Page 262 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

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Horkheimer, Marcuse) pioneered work in which mass culture was seen as the
degeneration of earlier folkart forms, involving a numbed sensory perception.
Alongside this negative strain a more positive version was offered, not only by
Benjamin but also, in his later work, by Marcuse, who came to see within popular
culture repressed and disguised Utopian energies and desires.
A second version of popular/mass cultural analysis has been developed from a
revaluation of aspects of working-class culture and leisure which sees them as an
integral part of the lived experience of the class as forms of resistance or
adaptation, to be analysed with the attention and the methods of literary criticism.
The work of the early British New Left (Hoggart, Williams, Thompson, Hall)
focused on traditional British working-class culture and was sympathetic to the
social-democratic aspirations of the labour movement. That these writers were
not unaware of ‘negative moments’, however, can be seen in Hoggart’s vision of
the potential degeneration of popular working-class forms into a new classless—
and worthless—mass art.
A third tradition has extended the structuralist and semiotic analysis of myth
developed by Lévi-Strauss into the study of popular/mass culture. The texts of
such a culture can be seen, in the same way as myths, as formal attempts to
resolve social contradictions in the imagination. Thus the analysis of popular/
mass culture can offer a privileged view of collective fears and fantasies. But
other work, beginning with Barthes’s Mythologies, has claimed that the formal
organization of popular artefacts obscures and mystifies social relations,
affirming and ‘naturalizing’ the existing social order. This work, emerging from
the avant-garde literary culture associated with the magazine Tel Quel and
heavily influenced by the counterculture of the 1960s, has led to a powerful
critique of realism that points to its role in confirming, rather than challenging,
the position of the audience or readership as passive spectators.
Finally, a fourth tradition sees popular/mass culture as a site of ideological
struggle within and around what Althusser has called an ‘ideological state
apparatus’—the popular media, or ‘cultural ISA’. In the following section our
analysis of the narrative-ideological structure of certain popular fictions draws
heavily on Althusser’s account of the naturalizing and reproductive function of
ideology and also, in its attempt to relate that structure to the linguistic practices
of the school, on his assertion that the dominant ISA of capitalist societies is the
apparatus of state education. But in the course of that analysis we have become
increasingly conscious that such an account is too simple and unproblematic.
Popular fiction is, in varying degrees, as unstable and ambiguous as the popular
politics described by Gramsci and, more recently, Laclau: fertile ground for
reactionary and chauvinistic connotations, but also, in different circumstances,
for potentially progressive ones. In this we have been influenced by the revival
of Gramscian notions of the national-popular and of popular culture as a terrain
of the struggle for hegemony—a revival itself linked to the emergence in recent
years of a distinctive ‘Eurocommunism’ that has increasingly distanced itself
from the cultural politics of orthodox Leninism and has developed instead a