compromise equilibrium of hegemony can also be employed to analyse differ-
ent types of conflict within and across popular culture. Bennett highlights class conflict,
but hegemony theory can also be used to explore and explain conflicts involving eth-
nicity, ‘race’, gender, generation, sexuality, disability, etc. – all are at different moments
engaged in forms of cultural struggle against the homogenizing forces of incorporation
of the official or dominant culture. The key concept in this use of hegemony theory,
especially in post-Marxist cultural studies (see Chapter 4), is the concept of ‘articula-
tion’ (the word being employed in its double sense to mean both to express and to
make a temporary connection). Popular culture is marked by what Chantal Mouffe
(1981) calls ‘a process of disarticulation–articulation’ (231). The Conservative Party
political broadcast, discussed earlier, reveals this process in action. What was being
attempted was the disarticulation of socialism as a political movement concerned with
economic, social and political emancipation, in favour of its articulation as a political
movement concerned to impose restraints on individual freedom. Also, as we shall see
in Chapter 7, feminism has always recognized the importance of cultural struggle
within the contested landscape of popular culture. Feminist presses have published
science fiction, detective fiction and romance fiction. Such cultural interventions rep-
resent an attempt to articulate popular genres for feminist politics. It is also possible,
using hegemony theory, to locate the struggle between resistance and incorporation
as taking place within and across individual popular texts and practices. Raymond
Williams (1980) suggests that we can identify different moments within a popular text
or practice – what he calls ‘dominant’, ‘emergent’ and ‘residual’ – each pulling the
text in a different direction. Thus a text is made up of a contradictory mix of different
cultural forces. How these elements are articulated will depend in part on the social cir-
cumstances and historical conditions of production and consumption. Hall (1980a)
uses Williams’s insight to construct a theory of reading positions: ‘subordinate’,
‘dominant’, and ‘negotiated’. David Morley (1980) has modified the model to take into
account discourse and subjectivity: seeing reading as always an interaction between the
discourses of the text and the discourses of the reader.
There is another aspect of popular culture that is suggested by hegemony theory.
This is the claim that theories of popular culture are really theories about the constitu-
tion of ‘the people’. Hall (2009b), for instance, argues that popular culture is a con-
tested site for political constructions of ‘the people’ and their relation to ‘the power
bloc’ (see Chapter 4):

‘the people’ refers neither to everyone nor to a single group within society but to
a variety of social groups which, although differing from one another in other
respects (their class position or the particular struggles in which they are most
immediately engaged), are distinguished from the economically, politically and
culturally powerful groups within society and are hence potentially capable of
being united – of being organised into ‘the people versus the power bloc’ – if their
separate struggles are connected (Bennett, 1986: 20).

This is of course to make popular culture a profoundly political concept.