Page 29 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

CULT_C01.qxd 10/25/08 16:29 Page 13

Popular culture as other 13

definition of culture and popular culture that depends on there being in place a cap-
italist market economy. This of course makes Britain the first country to produce
popular culture defined in this historically restricted way. There are other ways to
define popular culture, which do not depend on this particular history or these particu-
lar circumstances, but they are definitions that fall outside the range of the cultural
theorists and the cultural theory discussed in this book. The argument, which under-
pins this particular periodization of popular culture, is that the experience of industri-
alization and urbanization changed fundamentally the cultural relations within the
landscape of popular culture. Before industrialization and urbanization, Britain had
two cultures: a common culture which was shared, more or less, by all classes, and a
separate elite culture produced and consumed by the dominant classes in society (see
Burke, 1994; Storey, 2003). As a result of industrialization and urbanization, three
things happened, which together had the effect of redrawing the cultural map. First of
all, industrialization changed the relations between employees and employers. This
involved a shift from a relationship based on mutual obligation to one based solely on
the demands of what Thomas Carlyle calls the ‘cash nexus’ (quoted in Morris, 1979:
22). Second, urbanization produced a residential separation of classes. For the first
time in British history there were whole sections of towns and cities inhabited only by
working men and women. Third, the panic engendered by the French Revolution – the
fear that it might be imported into Britain – encouraged successive governments to
enact a variety of repressive measures aimed at defeating radicalism. Political radical-
ism and trade unionism were not destroyed, but driven underground to organize
beyond the influence of middle-class interference and control. These three factors
combined to produce a cultural space outside of the paternalist considerations of
the earlier common culture. The result was the production of a cultural space for the
generation of a popular culture more or less outside the controlling influence of the
dominant classes. How this space was filled was a subject of some controversy for
the founding fathers of culturalism (see Chapter 3). Whatever we decide was its content,
the anxieties engendered by the new cultural space were directly responsible for the
emergence of the ‘culture and civilization’ approach to popular culture (see Chapter 2).

Popular culture as other

What should be clear by now is that the term ‘popular culture’ is not as definitionally
obvious as we might have first thought. A great deal of the difficulty arises from the
absent other which always haunts any definition we might use. It is never enough to
speak of popular culture; we have always to acknowledge that with which it is being
contrasted. And whichever of popular culture’s others we employ, mass culture, high
culture, working-class culture, folk culture, etc., it will carry into the definition of
popular culture a specific theoretical and political inflection. ‘There is’, as Bennett
(1982a) indicates, ‘no single or “correct” way of resolving these problems; only a series